Introducing Interests
In 1998 I learnt how to code. The web was in its infancy and reference material was thin on the ground, but I got lucky. The connected nature of the net had spawned a number of killer tools that would bring like-minded people together. IRC, Usenet, and emerging group email software formed the basis of thriving interest-based communities, teeming with people ready to help each other. I learned to code alongside a tight-knit group of people I’d never met in person.
Interest-based communities dominated the early web. Bulletin boards and online forums might have been difficult to use by today’s standards, but they were the best we had, and I ended up making genuine new friendships in those early days. But the web moved on. Breakout social software put the emphasis on existing social circles and on shallower soundbite communication. Interest-based platforms stalled because they remained cumbersome, failing to evolve beyond their technical roots and offer the user-friendly environment that people were coming to expect. Interest-based communication lurched towards Q&A services — knowledge over community.
Think of the big social apps. Facebook, Snapchat and Whatsapp are for keeping in touch with your existing social circle. Twitter is for sharing snippets of your life with interesting people, or simply following celebrities and people of influence. LinkedIn is for work-related contacts and networking. If you spend most of your online social life on these platforms, there’s probably something missing. Where do you go to discuss your hobbies, your studies, and the life situations you find yourself in? These things have a meaning and relevance to your life that is not necessarily shared by your friends, family or work colleagues. Away from the big social apps many of us will have a small collection of random websites that we visit on a regular basis to fulfil this need. These forums, email groups and member sites often provide a poor user experience, are based on aging software and are difficult to use on mobile. Facebook Groups present a minefield of privacy concerns. Online forums are in decay. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups are a usability nightmare plagued by spam. Usenet, IRC and Reddit are for power users, not designed for the masses. Attempts have been made to make each of these platforms incrementally better, but there has been no reinvention, no unification of concepts, no overarching platform to connect interest-based discussion with normal, everyday people.
Enter Interests.
We have an ambitious aim; to create the missing social app, the default place to go to discover like-minded people discussing the things you care about. And our vision is bold; it is all about community, simplicity and freedom.
Community is more important to us than knowledge. If you want knowledge, you are already well catered for, with Wikipedia and Q&A sites. Community, on the other hand, is harder to come by. We believe that it’s through community that discussing interests starts adding real meaning and personal value to our lives. So we aim for each group on Interests to feel exclusive and exciting to those within it. The platform is designed to encourage engagement and automatically manage each group’s administrative tasks.
Simplicity is extremely important because our vision is for Interests to be used by anyone, anywhere, on any device. It should be easy and pleasurable to participate in a group. Today’s discussion forums can seem intimidating and formal, requiring knowledge of jargon and seemingly dominated by geeks and experts or those “in the club”. We want to be inclusive, and that means making things very straightforward. Our goal is to reinvent discussion forums and private email groups, sticking to a limited set of features that put conversation firmly at the heart of the product. We are aiming to make our discussion groups natural and intuitive to use. We call it frictionless discussion. What’s more, we’ll make discovering and joining groups easy.
Lastly, we believe in freedom. Specifically the freedom of expression that comes from keeping your different worlds separate. In Interests we aspire to provide a completely separate space from where you interact with friends and family. Discussions in groups will not be visible publicly to those who are not part of the group. It will be easy to maintain a separate identity for each of your interests, giving you the freedom to express yourself unhindered by privacy concerns.
Interests is about community, simplicity and freedom. We think it is the last missing social app, and has the potential to bring the meaning back into your online social life.
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Visit us at interests.me. Follow us at @Interests. Follow me at @paulfisher
