One of our main goals with eatsleepride has always been to make the user experience simple and intuitive across the whole site, without sacrificing functionality. We don’t want the site to get in the way when creating, sharing and commenting on content and hope to ultimately foster an environment where users want to contribute enough to make the community worthwhile for everyone.

Another goal is to ensure that as a user you feel like you are interacting in the right way, whatever the “right way” means to you. We anticipate users who are fervent contributors, posting as quick as they can type and connecting with as many different people as they can. At the other end of the spectrum will be those who are casual contributors, more of a spectator and only interested in friending people they actually ride with.

So, in the true spirit of web 2.0 / social networks, we set out to build a platform for participation that doesn’t exist for motorcyclists today. When we launch in the coming months (maybe we’re close enough to start counting in weeks now?) you’ll be able to create a profile that tells us enough about you to help us show you appropriate content within the site. You’ll be able to find like-minded riders and connect with them, create a group that’s focused on whatever you want and invite people to join it. You’ll have a feed of current activity within the site that can be filtered in various ways to ensure you only see what you want to see and you can easily add your own comments to the ongoing discussions or start an entirely new discussion from anything that grabs your attention. This is really only scratching the surface as there is much more to the site, but the same concept runs throughout: you make the decisions on how you interact with the community and how the community interacts with you, we are just providing the tools to make it happen and (hopefully) make it useful.

Next post I’ll start getting into specific features.

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