Open Museum, Getting Social & Smarter

At long last, we are turning our attention to programming the social features into Open Museum. Since our motto is "People + Objects = Museum", this aspect of the site is long overdue.

Our first step to adding People was to implement the "follow" feature. In the example below, to follow Ole Worm, you simply click on the link next to the Mona Lisa icon. The question mark provides a pop up help text.

If you select "follow" for Ole, he will receive an email notification (unless he's turned it off in his Home/Account Settings/Notifications). Assuming Ole elects to "follow" you back, you are declared "friends" and displayed in each other's Public Profile. Here's a screenshot of my friends as seen in my public profile.

Friends have the easy option to set notifications on a person by person basis. For instance, I've elected the following notifications for my friend, Jeff...

Notify me by email when this person favorites stuff

Notify me by email when this person comments on an object or wall

At any time, I can go to my Friend's profile and with a simple click on the check box change the settings.

Soon we will implement direct messaging between "friends". This feature will make it possible for members to have private communications within the site, as well as the public communications that are already happening on personal and museum walls.

The advent of friending has gotten us thinking about where the growing body of member-contributed data might take Open Museum. Each favorited object, each friended museum, each followed person is a piece of data that tells us something about a particular member. (Don't worry. We're not going to sell, share, exploit the date.) Using this information, Open Museum could begin to make recommendations about the kind of museums, objects, people might like to explore. Over time, with more data and technology tweaks, this recommendations system could become very sophisticated, with Open Museum doing for the museum world what Amazon, Netflix and Match.com do for their books, films and dating.

The question becomes how smart should Open Museum become.

Would smart recommendations make the world a better place? Would it improve the experience of the individual user? What would a smart engine look like and how would it be designed? How soon and how seriously do we want to pursue the development of this kind of functionality?

It's a philosophical more than technical question and we'd love to hear people's thoughts on the issue.