What is Skribit?
I haven’t really talked about Skribit in any depth yet, so this shall be my Skribit 101 post. Skribit is a web application sprouting from my idea along with many talented co-founders at Startup Weekend Atlanta. First off, I’ll tell you what it isn’t. Skribit is not some blog commenting system as others have believed it to be.
Skribwhat?
Instead, Skribit provides bloggers and readers with a unique form of interaction. Bloggers put our widget module on their blog and readers may suggest (anonymously or through an account) article topics through it. Readers can also vote for these topics. However, the widget does not just show the top 5 post suggestions. There is an algorithm behind it that displays suggestions that are hoppin’ based on recency, number of votes and a few other factors.
Furthermore, the Skribit homepage will become a portal for showcasing the popular suggestions across all genres of blogs. I envision it being the place to go for “tomorrow’s news”. At the moment, we are focused on nailing the blogger-reader interaction aspect and will expand from there. Many people have asked me how we plan to make money and to that my reply is that we have a business plan but it won’t come into play just yet.
You expect me to put a widget on my blog?
Some of you may find it quite ironic that I am behind a startup primarily dealing with a widget after I wrote that I am not a fan of blog widgets. Here’s my stance: widgets are worthless unless they provide real value. In this case, the value is the gained reader interaction. Comments are great for getting feedback on a particular topic or post, but Skribit aims to facilitate reader involvement over the entire blog and even direct where the blog’s content is headed. In return, blog authors will love Skribit for giving them ideas on what to write about. My Leopard post was related to a Skribit suggestion from a person asking me if Spaces was the best feature in Leopard. And it looks like I’ll be writing about iPhone 2.0 soon as 88 people have voted for that Skribit suggestion.
As for the general negative aspect of widgets, that they are slow to load and hinder the entire website’s performance, Skribit uses iframes at the moment, which do not mess up page loads should the widget fail to load for any reason. Down the line, I can see platform-specific plugins that communicate with Skribit every X minutes and store results in a local XML file (like TLA does it).
Questions?
Any questions? For those wondering what my specific role in Skribit is, I see myself as idea guy + front-end development including minor Rails work and lots of CSS/HTML tweaking. Skribit seems to be a great way for me to jump into Ruby on Rails development which I’ve never touched before. Oh and yes, widgets will be fully customizable in the near future. I know that not everyone has a green blog.
As a sidenote, Skribit would not be possible without Basecamp and Google Apps. Both proved incredibly useful.
Skribit Status
Team Skribit on launch night. I’m in the front in white.
Skribit is currently in private beta for the Skribit team but we plan on having a public beta very soon (weeks). For those wondering why most startups have all these beta releases - in addition to general application testing and stability, we’re doing it so we don’t fry our servers should this thing takeoff. Skribit has the potential to go viral as it is a blogger-centric tool. If bloggers like something, they’ll blog about it and the cycle continues. Also, since this is a widget service every page load of our users is a page load for our servers (plug: Skribit’s servers are (dv) boxes provided by Media Temple). For example, 10,000 users multiplied by 1,000 page views per day (random numbers I made up) would mean 10 million pages to be served by our server each day.
The Skribit Boardroom/Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center, with Lance Weatherby pictured. Lance has sort of become my business mentor.
The Skribit team has a lot of development ahead so don’t form your thoughts about Skribit just yet. One thing’s for sure though - I am devoted to this project and want to see it become something amazing. That and there’s no motivation as powerful as trying to prove Michael Arrington wrong after he stated “I don’t expect much from Skribit.”
I was interviewed by Rev2.org regarding what exactly Skribit is, so that’s worth a read if you’re interested. As long as I’m linking up recent interviews, here’s one on ChrisMarshall.ws and another on Away.gr
On a personal note, my grandfather passed away on Thanksgiving and I will be flying to his funeral, so I don’t think I’ll have time to update here for a few days.
At first, Skribit didn’t show because I had Safari’s set to only accept cookies from sites I navigated to. Once I changed it to all and reloaded the page, my Safari crashed. I tried again, another crash. I turned cookies back to it’s original setting and paulstamatiou.com worked fine. Anyone else experience this problem?
In Safari 3, in Preferences, under Security, for Cookies, I have it only accept cookies from those pages I navigate to, so Skribit throws:
“Sorry, your browser does not allow 3rd party cookies. If you’d like to use Skribit, please enable 3rd party cookies.”
:(
Whoops, Henry beat me to it. And no, Safari 3 doesn’t crash for me when Cookies are enabled and Skribit loads. Weird.
Typo: At the end of the “Questions?” section, you wrote “with out” instead of “without”.
I really like this idea, especially the fact that it can be done anonymously. (I assume that means without a user account.) The logo is cool too. :)
@Henry - that’s in our ticket tracking system already. hopefully we’ll be able to resolve that before public beta. Thanks for the comment.
It’s not showing up for me Paul, just a big white space under the MediaTemple ad. Could be something wrong with this computer, not sure. Also your footer has a bunch of extra space in it, check your CSS?
"I envision it being the place to go for “tomorrow’s news”… Scary, sounds like 'Tomorrow Never Dies', not that I am suggesting you are the next Elliot Carver, or maybe you are? Do you have a girlfriend who looks like Teri Hatcher?
Sorry, side-tracked on the James Bond idea, back to Skribit! Like the others, I agree there is a minor problem with Safari blocking external cookies. Overall it sounds like a great idea, but only really useful for bloggers that get fairly good traffic- Sometimes I get as little as 3 hits a day so I can’t see it being useful to me as a widget on my site- the ‘hub’ site would be useful for generating ideas to write about though, almost like Digg… only with some intelligence to weed out the rubbish.
Also, I assume I speak for all regular visitors to say sorry for the loss of your Grandfather,
Sight… I can never seem to get ‘Postable’ to work properly.
@Adam - postable is only for real code that you want to show, not that you want parsed. That is, if you want to show some PHP code, not if you want to bold something.
This certainly has great potential, Paul, and I remain interested in testing it. Like other Leopard users, I see the problem in Safari, and guess I will reluctantly add FireFox 2 back into my apps.
Regarding your grandfather: I am sorry for your loss.
@Paul: ah, that would explain why it never works. I guess I will have to live without the joy of italics in commenting.
Hey Paul. Just like to say that I’m really sorry about your Granddad.
I think that Skribit is a brilliant idea and have been following your progress from the start. Keep up the good work and I would definitely be one of the first to use it. If you could maybe get in talks with Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team to make sure that the Skribit widget is compatible with WordPress.com blogs you will definitely make me a happy bunny. I am seriously considering switching to WordPress.com as my current free servers are really slow and useless and I cannot afford a paid plan. So yeah, if you and the other guys could do that, that would be fantastic.
Thanks again Paul, and my condolences.
Great post! I was surprised by what Micheal Arrington said because it seems to me as though Skribit is actually something that people will use.
Also, my condolences regarding your grandfather.
Hey didn’t I make that iphone 2.0 skribit suggestion? :)
This looks like an awesome product! I’ve wanted to find an efficient way to do what Skribit’s designed to do for a long time, so I’m glad that somebody’s finally done it. Just like Adam said earlier, I too have limited traffic to my blog, but the portal of topic ideas is incredibly appealing. Keep up the good work, I’m looking forward to the public release!
Paul, sorry to hear about your loss. My best wishes to you and your family.
I’m excited to see Skribit take off personally. I think its going to provide a great element to blogs that have an active readership.
Hey Paul, I think Skribit is an awesome idea! Kudos to you and the team for thinking of it and developing it this far. As others have mentioned, it may not be ideal for me personally because of my small readership and their average participation level in elements of my blog, but for a blog like yours it’s perfect. I’ll probably add it to mine anyway, if only for the coolness-factor. Best of all is the so-called “idea portal”, which I assume will be set up similar to Digg. (Which, for the record, I think does have a good system - it’s just the content that’s gone to the dogs.) Really excited to see all this play out, and I’ll be blogging about it for sure!
My condolences to you and your family regarding your grandfather.
Sorry to hear about your grandfather. I have been pretty much out of things for a couple of weeks but this looks very cool, look forward to the beta!!!! Am sure you will let me know how to apply :-)
This does seems to be an extremely good widget, if it does serve its purpose.
However, can’t this be an embedded solution so that your servers do not get overloaded?
This is what Skribit is:
“Sorry, your browser does not allow 3rd party cookies. If you’d like to use Skribit, please enable 3rd party cookies.”
Ummmm, I have cookies enabled in Safari 3.
Paul,
I am sorry to hear about your grandpa, I hope the trip home was safe and the funeral peaceful.
I look forward to the beta opening so I can download Skirbit - if you’re behind it I trust it’s going to be fun and useful.
Requiescat in Pace, your grandfather.
n1, looks like you fixed the cookie issue. Also the recent skribit.com website looks waaayyy better than the first iteration.
well done
Ok, I’ve been thinking about skribit (basically since this original post…i know, I’m a bit late)
Could you modify this for software vendors to say “which feature should be added next?” and a way to make it more transparent for vendors to add to their product? an api maybe? I dunno, it would probably just take 20 minutes to implement some sort of PHP script to tally up these, but I like the direction of socially created software, as well as news.
Well, I’ve added it on, so here goes nothing… and seeing how “Nothing” is where my current reader interaction is, it can’t hurt.
We’re having a problem whereby if you refresh the page, something gets confused with the Skribit plugin and our Adsense ads. If you actually navigate to the page, for example by clicking the ‘Home’ link it is fine.