When we started Tribe, we were careful to define various items in the Tribe universe, and shape the experience with some rules about how and when users could create various kinds of content. For example, you can post listings and promote them to your friends, or to particular tribes, but you can't do the same things with photos. And, when you create a discussion topic, it's text-only -- no photos. Ditto with the promotions part.

What if we turned the posting feature inside out, and let you post anything to anywhere? This doesn't have to be as disorganized as it might initially seem; what I'm talking about is the ability to post anything:

- a discussion topic in a tribe
- a blog entry
- a photo
- a listing
- an event
- a request
- a recommendation or review
- a new tribe
- a new friend

to anywhere:

- for your friends to see
- for your friends and their friends to see
- for your friends and their friends and their friends to see
- for members of a particular tribe
- for members of all your tribes
- for people who live around you
- for members of everyone on Tribe
- for anyone on the Internet
- for just these particular people on Tribe
- for just yourself to see

What I have been imagining for a while now is a single workflow that lets you indicate what you're posting, and shows you additional fields as necessary. The second page would let you indicate the specific or general audience for your post.

If you've been following some of the more recent Web 2.0 discussions, you'll recognize some of the above as sounding a whole lot like structured blogging. And, because we have social networking and affinity groups (tribes) here as well, we can add some fancy things with privacy and targeting -- basically augmenting some of the powerful new features that you're just seeing in the photo albums with today's release.

Tribe would become a place where you can jot down whatever's on your mind, describe it a little bit (blog post, listing, recommendation, what have you), and shoot it out to whoever you think would be interested. People could visit your profile for a running total of everything you've posted (and only see the items that you want each of them to see). Perhaps they could even indicate the item types that they care to receive from you.

The flip side is that each member of your audience gets a continually changing, totally unique, and always updated list of stuff that's personally meaningful. Because Tribe contains things like events and restaurant recommendations as well as blog posts, photos and discussion topics, what I'm thinking of is something like a personalized version of your local alternative weekly paper.

System-level concepts aside, I think one major benefit of the structured style of posting is that is would simplify the entire process of creating content on Tribe. It will take some designing, but I'd like to work it out to where I can put this form at the bottom of a page (say, on a discussion topic) and let people post new content from just about anywhere.