Vision
In order for Augeo to be more engaging there are a several features that could be added. The enhancements that we have thought of are mentioned below. If you have any other ideas that could enrich Augeo's feature set, don't hold back and leave a comment here. Better yet, fork the Augeo repository and start developing!
As more and more interfaces are introduced the breadth of skills people can gain experience for will increase. To combat this, we want to introduce sub skills. For example, the Sports skill could have football, basketball, and baseball sub skills. It doesn't have to stop at one level though, once a system is in place an infinite amount of sub skills could be introduced. To elaborate, the Reading skill could have fiction and non-fiction sub skills, where fiction could have sub skills consisting of Fantasy, Romance, and Science Fiction. Those types of books could be broken down even further into different authors. As you can tell, adding sub skills would dramatically increase Augeo's appeal.
The idea behind flagging is to create an Augeo community. Currently posts are categorized into a specific skill by the user via hashtag (e.g., #augeosports), or if the hashtag is missing, by an algorithm. Sometimes users will abuse the hashtag categorization or the algorithm will classify incorrectly. In these situations, the Augeo community will have the ability to 'flag' the post and re-classify it. This is a way to keep our users and algorithms honest. After a post is re-classified, the user that re-classified the post will be awarded experience for their 'Community' skill. In order to keep everyone honest, a re-classification will have to go through several levels of approval. For example, if a person that re-classifies a post has a Community level of 1 then 2 other members with a higher Community level than 1 will have to approve the re-classification.
For this feature, badges will be awarded to users who achieve certain milestones. This could range from reaching top 100 in a certain skill, being the first 100 to join Augeo, or for correctly re-classifying 100 posts (see Flagging feature above). This feature is pretty straightforward, however will give a sense of pride and accomplishment to Augeo's users.
One of Augeo's biggest draws is its leaderboard system. This gives people the ability to find and connect with leaders in areas that most fascinate them. However, the current filtering system only allows people to search by skill. When the Sub Skill feature is added (mentioned above) it will give users a lot more flexibility in their search, however other opportunities for enhanced filtering exist. Such as filtering by a time period. You could find the top 100 people in Photography in the past day, month, year, or all the way back to when Augeo first started. Another search option could be location. Say you wanted to start a cooking club, just filter the Food skill by your location to retrieve a list of contacts. This, in our opinion, will be the biggest attraction for people wanting to join Augeo.
The objective for Augeo is to incorporate all sorts of interfaces that can portray a person's skills. For example, when interfaced with Instagram, people can gain photography experience. Or a person can increase their Software rank by contributing to open source projects on GitHub (wink, wink). The possibilities are endless.
Below are a list of potential interfaces/sites that we have thought of. If you have others in mind, feel free to leave a comment here.
- Amazon
- Blogs/RSS
- Fantasy Football/Basketball/etc
- Foursquare
- Games (Online Chess, console games, etc)
- GoodReads
- Lynda
- Nike Fuelband
- Scribd
- SoundCloud
- SourceForge
- StackExchange
- Steam
- Strava
- Tumblr
- Wodify
- Yelp
- YouTube
- FitBit
- Github
Did our vision inspire you? Give you more ideas that the Augeo community could benefit from? Head over to our contributing page to learn more!