Dribbble is a finely crafted community for designers, by designers. It’s invite-only in order to maintain high quality work on the site, but that doesn’t mean you can’t browse around for inspiration. Give it enough time to fine-tune the tagging and search features (color search is already there; UI patterns, textures, etc. would be great) and we may have the most useful, A-grade design reference out there from people who know their stuff.
There are several things that set it apart from generic portfolio and gallery sites, as it is also dubbed the “Twitter for designers”. From the tagline “what are you working on?” to its system of “rebounds” (basically a response to a “shot”) to uploads of 400 pixels or less, Dribbble is focused on brevity and the right now even when they could have entertained the whole spectrum.
Of course there’s the basketball metaphor working all around too, which when expanded even further can create some interesting activities and interactions for the community: think games, collaborations, meetups, leagues, merits. Think social games like Foursquare and BarStar, only more productive.
People have been complaining about the quality of a lot of things in the design community lately, whether it’s resource articles or the actual interactions within the community, and I see Dribbble as a partial solution to that.
I don’t think that Simler will be a Facebook or Twitter killer, but there are several features that interest me enough to not stop thinking about it. (That’s gotta be a good sign right? Knowing how that went for Twitter?)
- Instead of reading and discussing topics with your friends because they are your friends, Simler lets you find the topics (tags) that interest you, so you can consume and create content under them. You could say it’s a reformatted message board or chatroom, so is it really a new thing?
- The tagging concept keeps me on the fence as well. I like the idea of trying to define yourself with these keywords, but the novelty wears off when you realize it’s not much different from the way we list interests in virtual profiles and slambooks. And what does it mean when I add the IE6 tag to my profile? It definitely does not mean I like using it! What about the “Awkward Silence” tag? Eventually it will become a race to see who comes up with the wittiest name.
- I’m not sure it will actually scale. Will there be a way to organize the tags a user collects as time passes? Surely some people’s egos will find anything less than a thousand tags to be insufficient to describe their interesting selves. Then again, the Twitter era answer to that is: when there’s an API, there’s a way.
Simler poses interesting questions regarding how we pursue our interests on the Web. Do you join groups because your friends are in it? the cool kids are in it? or because you’re interested in the discussions? Are you tired of the insipid updates filling up their live streams? Should you take a more active role in choosing the content you see? Is the level of control for doing so enough?
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