We designed a new social network model grounds-up to focus on community and to mirror the way the real world is structured
The underpinning of the MainCross network model is the TOP channel model. TOP stands for Topics, Organizations and Personas, and on reflection one may see that it quite closely resembles how real life social structures and relationships are built.
Innovation galore along the way
TOP channels as microsites
Each TOP channel is a brilliant microsite for a topic, or organization or persona, with dynamic information, updates, conversations, content, interactions, reviews and ratings, products etc all beautifully organized and accessible under that TOP channel within a single URL. This is a powerful system that has no equivalent on any other network.
See all the channels on hoten.life, a public interest technology platform for the indigenous communities of Manipur (a state in the North East of India).
Channels on Veed Network, a media driven marketplace and membership network of licensed cannabis brands, producers, retailers and distributors and consumers.
The TOP model is extendible and can be used as desired during network setup. Some indicative examples:
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Type of network
Topics
Organizations
Personas
1
Political network
Citizen issues
Political parties
Politicians
2
Educational network
Subjects or courses
Educational Institutes
Teachers
3
Legal network
Legislation
Law firms
Lawyers
4
Social commerce
Product categories
Brands
Influencers
5
Publishing network
Categories or sections
Community organizations
Jounalists
6
Employment network
Discussion forums
Hiring firms
Industry stalwarts
Table: TOP model examples
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TOP channels also have geo meta attached with them, and hence can exist at a level of administrative territories. Eg a network could have a topic channel that deals with local housing at the level of cities (one for San Francisco and another for Bangalore), a topic for housing legislation at the level of each state and so on.
Discovering TOP channels
The network makes it easy to discover channels. Super networks (like nextelection.com) have 10s of thousands of channels across a great many territories. The network automatically shows relevant channels to members based on location as an example. There are other ways of presentation of the channels to its members, including gamified listing using a mechanism we've invented called ChannelPulse™.
TOP channels are also deeply interconnected, and over time create a superb network map. Topics may have Personas responsible or attached to them. Personas belong to Organizations, etc. Thus it is very easy to traverse the network map and discover and hop from one channel to another.
Each of the thousands of channels can be opened to see detailed information - news, views, campaigns, events, etc. The feed in each public channel can be viewed in chronological order, or by trending content, or by importance!
On any MainCross network site, members don't "follow" other members. Think about this for a moment - this is quite unlike any other platform. Imagine that you are following another human (user handle). So this user may one day may post about politics, another day might be bitchin' with a brand support team, and yet another day might post good morning messages, cat memes, flower photos and what have we. You might be inundated with garbage, and are forced to view all these in your own home feed whether you are interested or not.
Instead, on any MainCross network, members subscribe to one or more TOP channels, and get updates from that channel in their home feed and via optional notifications. The feed that is created perfectly matches what the member is interested in, rather than a annoying mix of relevant and garbage posts.
So that brings us to the posting mechanism.
Contributing into a channel
All users of the network have the right to contribute to a public channel. The contribution could be interactions with the widgets for rating, reviews etc, or it could be publishing a post. Contribution are instantly available to all the channel subscribers worldwide.
Various types of posts can be created seamlessly in any channel
Any post contributed by a user must belong to 1 or more channels. Think about this for a moment - this is quite unlike any other platform, where one is encouraged to just spew a stream of so called updates with no thought or intelligence, and whatever one posts reaches the user's followers whether they are interested or not.
In order to enable the system we have created, there is no mechanism to publish a post on one's profile - an approach followed on other platforms. From the get go, there is an enforcement of structure, and hence a post must be published into a channel for it to reach channel subscribers.
Curation and uniqueness
TOP channels are curated by the network. In other words, a general user cannot create TOP channels, and the system guarantees that there is only one unique TOP channel. In other words, there is only 1 channel representing a persona or an organization, etc, thus solving the horrendous problem of literally thousands of groups and pages and what not purporting to "represent" a particular entity - a problem that plagues large networks like Facebook or titter.
Public archive
TOP channels are inherently public, and are publicly available digital archives that are owned by the community, and cannot be taken down or deleted on the whims of any single entity. Facebook pages or groups are a pale shadow of the TOP channel model, because they can be deleted at any point or handled over to a new owner with very different purpose than what the group was created for.
