Alternate title of this post: “GDGT: A little gadget site with big ideas.” So last week, my friends Ryan Block and Peter Rojas fully launched their new community tech site, GDGT, which has existed in podcast and live coverage of special events form for several months. GDGT is supposed to be pronounced “gadget,” but I just can’t help thinking Gidget, thus the silly title(s) of and picture accompanying this post.
They have a cool little embeddable GDGT widget (again, pushing me to think Gidget), that I’m trying out in the bottom of one of the sidebars to this site. You can add what gadgets you “have, want, or had” to your profile and they will appear in the widget, which is very similar to Obsessable’s “own or want, like or dislike” abilities (that you can see on my profile page or on your own should you sign up for an account). The big difference between the two sites is that Obsessable is editorially driven (and Obsessable isn’t gadget exclusive), whereas all of GDGT’s pages are built by members of the site and the majority of the editorial would seem to be piped in links from Engadget and Gizmodo, mixed in along community-driven discussions.
Interestingly, at launch, the majority of the members of the site who had pre-built content and discussions for GDGT were AOL/Weblogs, Inc. bloggers from Engadget, TUAW, and a few other AOL sites, and Gizmodo bloggers. That’s cool, and I would imagine that some sort of arrangement was made between GDGT, AOL, and Gawker to exchange links to Gizmodo and Engadget content on GDGT in exchange for participation from the staff of those sites. It’s a smart strategy to jump start the community, but, honestly, I’m skeptical of how many users will stick and volunteer to add their own gadgets to the database beyond simply adding the title of the gadget and a picture unless some sort of motivation is added (right now, there’s not even the motivation of your profile page actively linking to your site). I’m also skeptical of the difference in quality between the professionally-populated content and the crowd-sourced content (assuming they manage to get a crowd; they should, given how well known they both are and how well known Veronica is). Of course, once they do get that crowd, if it’s big enough, they’ll be dealing with two (good to have) problems: 1. Scaling the technology to support the traffic (they had several spots of down time at launch, so I would imagine they’re already looking for solutions for this). 2. Scaling an editorial staff to police the community edits / fight against spam.
In any case, best of luck to the GDGT team.
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The GDGT widget looks too much like an ad for electronics for sale on eBay. I’m not sure why it looks that way to me – did eBay use similar red/green/blue colors in an ad at one point?
And yes, when I see GDGT, I think “GIDGET.” Not a bad thing though – it sounds better to say out load “Check if there are any reviews on gidget” rather than “Check if there are any reviews on gadget,” which makes you sound like English is your 2nd language: “Machine: turn on. Check for review on gadget.”