BricaBox Manifesto: Part 1
Published by Nate WestheimerLater 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.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Nate, excellent post and I’m definitely excited to see the full bricabox platform.
Feature scope is definitely a tough call. Look at Basecamp — Jason says they purposefully leave higher-end functionality out of the program and would gladly point people up the food chain. They believe they serve a very specific niche of users. Is Bricabox of that mind-set? If so, I’d like to see that top diagram with user groups or levels, in terms of difficulty and knowledge.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
That’s a great comment, Bud. One of the ways we’ll approach this issue is by opening an API in the future. This will allow us to focus on popularly used and needed features, and leave the niche work to interested developers. While it seems we’re trying to be all things to all people, we really do have something to offer pretty much ever level of user. I’ll work on showing that in a graph of some sort.