Post by Youbundle founder
YouBundle is taking the most basic idea – links – and creating a centralized and organized database fueled and rated by users. Unlike social bookmarkers whose main goal is to simply get the links no matter their quality. The goal of YouBundle is for the USER to pick a subject – any subject – and put together a bundle of relevant links to pages, videos and photos. The Bundle actually becoming a new piece of content in the process.
Other users will then have the power to rate the quality of this bundle, with this rating determining how much exposure it will or will not gather. The value of YouBundle is a three-fold process.
- Creation – The user has an expertise on a subject, along with a knowledge of places on the web to find information on this subject – They come to YouBundle and arrange all of these links into a bundle.
- Share and Explore – Other users come to YouBundle to explore and learn all about new subjects. As they browse through various bundles – they get a concise summary of links regarding a certain subject so they can determine in a flash which subjects they would like to further explore in depth.
- Search – The internet information gatherer currently has numerous tools at their disposal including typing the query into Google and sifting through all of the machine generated and SEO’ed results to find the sites of true value.
YouBundle offers a shortcut to this process. As on any given subject, there will already have been a self-declared and community rated expert who has already created a bundle of results on the subject. Furthermore if the searcher is not satisfied with the Bundles offered, then the wheel turns back to the beginning where they can then become the Creator in order to offer their improved results. In this way it is a self-perpetuating system.
To further understand YouBundle and how it differentiates from time-substitutes and competitors, we have to know that there is no editorial process involved aside from basic TOS violation removal. If people make a bundle that is not full of quality links, then they are free to do so and to publish just the same. The crowd-sourced rating process will allow those bundles of highest quality to raise above the rest.
Furthermore – by the lack of an overboard editorial process such as Wiki which sterilizes results via need for consensus – YouBundle is offering the user to express their originality in the bundle. The same subject could have 5 different bundles from 5 different perspectives from 5 different people. Neither would be more right or wrong than the other (as opposed to the editorial model), rather it will be up to the community to decide which is to gather the most exposure.
YouBundle is such a simple and amazing concept that if it can reach the critical mass of users, then we should be prepared for a complete redefinition of the concept of how we search for information on the internet.
Neyma Jahansooz
Co-Founder YouBundle.com
My opinion
As an alpha user of the service, the thing I enjoy the most at Youbundle is the flexibility: Users create groups of links and are totally free to organize those the way they want. I put HyveUp in a top-ranked tech blog bundle, and I am expecting the community to readjust this by making new lists compared to which my vision of HyveUp will probably lose some ranks. Just give your subjective vision of things, and let the natural order object it back if needed.
YouBundle feels like a social network where users interact with links (basic social features so far). If I like your bundles, I become your friend and follow your bundle creations. The sharing experience is very similar to Digg, except that the user provides several links at once in a category withholding them.
As usual, by opening up the system to the user, there is always surprising things popping up like this bundle about the secret sex lives of Pandas. Very informative. By the way, this blue text (or green here) leads to the private beta version of the site, meaning you need an invite, and I’ve got a few to offer. If you want in, all I need is your name and email, which you can drop in the Disqus thread below, or email to interview@hyveup.com.
As mentioned in Techcrunch, so far, like Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. YouBundle is still young, but the service is really easy to use. So join in and let’s see how far this ship can go.