BricaBox Blog

We’re launching Tuesday morning, as you know, so until then, we’re putting the site in maintenance mode.

We’ll be back in 24 hours with a wonderfully fresh coat of paint!

Mark your calendars for next Tuesday, February 26th. That’s the day we’re launching BricaBox.

Excited? We are.

Here are some new features you can expect:

• Block enhancements for: Google Maps, Technorati, Compete
• New blocks: Photos, ShareThis!
• Full CSS customization
• Full OpenID 2.0 support

Photo credit: jurvetson

We’re demoing BricaBox at the NextWeb / NY Web 2.0 Meetup here in New York City tonight (info below)

At the event, we’ll be showing off some of the great new features coming up in our launch. Please come out to Webster Hall to support us and grab some free food, if you’re in the New York area.

Thanks.
N & K

The NextWeb’s NY Web 2.0 Meetup will be held tomorrow, Monday, February 18th, at Webster Hall. The event begins at 6:15pm and will have FREE FOOD (sponsored by Gusto), Free WiFi, drink specials, presentations, and informal networking before and afterwards. Presenting this month is/are:

1. Brian August, Webster Hall
2. Eric Litman, Washington VC
3. Nate Westheimer & Kyle Bragger, BricaBox
4. Michael Grushin, ReviewBasics
5. Sam Lessin, Drop.io

Please RSVP and let us know if you’ll be joining us for the event. Follow this link to RSVP: http://newtech.meetup.com/21/calendar/7115544. If you’re not a member, you may join by clicking here. You do not have to be a member to attend!

Photocredit: Willotoons

Later this month (February 2008) we will launch the BricaBox Platform. But what is BricaBox? Why did we make it and what problem are we trying to solve? Most importantly, what can YOU do with it? Here, in Part 1 of our Manifesto, we try to explain the history of our market and why we’ve created BricaBox:

Searching for the Universal Social Content Platform
Part 1: History and Market Analysis

We believe in technology which is disruptive, and in disruptive technology which is empowering.

In the last decade, the best of example of a disruptive and empowering technology has been the Blog. Its significance is in the way the blog flattens: before, one needed vast resources to build a content management system and compete with the New York Times; now, all one needs is one click. The blog’s disruptiveness has reverberated far and wide; newspapers have stopped printing and politicians have resigned due to the free utility of the blog.

In the last 5 years, the blog has shared the stage with new social applications. Some of these social applications have been social networks, but the most valuable and compelling have been what we call “social content sites.” YouTube and Wikipedia have led this social content wave and have demonstrated the value of having groups of people contribute to a base of content. However, little has happened to grant everyday web users the power to create their own social content sites. While wiki and video platforms have emerged, the same simplicity and universality that made the blogging platform so powerful has yet to appear in the social content space. Tools like MediaWiki or PBWiki have lowered barriers to help you make your own Wikipedia; but, the fat and long tail (diverse and highly valuable) of other social content sites, which do not yet have free and easy-to-use platforms, are left with extraordinarily high barriers to participation.

Consider these examples:
Yelp is a fantastic social content site for restaurant reviews, mashing up mapping data to user reviews; yet, no platform exists so that everyday users can create their own niche restaurant review site. LibraryThing is a wonderful website for literary fanatics, and uses Amazon’s data to enhance its entries, yet no platform exist so that everyday users can create their own book club site; 43things is a place for people to share personal goals, and allows its users to ask each other questions, yet no platform for people to create their own goal sharing, zeitgeist site.

These needs — the needs of millions of people who would love to create their own restaurant or book review site, and the millions more who would like to create a site for baby naming, or vacation reviews, or photography/maps mash-ups, or wiki/video how-to sites — are not being met by today’s small collection of social content platforms.

It is our opinion that one-off, rigid platforms will not unlock the value in this “long tail” of social content sites; therefore, we have set off to create a universal social content platform: a way for anyone to create a social content website using any combination of tools and data sources, just as easily as someone can create a blog.

BricaBox is a Universal Social Content Platform. It’s platform for you to create your social content site.

Your social content website should be a reflection of what you want it to be, not what a fixed niche platform decides it should be. If you want wiki functionality on your video site, you should be able to drag and drop that in. If you want weather data for your restaurant reviews, you should be able to drag and drop that in. And so, we’re presenting BricaBox with the tenants of flexibility, universality, and self-expression. We believe this combination will be disruptive in the social content space and empowering for its users.

Here’s a call to action from Kyle, and a sneak preview of the new design + UI:

Click on the image to see it in its true size (and keep sending in those inquiries!).

You know those default themes Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr offer their users? Well, when we officially launch BricaBox next month, we’re going to have those too, and we’d like those themes to be designed by YOU.

(Here’s what it looks like on Tumblr and Blogger, FYI)

This is a great opportunity to get your name out there (you get to link to your website from the footer of the theme) and heck, it’s great for our us and our users too.

So, if you’re a designer and you’d like your design to be the art behind the thousands of websites which will come out of our platform in the next year, please email us at hello@bricabox.com and we’ll send template information in the next week or so.

Thanks!

Nate, Kyle, and Nir

PS: If you’d like to see our 37Signals Gig Board post about this, check it out here.

Kyle pushed out another great update this past week, which included a feature I’m calling “Color Picker.”

Color Picker allows you to change the colors of your BricaBox site in a bunch of places. It’s a great way to make your site more, well, YOURS.

Anyway, check out this new screencast about it below, and head to What.BricaBox.com to leave a comment or helpful tip.

PS: Kyle hated the colors I picked for What.BricaBox.com so I had to change them back to the default colors.

Kyle posted a new video about how to create a BricaBox site. You can find it in this post, in full HD quality on Vimeo (where we love to upload videos) or on our tutorial site: What.BricaBox.com.

For those of you with BricaBox creation privileges, this video will take you through, start-to-finish, the process of creating a BricaBox, creating new content types, and adjusting your layout. It takes 10 minutes, but you can watch only the first part or up until you feel comfortable taking the reins with your new site!

Hello friends, Kyle here with some news we’re pretty stoked about: we’re about to unleash we just unleashed some really awesome new functionality and a bunch of bug fixes for our pride and joy, BricaBox! For your reading pleasure, below you’ll find a brief list of the new stuff we rolled out this morning.

MultiContent
- Each BricaBox can now have multiple content types. Want to create your own version of 43 People, Places, and Things? Easy! Just add a content type for each. Each content type can have its own set of attributes, too. For instance, a Person might have a URL and no address, whereas a Place might have an address and no URL.
- Each content type can have its own custom layout. Just go to Manage > Blocks & Layout > Content Layout. You’ll be able to select which blocks appear for which types of content. Easy.
- Filterable content list on steroids

Community Features
- Profile comments + email notifications about ‘em (you can turn these off on your account settings page)
- Comment block now has pagination on the homepage

Engagement
- Engagement can now be toggled on and off for a BricaBox (e.g. if you’d like to disable voting on a Top 100 list)

User Interface & Bug Fixes
- Lots of UI enhancements + refinements
- A ton of backend tweaks and bug fixes

We’re really excited about where BricaBox is headed in the coming weeks and months, and you can expect more fixes, enhancements, and upgrades as we progress towards our January launch.

As always, please get in touch with us if you have any questions, feedback, comments, complaints, or otherwise; we’re all ears! I should note that a great deal of the features rolled out today are based directly on feedback from a group of very valuable people: YOU!

Cheers!

Kyle Bragger is:

• BricaBox’s CTO since mid-2007
• An inspired designer, whose work has been featured on Webcreme and other design sites. The man sweats valid HTML and CSS. BricaBox still hasn’t been “debugged” for IE… but it works more or less with no problem, because that’s the way he does it.
• An innovative developer… programming since he was an early teen. Once he wrote a flight systems simulator just by reviewing the manuals for a large plane’s control panels. He’s a code bricoleur.
• “Only” 21 years old… and a half
• Someone once on the path to becoming a physician (after two and a half years of pre-med and German, he dropped out)
• Nearly fluent in said German, and often found IMing German phrases which can not be translated in this space
• Debunker of myth that all developers are socially maladjusted (just like I am re: homeschoolers, I hope). To my apartment’s champagne house warming party, Kyle was the only one who thought to bring champagne flutes as housewarming presents.
• A family man. He’s a loving big brother, a Uncle, and a patient son.
• Not a blogger, but a regular tumblogr.

Why am I writing about Kyle? Because too many people know who I am and not enough people know Kyle. It’s time you got to know him.

Back story, or: How Bragger met BricaBox
This past spring, I was working on version 1 of this project, creating a little app called “VentBox” (if you’re wondering how the two are connected, realize that you can make VentBox with BricaBox, etc, etc). The first design for the app was something I sourced from oDesk, but it looked and felt like crap, so I decided I needed a real designer to get involved, just like I was working with a real developer at the time.

So, an ad went up on 37Signals Gig Board — our person wish list is still posted on the VB Blog — and very shortly after, I got this email in the sea of others:

Greetings Nate,
I’m very interested in the VentBox gig: http://gigs.37signals.com/gigs/179

My company site & portfolio, although very, very limited at the moment (just relaunched my company site and have many pieces to put up yet), is located here:

http://www.trndy.net

Could you elaborate on what you mean in saying “directed the user”?

Regards,
Kyle

Now, there’s a whole great long story behind why I ended up working with Kyle (mostly it had to do with him undercutting the competition and sounding crazy enough on the phone that he’d be fun to work with), but pretty much the rest is history.

He came on board in early March; visited NYC in the middle of the month to brainstorm about the new design; pumped out the design nearly before he left that day; started working on some new features (”I had bought a programmer too?!” I couldn’t believe) right off the bat; helped present the new design to Brett’s Web 2.0 Meetup back when there were 30 people in the room (not the 250 there are now); that night he helped me understand that the platform I really wanted to build should be built from scratch — I had learned so much developing the first version, but the code was not transferable — and then convinced me he’d be willing to help me see my idea through, and that he was the right man for the job; by this time, Kyle was already moving up to New York City, after taking a job with The Huffington Post.

Now, I’m can’t speak for Kyle and say that he was smart to have joined forces with me — time will tell? — but I can say that he’s been the right man for the job. Let me tell you about how Kyle has innovated with this platform, from the eyes of the “not-technical-enough-to-program” CEO:

BricaBox is an extremely complex application. Our goal is to both simplify and enhance the collection, organization, connecting of, publishing, relating around, and promoting of content and data. Simplify and enhance. Better said, simplify and revolutionize.

So, besides just being thousands and thousands of lines of code, there is functionality within the app which has not really been done before, even by Ruby on Rails super-star outfits like 37Signals and Robot Coop; Rails was born out of 37Signals’ Basecamp, so it goes without saying that Basecamp itself doesn’t really push outside the boundaries of Rails… it defines them. But sometimes, when you’re not doing Basecamp, you have to go outside those boundaries.

For instance, we publish your sites on subdomains of our site. Simple, right? If you were getting down and dirty with PHP, perhaps. But even 37Signals uses a PHP front-end to manage marketing, billing, etc, etc. Then they throw the sites on the subdomains using a plugin (or gem — my non-coding self doesn’t remember the difference yet) called “account as subdomain,” but there’s no global view — no main account on BasecampHQ.com. But that’s what BricaBox is. You have BricaBox accounts, sites, global directories, specific profiles, and…

…then there’s the whole custom domains issue, which again, no one has really done like we’ve done. The Robot Coop published xs_auth so that you could login on one of their sites and be logged in on their other sites, but they didn’t have to worry about subdomains like we do. Not only do we allow top level domains, but we also allow subdomains of top level domains, and Kyle coded that straight up.

And how about our content aware “blocks” system? For those of you who have seen it, you may begin to grasp the complexity which is behind the interface and functionality. Today, that interface and functionality got a lot crazier and more complicated, but more usable for the enduser. It’s not so often you find someone who innovates in code and UI in the same movement. But yeah — that’s my CTO.

So consider this a Thanksgiving post. I’m thankful to be working with this guy. But also, consider it an introduction, because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of Kyle now that we’re getting BricaBox out there and people are thinking about and wondering what’s under the hood. It’s pretty fantastic stuff, and if you have any questions, or if you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out, buy him a beer, and chat him up. He’s at Kyle (of course) @ BricaBox.com.

PS: Any technical representation or description of ourselves or others could be off the mark. There are things I “get” about the programming aspect of things and things I don’t get. Let me be clear: anything I’m off the mark on here is not a representation of claims Kyle’s made. He’s too humble to say he’s the first at something. So I could be wrong on some of these analysis, but that doesn’t reflect Kyle or take away from his work.