One of the biggest issues for any website these days is how to deal with Social Networking. We at eatsleepride believe unabashedly that you can’t get by without being a social site and thus it’s a central question to us.

At this time, there are two main models: Facebook, where friend relationships must be mutual and Twitter where relationships are one way only. With the latter, you can of course follow someone who is following you and make it a mutual relationship and a lot of people do just that. To me, the difference is more profound. On facebook, most of the time you are keeping up with and communicating directly with friends on a 1:1 basis. Occasionally, it’s 1 to many but only very occasionally. With Twitter, the medium is more broadcast than friend oriented.

So, what are we doing at eatsleepride.com? As I think we explained, we are trying to be “everything for every biker” and we do believe we can deliver on that model. Part of that secret sauce is going to be in the way we build Facebook like feeds, tailored to you and your riding but also leverage a Twitter style friend model to allow you to discover and consume new and interesting ideas. If you choose to make your relationships mutual, you’ll effectively have a Facebook for your biking (and yes, we want to implement cross-posting at some point very soon). On the other hand, if you don’t follow others, you can use it as a richer Twitter style app (again, we do want to implement cross posting so you don’t have to manage multiple profiles).

Why this fence-sitting? Both Nick and I have been long time Facebook and Twitter users and have found limitations in both. Twitter is great but it’s hard to maintain a history. That and often 140 chars is just too little. Facebook is perfect for seeing what your old high-school friends are up to, which is great and all, but if you’d really wanted to know, you’d probably still be calling them. Other than that, it’s lack of focus lends itself to being little more than an amusing way to kill some time. As a result, we’ve all but stopped using Facebook and as you may have seen, my Twitter feed (twitter.com/EatSleepRide) is not as frequently updated as it once was.

Of course, there are a raft of other features we plan on implementing that make this site more than just another Facebook or Twitter clone and all of them are relevant to your biking needs. I’ll write about them a little more next time.

Tags:   design · developmentNo Comments