The Swipp API: Creating the World’s Social Intelligence by Greg Bates.
From the post:
The Swipp API allows developers to integrate Swipp’s “Social Intelligence” into their sites and applications. Public information is not available on the API; interested parties are asked to email info@swipp.com. Once available the APIs will “make it possible for people to interact around any topic imaginable.”
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Having operated in stealth mode for 2 years, Swipp founders Don Thorson and Charlie Costantini decided to go public after Facebook’s release of it’s somewhat different competitor, the social graph. The idea is to let users rate any topic they can comment on or anything they can photograph. Others can chime in, providing an average rating by users. One cool difference: you can dislike something as well as like it, giving a rating from -5 to +5. According to Darrell Etherington at Techcrunch, the company has a three-pronged strategy of a consumer app just described, a business component tailored around specific events like the Superbowl, that will help businesses target specific segments.
A fact that seems to be lost in most discussions of social media/sites is that social intelligence already exists.
Social media/sites may assist in the capturing/recording of social intelligence but that isn’t the same thing as creating social intelligence.
It is an important distinction because understanding the capture/recording role enables us to focus on what we want to capture and in what way?
What we decide to capture or record greatly influences the utility of the social intelligence we gather.
Such as capturing how users choose to identify particular subjects or relationships between subjects, for example.
PS: The goal of Swipp is to create a social network and ratings system (like Facebook) that is open for re-use elsewhere on the web. Adding semantic integration to that social networks and ratings system would be a plus I would imagine.