Pick your parents: Flowli’s following feature
Following and having followers on Twitter is an indication of a feed’s popularity. Since the person who is being followed cannot choose who is following (apart from blocking someone altogether), it is a one-sided affair that mainly serves the spreading of content.
In Flowli, we’ve taken this approach to the next level. You could say that following and being followed are the ‘nodes’ of Flowli’s central library of content – the concept even inspired Flowli’s name, since following allows for a seamless flow of information.
In practice, following means that any artefact (article, image, file, video, user) can follow one another, very much like Twitter members following each other.
An artefact is aware of its followers but the relation is created in the artefact that wants to follow. It’s a bit like a reversed family order where the kids choose their parents (and can choose as many parents as they want) and the parents don’t really have a choice but to accept. Since this hierarchy can go over multiple levels, it provides a way to not only display hierarchical data on a page, but to create the full website structure (including navigation) based solely on this extremely flexible tree.
The advantage of this system over traditional ‘folder-based’ navigation and content organisation structures is that the relations are purely semantic. Flowli’s library – where all the content lives – can thus display and manage the content indiscriminately of any relation. The editor does not really need to know where a piece of information should be displayed, but just its immediate parent (and even for that we’re building a solution for automatic tagging and categorisation in partnership with Strider DI).
Another advantage of this approach is a significant reduction of complexity. While we originally planned to create an extensive templating system where the content to be displayed was to be defined by a number of parameters, the ‘following’- approach makes this easier, since no parameters have to be entered to display specific information in containers. Rather, in combination with ‘related’ (artefact in a different family but that might share some ancestors) and ‘friends’ (my brothers and sisters), the structure is defined directly in the template. The whole publishing process is thus reduced to simply entering or uploading the artefact. It really is as incredible as it sounds.
The semantic structuring of content, however, doesn’t stop with the back-end. We fully embrace Microsoft’s, Yahoo’s and Google’s initiative for www.schema.org, to expand the mark-up (HTML) with semantic elements. We’d like schema.org to go a bit further in its approach in the future, but it is definitely a first step in the right direction.
