Following Stowe's posting about Mark Pincus's PeopleWeb posting, I got into a small dialog with Mark (by email, blog, blog-comment, trackback - aargh, still too fragmented to work this way, but that's another story, discussed in "One content -> 10 outlets"). Mark encouraged me to try out the new open profiles style of Tribe.net, which I duly did.

The screenshot below only shows the Yahoo-portal style of the configurable user interface, so please don't be misled; the real power of the peopleweb philosophy being trialled through the new user interface comes from the ability to export Tribe entries to an external blog; to import external feeds into Tribe; to have multiple IM identitities; to have FOAF personal descriptions maintained independently of Tribe, and a lot more.

Here are some notes I sent to the Tribe guys after playing with the new interface for a while, that I thought would be of interest to Get Real readers:

Overall, I think it's an excellent concept - 'roundtrip' blog linking (see item 1 below) and IM linking (see item 2) are very powerful... but here are some minor clarification suggestions.

1. 'Blog module' (import blog posts) and 'tribecast' (publish entries) need to be more obviously reciprocal in some way. They are beautifully complementary, but now they appear in very different (and different-looking) ways. "Blog module" is for importing external blog posts into Tribe, whereas "Tribecast" is for exporting Tribe items to an external blog. In my book, that's both powerful and reciprocal, but needs to be shown in a similar/complementary way... it's probably one of the many killer features that Tribe.net is going to be offering.

2. The link between the 'online' icon (which is shown in my profile) and the IM settings (only visible when I go to 'configure' my profile, and therefore too indirect) needs to be clearer. When I'm editing my profile and I see my own 'online' light on, I ought to have a standard 'edit/configure' button right nearby that light. In my profile I've set a "TribeChat handle" and added MSN and Jabber IDs (hooray - you've made Jabber a first class citizen!!), but I want to add more than 2 IM identities, which I currently cannot do. Finally, I don't understand the relationship between the 'online' light and my different IM IDs... does the light come on ONLY when I'm logged in to Tribe.net? Will others see it light up when I'm on Jabber but NOT on Tribe (ths would be ideal, but it doesn't tell me that)... just a little 'info' icon or some more explanation would be great.

3. The rollover label 'configure this module' needs to make it clearer that you can also make basic editing changes (in addition to moving things around etc), e.g. wording such as 'edit/configure' would be sufficient, or words to that effect. In fact, the word 'edit' would be more valuable than the (redundant) phrase 'this module'.

OVERALL this is going in a very nice direction; IMHO it still suffers from being too much of 'portal' (EVEN THOUGH I CAN SEE TRIBE.NET IS BREAKING OUT OF THAT MOLD), but for some reason I'm not a 'portal' kind of guy - I used to be, but now if I want to (say) check out or contact Stowe Boyd or Marc Canter, just to pick two contacts at random, the only thing that matters realistically is whether they're on Yahoo/Jabber/MSN/AIM, or what they're saying on their blogs, which appear in my aggregator - I happen to use NewsGator because I can get that on my PDA too.

The good news is that I see from the tribe.net open profiles trial that 'My feed' and My del.icio.us list are prominently featured on 'coming soon' features... so that's probably going to go a long way... the flip side of this is tribecast, i.e. "You can syndicate any module shown on your profile, and add it to your own blog or any other webpage that you publish or host", so this is going to be pretty cool; I'm not sure whether I want to publish that stuff on my blog or not... an extremely interesting tradeoff to consider, and one of the benefits of the peopleweb / open profiles mentality... probably if I were more of a Tribe-a-holic then that would be worthwhile, so I'll certainly stay tuned to these developments.