Great work @ginatrapani and @anildash. Last time we chatted about Makerbase, you said it was a "20%" side project, second to ThinkUp. Is that still the case?
Also, upvoting this statement:
Great products (and businesses) are built by teams of people in engineering, marketing, design, product, sales, etc. We all know this but so often in tech the focus is put on the "developer" with disregard to other functions.
@rrhoover thanks Ryan! Leading up to launch we spent more time getting Makerbase ready, and now we'll split our time between ThinkUp and Makerbase based on how the products are resonating with our users and customers. ThinkUp is doing well, and not going anywhere.
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@ginatrapani@rrhoover Nice to see new projects from you, Gina.
Your projects & articles have given good amount inspiration during years. :)
There are so many "LinkedIn killers" that have popped up over the years, trying to capitalize on LinkedIn's vulnerability, mainly by doing a slicker UX...but polishing up LinkedIn won't give you the next LinkedIn. It'll come out of left field and better suit the workers who are increasingly more likely to be contractors, freelancers, etc. and the projects they make. Makerbase should scare LinkedIn more than anything that's come out over the last 10 years. Props to the team, and good luck.
@adamokane Yes, though I don't see this replacing LinkedIn - I see it replacing the "projects" portion of my profile. This could function as the portfolio companion to LinkedIn's digital CV.
Makerbase launches today. It was inspired by how useful IMDB is for the film and TV industries. The idea is to organize all the contributors to various aspects of a product so that you know who built what. Even failed or closed products can be added to the database. @anildash and @ginatrapani will be in here a bit later to tell us more about the project.
Love the concept. Curious, how are you building the community of "contributors"?
It seems like others who have tried this model have failed if they weren't able to consistently motivate people to contribute, keeping the content relevant/up to date. Especially considering for IMDB, movies and casts don't change. For products, features and teams can change constantly.
What's motivating people to continue to manage the content?
@davidspinks Great question -- we've been thinking a lot about that. There are a few ways we think we can be of service over the long-run to creators.
First, we'll be giving more tools to makers that can help them show off their creations and have a great place to list all their work. I don't presume people have a ton of time to randomly edit pages on the Internet, but I do know creative people are very interested in telling the world about their work, and that's the primary motivation we want to serve.
Second, I do think a big challenge is the fact that software has new versions. (Although I guess George Lucas released a bunch of Service Packs for his movies, too.) Right now we support having a date range to list when a person contributed to a project, and we can imagine maybe adding support for versions, so if you contributed just to version 2.0 that would be listed.
Finally, I think there's a tremendous amount of potential in wondering "how the heck did you do this?". So many of us learn from our friends and mentors and inspirations, and finding a good way to tap into that impulse could certainly animate and energize Makerbase for a long time to come.
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