What's shakin' bacon?
We recently added quite a few new members to the diving channel. First, we’d like to say welcome the party!!With this influx of new blood came an influx of new ideas on the comment board combined with many questions about what’s going on and where we’re headed. So, we wanted to pull together a quick blog post to address some of the most common questions and comments.
First, it might be helpful to just let everyone know our overall vision for Startlike. The idea is to create a very simple and usable start page that brings everyone together around a common interest. In addition to your channel specific photo and hotlinks the page has your “essentials” and as little else as possible. If you are an iGoogle addict with dozens of widgets all over your page, or you just can’t stand not knowing when Britney Spears breaks a nail, Startlike probably won’t be the start page for you.
We can’t try too hard to do too much. For example, we don’t want the SCUBA channel to become an aggregator of all diving content from the web. Many great sites work hard and focus entirely on providing such content and any attempt to create our own (or even link to other sites as a mass directory) would likely fall very short because ee just don’t have the manpower and infrastructure. Instead, with Startlike we’ll focus on doing 1 thing well, giving you a cool daily photo and some interesting hotlinks to explore your interest.
While it does not make sense for us to do it internally, we do want to see the content on Startlike grow. This will make the site more “sticky” and entertaining for everyone and we’ll actually be relying on you, the members.
Our next major update will let you submit your own photos and hotlinks to create a complete Startlike page. Members will be able to browse user submitted pages and vote for the ones they like. The best user submitted pages will have a chance to make it to the homepage.
Once "Submit Your Own" is ready we’ll have a firm "version 1.0" of Startlike and our attention will turn to marketing the site and increasing membership. We’ll begin to add social features to help you meet other people that share your interests.
For those that have been following us for a while you know that our initial plan was to release a network of niche social networks but we ran into some problems gaining traction and had to go back to the drawing board, where Startlike was born. Please know that while the roads we’ll take to get there may be a little different our target destination has not changed.
The code we developed for the original social platform (which was 85% ready when we realized a change in course was needed) will be tweaked and integrated directly into your start page to help you meet other people who share your interests and create real offline friendships.
If you are new, welcome to Startlike. We hope you will enjoy it and stick with us for years to come. You are among the first to get here and your feedback will help shape the site for the future.
As a side note, we have also received a fair amount of specific feedback about the functionality, features and design of the site. For example, in the past few days many people have suggested moving the Google search bar to a new location on the page.
We would like you to know that your voice is being heard. We can't react immediately to this type of request because such changes require us to design and test variations to find what works best. The current design is the result of several iterations and tests. If a common theme presents itself in the comments (like moving the Google box) we will be sure to test revisions in the future and get them in front of our focus groups. We hope that nothing is so “bad” currently that it causes a mass exodus of users but we have to be careful with changes and make sure we don’t break something by fixing something else.
Please give us feedback freely, but please be patient as we test and refine.
Remember even the greats like Google and Facebook weren’t built in a day!!
Stay tuned for more to come....
