Stock, Flow and why we are working on The Shared Web

I read an article today on The Shared Web, that discusses two types of value that you create from your work and uses them as a metaphor for media today - Stock (durable stuff - blog posts that can be read 2 years from now and still be useful) and Flow (status updates on Twitter that engage with others and establish your presence) and the interplay between them. It got me thinking about what stock and flow we were creating with The Shared Web and reiterating the motivation that my team and I had for starting TSW and dedicating our time and effort to it. 

Nav, Nicolae and I created The Shared Web - a place where you can discover content that is worth your time since it was validated by people you trust - because we wanted to find content that we cared about, that we would enjoy and that we could discuss. It’s a place where we can share with each other all the interesting things that we see on the web everyday in different topics and have the most interesting of these bubble up to our attention. That’s the flow - the content that’s going through the system. We are constantly tinkering with the formula of what makes something interesting - is it because it is controversial and there are many comments about it? Is it because a large number of people posted it too? Or is it enough that one of your friends, who is knowledgable about the topic, posted it? These are the questions that we are exploring and planning on answering by building The Shared Web.

Discovery of content and cutting through the noise that exists today was one of the primary motivations behind The Shared Web. But, there is something even more powerful that we realized as we were developing and using it. The sense of community and common context that is created when people that you know start seeing the same content as you. It makes for better conversations. Think of funny videos that everyone in a social group enjoys, the cat that barks like a dog until it sees a man watching it and immediately switches to a timid meow, or an article about congressman Weiner resigning that sparks spirited debate. That social engagement around content translates to discussions in different topics - it’s the evolution of old school forums. It’s a way to make sure that the people you care about see the things that you find interesting so you can discuss them, so you can interpret them, so you can develop closer relationships by having common experiences. That’s the stock of TSW, creating stronger, more meaningful connections between people through the content that they enjoy together.

That’s our mission. That’s why we are building The Shared Web.

Let us know what you think and join The Shared Web so you can help shape our vision.

-Kareem

P.S. Listen to this song: Someday - A Hundred Little Reasons

SocialSign.me

SocialSign.me is a simple website where you enter your social services, and we prepare you an email signature like this one:

We only spent a day hacking on this, so the feature set is very limited. But, we just wanted to get it up since we thought it might be something people find useful. You’ll also notice that one of the featured icons is The Shared Web. We’re working hard towards the public launch of TheSW, so sign up for a beta invite if you haven’t already, and you should get one in the coming weeks :)! 

Would love to hear feedback on SocialSign.me - feel free to send us an email if you have trouble setting it up at feedback@thesharedweb.com

Cheers,

Nicolae

Cofounder of The Shared Web

User Search and Easier Reposting

We’ve been trying to crank out a continuous flow of new features here at TSW, and we’ve got some big big things coming this week.

But, I wanted to give you guys a quick update on a few of the smaller changes we made to help improve: Finding People, and Circulating Content through networks.

Finding People - User Search 

We’re working on a bunch of stuff that will help you find your friends, and other interesting people to follow. One of the improvements we made this weekend is to support user search in our header bar. 

This should hopefully make it a lot easier for you to get to the users’ profiles you want to see.

Also, just wanted to say thanks to all the people who have been spreading the word about The Shared Web. Please feel free to keep inviting your friends - as we all know TSW is better with friends :). We’re excited to push out the changes that will make it easier for you to invite your friends. 

Circulating Content - Reposting 

We want to make it really easy for users to post content to their own profiles, and in turn spread it to their own social network. We added the Repost button to the site which lets you do that with the click of a button.

We also heard that many users weren’t noticing the ‘Mark as Read’ and ‘Ignore’ buttons, and so we wanted to give them more prominence. These buttons are really useful to keep track of the things you’ve seen, and also to move content you’ve already engaged with out of your hot stream to assure that you’re always getting fresh stuff. 

Let us know what you think of the new changes, and please feel free to send any feedback to feedback_at_thesharedweb.com

Just Added Some New Functionality

Hey Everyone,

Marked As Read 

We knew that one of the things we had to get working was a way to see all the posts you’ve marked as read. So in order to do that we’ve added a Marked as Read tab on your homepage:

This should make it easy for you to rediscover things you’ve seen. And we’ll add more fine-grained filtering for these items in the future.

Share to FB/Twitter

We’ve also added the FB and Twitter buttons which many of you have likely noticed. These are there to make it easier for you to share out the great content you’re seeing back to your existing social networks. I personally also really enjoy seeing what’s popular on Facebook vs. Twitter - and it’s really cool coming across great content on TSW that hasn’t been posted on either network yet! 

First Name/ Last Name (supporting spaces and hyphens)

Some of you pointed out that we didn’t support hyphens and spaces in last names, so that was one of the things we added over the past few days. To change your  First Name/Last Name, just go to your profile page, and Select ‘Edit Profile’:

We’ve got a lot of really exciting features lined up for the coming week, so stay tuned. Some of the things we’re working on is making it easier to share different types of content, and organize the content into the best channels with greater ease. We’re also looking to introduce a feature that will make it much easier to target sites to specific people, rather than just the broad public broadcast.

Thanks to everyone for all the support and great feedback so far! Keep it coming! 

Cheers,

Nicolae (Co-Founder)

First Day Of Beta Invites - And New Features

Hey Everyone,

Thanks so much to all the people who came to check our our site today after the first round of beta invites. We really appreciate all the great feedback we’ve been getting. We’re hard at work pushing new features into the system, and you should notice things getting updated every few days.

Just now we’ve added comment notifications, to let you know when users have added to the conversation around posts you’ve made. We’ve held off emailing you when new comments occur, just to not overwhelm people. 

We hope that this feature can really drive engagement with your friends, and others around the content you find interesting.

Looking forward to hear what you think of the changes :), along with any other feedback you have on where we should take the product! Feel free to email us directly at any time (founders at thesharedweb.com)

Cheers,

Nicolae 

Cofounder at The Shared Web  

We are excited to start opening our beta to our first few hundred users soon. If you’re looking to be one of the first few users of our site then sign up on our homepage. We’ll be selecting users at random to give them access to The Shared Web. 

We want to use our first blog post to let you know more about what we’ve been working on over the past few months. We started off at Techstars Seattle with a simple idea, taking your online presence to the next level so that when you launch your browser you show up as being online to your friends. From there you can share where you are online in real-time. Since then we’ve evolved this concept to the experience that we really wanted to enable on the web and that’s being able to get all the content that is interesting to you in the fastest way possible and being able to engage around that content - talk about it, react to it, with the people you care about. 

We give you the best content on the web curated by your friends and experts in the topics that you are interested in.

The Shared Web is a better personalized filter for discovering content you are interested in. Google is great for finding stuff online but increasingly it’s getting bogged down by SEO manipulations. It’s also not great at showing you content that is personalized to you. Try searching for fashion on Google for example and you’ll get fashion.net, Vogue and Seventeen instead of the top blogs, pictures and articles from the people who’s taste you trust. From the people who are the tastemakers of tomorrow. Getting content via Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, or Buzzfeed is great for finding the latest memes but that’s like getting your content from the Billboard top 100, it might be good but it’s not necessarily tailored to your taste. Although Hacker News comes very close to capturing our interests.

The Shared Web is a place where you choose which topics you’re interested in and get more relevant content for you by following friends and experts who’s taste you trust in those respective topics. You can use it to showcase yourself and your expertise in various areas. Suppose that you are a huge foodie and know which blogs to read and which restraunts to visit, you simply curate these sites by posting them to TSW and share this information with your friends to be recognized as the master food curator in your social circle and beyond.

Sign up to our beta list and we’ll be sending you an invite to try it out. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Cheers,

The Shared Web Team