CC: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com>, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>,
dynamicuno@gmail.com, gsundeep@gmail.com
Hey all -
I finally had a few hours to bang out a proof of concept for the projectpm newswire. I built it on Drupal, since that's what I know best. You can check it out at http://newswire.singingsites.com . Here's the feature list:
* accounts with profile pictures, and a list of your blogs
* registered users can create Submissions - a title, a link, and a category
* there are three places to see submissions: most voted, most active, and pushed. Each page ranks submissions a little differently.
* users can "Endorse" other users. Endorsing someone adds everything they push to your "pushed" list.
* users can "push" any submission on the system, or revoke their own pushes by "pulling"
* users can comment on submissions, and can up/downvote each others' comments
* the system awards "Respect" to users based on their activity. When someone pushes your submission or endorses you, you get respect.
* the system supports "Badges", which appear on users' profile pages . Badges can be manually added to users, or automatically based on pre-set criteria.
What I have NOT done:
* addressed any visual elements whatsoever. This is the Drupal default theme, and there are a lot of elements which I would like to have a different look. The objective here is to demonstrate functionality however - theming is purely cosmetic in Drupal.
* properly addressed the comments system. We've talked variously about up/downvoting comments, slashdot style comment moderation, and a number of other possibilities. We can do anything in this framework, we just have to decide what we want to do.
Please create an account, log in and play around. The central question I'm still dealing with is, what makes this different from Reddit? How can we differentiate ourselves in a clear way, and what makes this a superior system for sharing information?