The premise of Cutting Edge Club is that these four friends nominate three songs every month, and those songs have to have been released in the past year. There are couple more rules, but that's the basic idea.
After just over a year, it's turned out to be a great personal success for us: we've listened to loads of music that we wouldn't have listened to, bought some great albums as a result, and had some great evenings chatting and generally navel-gazing.
"Great", you're probably thinking, "what a fascinating slice of your life. But where's the user experience?". The user experience is in social networking, of community-building, and user contributed content: simply Web 2.0.
We already have a thrown-together and not very well maintained website (http://www.cuttingedgeclub.com/), but we were thinking about how we could enable other people to have the fun we've had. And, more than that, how we can have more fun by listening to more music we haven't heard before, and maybe learning about people we don't know.
The answer, it seemed to us, was to build a platform for a community: a platform because we wouldn't provide anything except:
- some rules
- an easy way to get started
- some help with communication
This is in the same vein as one of my ultimate favourite sites: Last.fm. And, thinking about some of what I've recently be reading from the 37Signals book "Getting Real", we don't even need to worry about scalabilty. I'm not convinced how sound that proposition is for a commercial enterprise, but for an organic hobby enterprise it probably makes sense to not worry about having 100,000 users until you've got 1,000.
So what's the point? Maybe all you have to do is build an ideologically well-structured, solid, useful platform that your users can develop themselves, and everything else will fall into place...
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