Noone wants to be excluded. It’s kind of synonymous with ‘isolated’ or ‘being outlawed’ and it certainly does not seem to be a desirable thing. Nevertheless I think there is more to it than just the negative aspect - and as with many things it again depends on which side of the ‘exclusion sign’ one is standing. A few days ago I met an old friend in a bar in my hometown and we talked a little bit. When I asked him how he came to study BWL (which is business school), he told me the following:
Look, after graduating from highschool I felt confronted with a world full of opportunity - law school, medicine, arts, humanities, life science, physics, french - all sorts of stuff to study and make a living from. I just couldn’t decide what I would be most interested in, everything seemed to have both advantages and downsides. When taking a closer look, it even deemed to be the case that most things had more downsides than advantages. So I started to exclude field by field by means of intuitive disinterest. What I ended up with was business school. And now that I am graduating from it, I can say it was a good decision. And a good method: I keep applying it to any kind of situation and it works perfectly well.
The latest Lifehack.org post ‘12 places to say no’ promotes exactly this method as ‘the strategic plan for 2006 ‘. Mathematically the idea is nothing else but increasing the relative amount of good stuff by systematically getting rid of the bad stuff. It’s certainly not a new thought, everyone knows and uses it.
Yet I think it’s another thing that makes Outfoxed so unique amongst all the other social applications. While the emphasis of del.icio.us , Riffs ,
Shadows and others lies on recommendation, Outfoxed almost seems to be a about ‘decommendation’, i.e. rating pages / files / entities as bad or even dangerous (though it’s of course possible to do some good ol’ recommendation). Take a look at the front page of Riffs to see their ‘most popular’ section. When I viewed it, Jeniffer Aniston and Halle Berry where on top of it. I don’t say that it sucks all the time or that browsing their page can’t be fun. But if all that social networking can do for me is a thumbs up or down on Halle Berry, I’d rather stay away from that party.
Because the web contains more than ‘12 places to say no’ to.
I hope that Outfoxed will be able to combine the best of both worlds, that is a traditional recommendation system + protectional ‘decommendation’.

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