The original vision of BFJ5's Participate system was an idea I'll call Social Flower (it never had a name). The idea was to create a game where you go around collecting petals to complete a flower. Each "friend" you add gives you another petal. When you complete a flower, you get an animated flower on your profile, that displays your friends' photos when you touch the flower. Maybe it would become a virtual group photo of sorts. The idea was that there was an aesthetic reward for completing the flower.

I liked, and still like, this idea because there is a start and end, and it's not that hard to achieve the end. Moreover, the number of slots is a limited resource, so you have to think a little harder about who will be on the flower, and who will be left out. (Maybe let people have multiple flowers?)

The aesthetics are nice, too. Everyone likes flowers, even guys. The flower shape is like a mandala, and it's natural to contemplate and meditate over flower-shaped things. Flowers are sexual (they are sex organs) and also signify life, death, and rebirth. Religions and myths often use flower-based symbolism.

The flowers would be in a garden, of course. The garden wouldn't be a network or anything; it would just be a way to see the progression of flower growth.

With the proliferation of social network sites, I expected someone else to have the same idea, and for sites to try out something like the social flower, but it didn't happen. Judging by how they all work like myspace, one may surmise that they didn't like the idea of finite goals.