Thanks for including growthhackers.com Ben. I think you're dead on about curation. Its value is a function of its quality. This fact makes it hard to automate, because (for now anyway) it takes people with expertise to critique and recommend highly specialized content that stands out from the "me too" stuff across the Web.
Best of luck with Launch This Year.
Thanks for stopping by Morgan, appreciate it!
I'm a fan of Product Hunt and Launch This Year looks great! There's a lot of great examples that fall into this curation trend. Hack Design and iOS dev weekly are two that come to mind.
Agreed, RJ. More and more. It's the "age of curation" on the Web, I think.
Ooh I will have to check those out too!
Thanks for mention Product Hunt, Ben! I would also include Quibb and USV.com as good examples of community-driven content curation.
Totally agree on Quibb and USV.com. I should have put both of those in there, since I use both of them.
Yup, good curation takes time to be well done. Subject matter expertise is key.
This is a great post, thanks for sharing all the awesome product ideas! One minor suggestion: make the links open up in a new tab or window :)
Thanks for stopping by. Ya, sometimes I do that with launching new tabs/windows, most of the time I don't. I hope people just come back :)
No worries, just wanted to let you know. I also liked your point about going light on the tech until there is interest & competition. However, I'm curious to know if you'd advise at least having a roadmap?
Also more on the topic of curation, I feel like people who curate need to establish some level of trust/credibility/criteria, what are you thoughts?
Trust is absolutely critical. If you look at Product Hunt, I'm certain it would be nowhere near as interesting/successful if it wasn't Ryan Hoover doing it. He's everywhere online--curating stuff on Medium, guest blogging, etc. He's built up a reputation and now he's cashing in on some of that (in a good way).
So the leaders that curate are critical to the success of the curation. The challenge comes when it's time to scale. Ryan can't clone himself (as far as I know!) so if Product Hunt continues to grow, he'll need to do other things to keep things going -- that might involve moderators, employees, technology...
I think a roadmap is always a good idea--some sense of where you want to take things over time, depending on certain circumstances like traction, etc.
Too kind, Ben. :)
Let me know if you find a cloning machine (and post it to Product Hunt!).
Disclaimer: Product Hunt wouldn't exist without Nathan Bashaw as well. He built the entire product and had an equal hand in the product design/vision.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately too. It actually really struck me re-reading the 1995 Newsweek article about why the internet would fail and it essentially says that it will be a bunch of crap. To a certain degree that prediction came true and I think we are seeing that in things like Medium and Circa. Curation is definitely a theme that I'll be watching in 2014