Dan Phiffer

Is ShiftSpace useful?

ShiftSpace received a rather tepid review from the Open Road blog at CNET:

Then there’s SourceShift, which allows you to re-tool a Web page with HTML. On the InfoWorld page in question, I changed the title to something more to my liking. While a momentarily fun act of graffiti (harmless, because it’s just an overlay only visible to ShiftSpace users), it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose.

In other words, ShiftSpace is mildly interesting, but I don’t (yet) see the point. Can someone enlighten me?

I think what Matt doesn’t understand is that ShiftSpace isn’t just a set of tools, it’s also a community of hackers and users. We’re trying to build something new, which is a messy process with lots of experimentation and plenty of failure. We’re all kind of discovering what this stuff is good for, but I do hope we reach beyond idle vandalism (which I’m assuming is what he means by “graffiti,” not so much street art as a practice).

And like most social media, the value we’re trying to create depends to a large extent on social effects that we don’t quite have yet. As our user base grows, the density of content will increase and our code will adapt better to the demands of the group. The software needs to mature just as we need to learn how to use it effectively. The same was observed about blogging by Clay Shirky:

We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn’t know what we were doing.

One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.

Answering the question “is it useful” depends a lot on what you want out of the experience. For me it’s more about the context than the tools per se. With ShiftSpace you get more latitude about how and where you engage with other people. And it’s different in that it’s an experiment in commons-based peer production, which has different constraints from a start-up trying to build the next sticky web destination.

We’ve come a long way from our early prototypes (hat tip especially to David and Doron), but we’re always looking for more folks to join our team. We need help on all fronts, from decentralizing our server architecture to reporting bugs in the client software. Please drop us a line if you think you might want to get involved.