Move over Twitter…
July 16, 2009
It all started with Twitter. I love the idea of microblogging. It's a beautiful thing. Twitter makes it easy to post your thoughts and ideas about just about anything in 140 characters or less. Other folks can follow along and read what you have to say. That's why I love Twitter, but that's also why I don't like it.
You see, it's a great idea, but unfortunately it often ends up that I'm following all of these folks who are posting about what they had for breakfast, or tweet that they're giving their dog a bath, or other ridiculous stuff that I have absolutely no interest in.
Then there are the spammers. Oh my goodness! 100 tweets in a row advertising trash I'm not interested in.
Even when folks aren't spamming, Twitter seriously lacks focus. From one tweet to the next, the sheer volume of subjects is dizzying — and it's rarely related.
That's why I created TipDrop.com. TipDrop is what I call a "social-knowledge" site. Simply put, it's a very focused form of microblogging site.
At TipDrop, a user creates a "tip sheet" focused on a particular subject. The user who created the tip sheet, and other TipDrop users, can post tips to the tip sheet. The users can also vote for or against the tips on the tip sheet. Since 140 characters really isn't enough for a good tip, your tips can be up to 255 characters long.
It's like Twitter meets Wikipedia meets Digg.
For example, let's say I created tip sheet on How to get people to link to your web page (which I have–that link points to it). You can go to that tip sheet to read all of the tips that I and other users have added to get ideas about how to build links to your site. If you like a tip, you vote it up — if you don't like it, you vote it down.
You see the power here? Instead of random bits of noise and nonsense, TipDrop creates tightly focused pages of practical knowledge. It's social-knowledge.
To make it even better, TipDrop is driven by what I'm calling a "credibility engine." Everything in the system is given a "credibility" score: users, tip sheets and tips. The more users vote for a tip, the higher the credibility of the tip, the tip sheet and the tip-writing user. The more users that vote against the tip, the lower the credibility of those three things.
The best (read: most credible) tips appear on top of the tip sheet.
The site is now in beta, and I encourage you to go take 30 seconds to sign up for a free account (that's really all it takes — it's super-fast and easy). Perhaps start by adding your own tips to my tip sheet on how to get people to link to your web page?
Check the Site Links down the right sidebar of the home page for links to the TipDrop blog and forum as well. I'm very interested in hearing your suggestions and thoughts on how to make the system better. Click here to go to TipDrop.com now.
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