Imagine life before email? Then imagine life before voice mail? Similarly, we will look back in five years and say “Did we really share information that way. How did we manage? ” We are in the midst of a new generation of web sites completely focused on how we share information (e.g., video, photos or news). FatVine is the perfect compliment to these sites as we share the information about the data (data in this case being the movie, music, blog, photo, video, etc) rather than the data itself.

A. You can just click on stuff and see what happens.
B. You can join, click on stuff and then rate some of the things that you like (they will be automatically attached to you).
C. You can join, click on stuff, rate some things that interest you and establish a link with the folks that created the stuff.
That’s it. You get to do a whole lot more if you want to and then the fun really starts.

FatVine is different from a Social Network (e.g. Myspace) because you don’t have conversations with people or leave comments on their profile pages. In a sense, Social Networking is about connecting and conversation, whereas FatVine is about sharing information. Most importantly though, the sources of that information are people you know or people that they know.
Also, one of the things that we don’t do is search the whole web. There are excellent companies that do a great job of that already! FatVine compliments those search engines because you still search when you know what you are looking for but you browse FatVine when you are looking to discover information (e.g. new places to go on vacation by selecting ‘friends’, ‘travel’ from your browser if you have the toolbar installed).
So there you have it — Social Networking Lite + Search Lite = FatVine!

Barry is on his way back from Iran but this excerpt form his last email was interesting…

I realized today that I have only conversed with Iranians for the last 20 days. Saw very few tourists and tried to give them a wide bearth. It was very interesting to be exclusively with locals. I think you learn a lot more about a country when traveling by yourself and I had long, long debates with Mehran about middle east politics. The were very open with me and I think I saw a side of the country that I wouldn’t have witnessed had I been with even one other person.
 
Somewhat surprisingly, several Iranians expressed a fondness for W. Maybe it was because he knocked off their arch-enemy, Saddam but there seems to be little knee-jerk hatred of the the red, white and blue. In fact, I haven’t heard a single negative comment about America my entire trip. Maybe it is just the famous Persian hospitality but I don’t think so.
 
Everyone I met was surprised to hear I was American but invariably they would give me a huge smile and say, “welcome to Iran”. Great trip, great people.
 
I guess I am struck by the fact that there are far more similarities between Americans and Iranians than differences and there doesn’t seem to be such a great cultural divide like we keep hearing in discussions about from our respective govt.s and the media. I know it sounds trite but this is about as far from an “evil” society as I have ever seen.

I recently came across this great example of fatvine content. This just happens to be an item in the photo category but it could just have easily been a blog, music, news, travel or video item…

I was walking past what I thought was a shop window at 9:30 am on 17th street in Manhattan when something caught my eye. Something in the window was moving. I stopped to look and noticed there was shredded paper in the shop window similar to what you would find in a pet store. What happened next really made me stare…

A young woman came and just lay down in the shop window. I then grabbed my cell phone and took the picture…

As I was doing this I noticed this sign in the window…

Is this an update to an age old tradition?

I have asked around and I was offered two potential explanations for what had happened. One friend mentioned that there was an NYU campus nearby and the students may have been performing a live art installation. Another friend thought that a strip club was opening on that block and this may have been a promotion for this club.
Well I never went back or found out exactly what is was going on. Can anyone shed any light?

Oh and we’ve got email notification set up for fatvine now so you get a friendly reminder when we launch in three weeks. From this point forward, if its share-worthy, you’ll be in the know. Go to www.fatvine.com now and drop your name in the box to get the release announcement.