Image Transformation (Project Morphing)
There are different images and different transformations. Google, for example, at the request "transformation of visual images" issued in the top "transformation of female images in the pages of Soviet magazines." And I just wanted to find out if this special name has any special name, you know, a well-known little stump with a transformation of visual images, when you have, for example, a portrait of someone else, and you quickly get a completely different portrait. Here I am now about the same thing, but with reference to Internet projects: how to get another from one project by minimal transformations. Why do you need it? - let's say you have a project idea and you want to see how to successfully change its existing closest analogues to make this project. Understand whether these changes are in line with the natural evolution of these analogs (including in the context of general trends in the development of the Internet) and, if so, how long such an evolution could take. These questions are important for you and your potential investors, because there is a consideration expressed by Anton Nosik (perhaps it is generally known, I just heard it for the first time from Anton): if your project is in line with the activity of a major player, then you need to evaluate and weigh whether to start a separate startup or better to offer yourself and your ideas to this player.
This was already in another article of mine, but then it was more a question of the psychological aspects of this choice. Now I wanted to consider what factors should be considered when analyzing project differences. An exhaustive list, however, does not work out; So far, only a couple of considerations in the piggy bank of this topic, as well as examples of the transformation of some well-known projects into the project I described in three previous articles [1] , [2] , [3] . I also heard one consideration from Nosik in his statements at the round table in Infocom 2007: to make changes to the program code of mass projects like an operation on a living person, i.e. It is extremely difficult. Probably, this is all the more true for significant functional changes. Frequent and / or long service interruptions, programmer errors cause customer dissatisfaction, and if there are hundreds of thousands and millions of customers, the problem becomes serious. It turns out that mass services that have gained popularity are thus quite limited in the capabilities of their transformations.
Another aspect is vividly highlighted by the example of Odnoklassniki - a project that is even inferior to competitors in terms of functionality can “shoot” and go far around them only due to positioning (and the name) that exactly fits into the sought-after consumer niche. This means that in some cases you can repeat someone else's functionality, and the minimum change mentioned will consist only in a different positioning. On the other hand, there is probably an ambush in this for “large” services - they become hostages of their positioning, get used to them as something specific and cease to perceive otherwise. Although maybe I'm wrong, maybe these are my personal "cockroaches"; for example, I still cannot bring myself to see Yandex.Ru and Mail.ru, apart from search and news, also competitive with traditional blog platforms. Probably, this problem with positioning is still solved and this factor affects only the speed of changes - if the proposed changes and additional services are really good, then gradually they will find their users.
')
Now examples. For those who have not read and do not want to read my previous articles on the project, I briefly explain that the ultimate goal of test transformations is a service in which users create content objects of different types and link them with different types of links. Thus, they create structured (due to links) content. Such a network allows the same object to belong to different semantic contexts, which opens up interesting possibilities. For example, to combine chaos and order, communication as spontaneous production of content and building the same content into thematic hierarchies. If users make the creation of complex (composite) objects from simple ones accessible and these complex ones will also belong to the common network, then the prospects will become quite interesting. For example, this way you can simulate society. In this case, objects are resources : informational — content objects are textual, audio-video-photos, and so on; intellectual, creative, professional, i.e. people; communities and organizations (which are projected onto the Internet space are all, of course, composite information objects), well, everything else that can be invented. This network introduces a rating system with context-sensitive user vote weights, which, along with other factors contributing to the manifestation of the author, should stimulate the production of high-quality content. I see areas of content sharing in terms of quality and positioning, where the highest level means the best review or systematizing materials on various topics. It seems so far enough. But in general, it seems that the theme of copyright spaces is still not well understood; probably I will devote a separate article to this.
Probably the non-network project TheBrain is closest to the one described. An application that can be downloaded and installed and which allows you to link different types of objects to different types of links in order to organize materials in your computer, which is an alternative to the traditional system of nested folders. The desired goal would be achieved if this project is implemented as an Internet service, change the types of objects and connections for specific positioning tasks and implement the wiki principle to create socially significant content for the masses of people (for which to introduce a system of user polls).
Regarding the ideology of the wiki, the project described is closest to Wikipedia . If you think of articles in it only as the tip of the iceberg, as a dry residue of various relevant materials, multi-format discussions, personal blogs, etc., and content filtering by quality and relevance is performed using the system of user voting, then we get approximately what is proposed. It is even easier to do all this with the help of the Semantic Wikipedia - it is possible to establish types of relationships between objects (an unlimited number of types, which, on the one hand, is great, but on the other, it may not be so good), but there is no possibility to type objects.
In terms of user participation in filtering materials (voting system, karma, etc.), the project is closest to social media. If, for example, the positioning of Habr is changed to the site of the best materials on IT topics, where articles on various topics that have scored the maximum rating will be given in the top results on search intraservice queries on these topics, then Habr, perhaps, would resemble a narrowly themed Wikipedia. However, the ultimate goal is to have many diverse user communities. This can probably be achieved by changing the voting system (making it thematically-dependent, as well as “performance-dependent”, when the authors of the best articles have a greater weight of votes) and abandoning a common main page with top materials in it (for example, giving This is a choice in the user settings, ie, each user would have their own home page).
Prose . Here, the example is not so much transformation, but how positioning influences filtering based on quality - there are no user polls in this service, but users don’t usually upload any content to their author’s pages (as we assume in blogs), but only what they consider to be the best. his works. Those. This material is “for history” and for the feeling of personal self-realization. In the idea of ​​this project, probably, to the greatest extent among the listed services the author’s beginning is emphasized. To write an article for Wikipedia is also relatively simple, and this material can be viewed, if not for history, then for long-term universal use (wiki principle). This brings Prose and Wikipedia closer together, but the idea of ​​authorship on Wikipedia is reduced to almost zero. Getting an author's article in the top on Habré is a much more difficult task due to the presence of a voting system, but this hit is short-lived and is not positioned either as material for history or as material for long-term use (although in fact it can be both) . The Prose project is also interesting due to the presence of a gradation system according to the types of text objects - a miniature, a story, a story, journalism, a novel (we may have forgotten something else). If the goal is an ordered social environment, then developed standardized typing of its objects is necessary.
Unfortunately, there is no place and time to consider these transformations also from the point of view of the points mentioned above, i.e. analyze where each of these services is developing, whether it will eventually come to the project being described and, if so, in what sequence of changes and how soon. Perhaps I will come back to this.
This was already in another article of mine, but then it was more a question of the psychological aspects of this choice. Now I wanted to consider what factors should be considered when analyzing project differences. An exhaustive list, however, does not work out; So far, only a couple of considerations in the piggy bank of this topic, as well as examples of the transformation of some well-known projects into the project I described in three previous articles [1] , [2] , [3] . I also heard one consideration from Nosik in his statements at the round table in Infocom 2007: to make changes to the program code of mass projects like an operation on a living person, i.e. It is extremely difficult. Probably, this is all the more true for significant functional changes. Frequent and / or long service interruptions, programmer errors cause customer dissatisfaction, and if there are hundreds of thousands and millions of customers, the problem becomes serious. It turns out that mass services that have gained popularity are thus quite limited in the capabilities of their transformations.
Another aspect is vividly highlighted by the example of Odnoklassniki - a project that is even inferior to competitors in terms of functionality can “shoot” and go far around them only due to positioning (and the name) that exactly fits into the sought-after consumer niche. This means that in some cases you can repeat someone else's functionality, and the minimum change mentioned will consist only in a different positioning. On the other hand, there is probably an ambush in this for “large” services - they become hostages of their positioning, get used to them as something specific and cease to perceive otherwise. Although maybe I'm wrong, maybe these are my personal "cockroaches"; for example, I still cannot bring myself to see Yandex.Ru and Mail.ru, apart from search and news, also competitive with traditional blog platforms. Probably, this problem with positioning is still solved and this factor affects only the speed of changes - if the proposed changes and additional services are really good, then gradually they will find their users.
')
Now examples. For those who have not read and do not want to read my previous articles on the project, I briefly explain that the ultimate goal of test transformations is a service in which users create content objects of different types and link them with different types of links. Thus, they create structured (due to links) content. Such a network allows the same object to belong to different semantic contexts, which opens up interesting possibilities. For example, to combine chaos and order, communication as spontaneous production of content and building the same content into thematic hierarchies. If users make the creation of complex (composite) objects from simple ones accessible and these complex ones will also belong to the common network, then the prospects will become quite interesting. For example, this way you can simulate society. In this case, objects are resources : informational — content objects are textual, audio-video-photos, and so on; intellectual, creative, professional, i.e. people; communities and organizations (which are projected onto the Internet space are all, of course, composite information objects), well, everything else that can be invented. This network introduces a rating system with context-sensitive user vote weights, which, along with other factors contributing to the manifestation of the author, should stimulate the production of high-quality content. I see areas of content sharing in terms of quality and positioning, where the highest level means the best review or systematizing materials on various topics. It seems so far enough. But in general, it seems that the theme of copyright spaces is still not well understood; probably I will devote a separate article to this.
Probably the non-network project TheBrain is closest to the one described. An application that can be downloaded and installed and which allows you to link different types of objects to different types of links in order to organize materials in your computer, which is an alternative to the traditional system of nested folders. The desired goal would be achieved if this project is implemented as an Internet service, change the types of objects and connections for specific positioning tasks and implement the wiki principle to create socially significant content for the masses of people (for which to introduce a system of user polls).
Regarding the ideology of the wiki, the project described is closest to Wikipedia . If you think of articles in it only as the tip of the iceberg, as a dry residue of various relevant materials, multi-format discussions, personal blogs, etc., and content filtering by quality and relevance is performed using the system of user voting, then we get approximately what is proposed. It is even easier to do all this with the help of the Semantic Wikipedia - it is possible to establish types of relationships between objects (an unlimited number of types, which, on the one hand, is great, but on the other, it may not be so good), but there is no possibility to type objects.
In terms of user participation in filtering materials (voting system, karma, etc.), the project is closest to social media. If, for example, the positioning of Habr is changed to the site of the best materials on IT topics, where articles on various topics that have scored the maximum rating will be given in the top results on search intraservice queries on these topics, then Habr, perhaps, would resemble a narrowly themed Wikipedia. However, the ultimate goal is to have many diverse user communities. This can probably be achieved by changing the voting system (making it thematically-dependent, as well as “performance-dependent”, when the authors of the best articles have a greater weight of votes) and abandoning a common main page with top materials in it (for example, giving This is a choice in the user settings, ie, each user would have their own home page).
Prose . Here, the example is not so much transformation, but how positioning influences filtering based on quality - there are no user polls in this service, but users don’t usually upload any content to their author’s pages (as we assume in blogs), but only what they consider to be the best. his works. Those. This material is “for history” and for the feeling of personal self-realization. In the idea of ​​this project, probably, to the greatest extent among the listed services the author’s beginning is emphasized. To write an article for Wikipedia is also relatively simple, and this material can be viewed, if not for history, then for long-term universal use (wiki principle). This brings Prose and Wikipedia closer together, but the idea of ​​authorship on Wikipedia is reduced to almost zero. Getting an author's article in the top on Habré is a much more difficult task due to the presence of a voting system, but this hit is short-lived and is not positioned either as material for history or as material for long-term use (although in fact it can be both) . The Prose project is also interesting due to the presence of a gradation system according to the types of text objects - a miniature, a story, a story, journalism, a novel (we may have forgotten something else). If the goal is an ordered social environment, then developed standardized typing of its objects is necessary.
Unfortunately, there is no place and time to consider these transformations also from the point of view of the points mentioned above, i.e. analyze where each of these services is developing, whether it will eventually come to the project being described and, if so, in what sequence of changes and how soon. Perhaps I will come back to this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/56309/
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