(2010-11-21) Nash Cursor Future Publishing

Interesting interview with Richard Nash, who recently left SoftSkullPress to launch Cur Sor, a new Book Publishing player. (Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities (Virtual Community)... Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.)

I do think that there is a degree to which the Red Lemonade community is publishing, but it’s also a Recommendation Engine (Collaborative Filtering), much smaller than FaceBook, but much deeper. I think Facebook’s weaknesses are one, that it’s quite shallow, or maybe horizontal. It’s defines everybody as “friend,” “corporation,” or “celebrity.” The reality is the world is a much more nuanced place than that. But its Social Graph is dependent on the connections between people only. Twitter’s social graph is dependent on people’s interests, it’s a more broadcast-y kind of thing. Each is good at one thing. As a recommendation engine, each has something to recommend it. You friends may know you better on Facebook personally, but there may not be any experts on a given topic who you’re friends with. So you rely on Twitter to get advice from some internet guru who’s never going to friend you on Facebook or from Susan Orlean, who’ll never friend you on Facebook, although she might, the writers tend to be kind of friendlier.

May'2011 update: launch post.

Oct31'2011: shutting down.