This has been a long time coming.

I think Nick and I first talked about the concept almost two years ago. As both avid motorcyclists and technology people, we were somewhat disappointed with the current state of motorcycling on the web. Many sites look like they should have been retired in 2001. Many of them had so few posts, they looked like they were. The most trafficked ones were forums. Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that while forums are OK for having a shouting match, but they’re not so useful for finding stuff out. Well, not always. And they also don’t scale well.

Then there are the sites driven by manufacturers – Harley Davidson is a good example. Nice modern layout, some good ideas. Ultimately, the focus is too narrow. Sure, it’s nice for Harley riders to interact with others, but are they the only people they want to talk with? The mixed riding groups I see on the road suggest otherwise.

On the other side of web, we have Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is all but useless for anything but seeing what ex-school friends are up to (and it’s rarely anything interesting). We have been using Twitter for a while now (@nickESR and @EatSleepRide for Nick and I respectively) and we like it. But it’s also full of noise and a lot of irrelevancy.  In short, these social networking behemoths are a long way from perfect.

So, we had the idea to build something better. It started as a feeling, that we knew something better could be done. You can call that hubris if you like, but they do say all entrepreneurs are egomaniacs.

Our first attempt was built using Drupal about a year ago now. We sat down and spent ages thinking about what we wanted to do. We even had some good ideas. Unfortunately, when we implemented them in Drupal, it didn’t work so well. It was difficult to customize and for the amount of work we wanted it to do, we needed about 60 modules. That’s a lot.

Then the weather turned nice and we went motorcycling for weeks at a time.

But now we have returned and revived those ideas and are fully committed to the concept. It’s currently undergoing final design and we will be starting the coding of the UI in the coming weeks.

The reality is however, that this is not a site for me or Nick. It’s a site for you and that’s the point of this blog. Over the coming weeks, we want to share the features we think are important with you and ask what you think. We need your feedback to ensure this is all going to work the way we all want it to. So, please check back soon and we’ll have some new updates for you, but in the meantime we’d love to hear your left-field ideas on what you would want in a motorcycling web site.

On a final note, don’t get me started on what is wrong with motorcycling on TV. Or perhaps I should leave that for another day…

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