Stand for your opinions at Standpoint

01Feb06

Standpoint

Pete Cashmore writes a good post on Standpoint, which was launched just a couple of days ago.
Standpoint allows you to tag something you believe in, and then link to other people’s beliefs that help you build your case. For example some of the cases on the homepage that I see at the moment are…

Personally I do not see myself using Standpoint, however I have used 43things as I found it useful for posting goals, and finding other goals that I should be striving for. Both Standpoint and 43things use similar technology, however do not appear to be trying to achieve the same outcome, so it is hard to compare them as similar businesses.

What I like about Standpoint…

  • The branding – like the logo and colour etc.
  • The simplicity of the site design.
  • The simplicity of how to use and contribute to the site.

What concerns me about Standpoint…

  • Is the knowledge they are targetting to broad… ie: anything you want to write about you can.
  • There seems to be no depth to people’s beliefs. When building a case you can not type out a full document on your opinion. You only seem to be able to write a line about your belief and then link to other beliefs that are equaly laking in information. For example see the belief “God does not exist“… where does it explain the reasoning behind this belief?

Anyway – good luck to the team at Standpoint. I am sure their are millions of opinionated people out there willing to give it a shot ;)

Would love to hear from anyone that has used Standpoint, and/or also the founders if they are available for comment.

Note: Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted a small article on Standpoint here.

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One Response to “Stand for your opinions at Standpoint”  

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  1. 1 Gentry Underwood on February 2, 2006 said:

    Hey Clay — thanks for the review and the encouragement. We’ve been very excited by the number of people who have already started using Standpoint. Our users teach us so much — both about the site and about what they believe.

    I wanted to clarify one piece of the design: our hope is not for shallow, brief reasons why people believe what they do (at the cost of depth), but rather to encourage them to make that case with other claims. We believe that every argument for a belief is really a set of other beliefs.

    Every time you take a stand you can back it up with (among other things) individual claims and arguments (claim AND claim AND …). Each of those claims can in turn be backed up, until you’ve made your case in a sort of outline form that is easy for others to interact with and build onto.

    This concept is central to our ‘value add’, because in the long run we believe that it is these relationships that are particularly interesting and useful for learning and discourse. We hope to be rolling out some powerful tools for building and visualizing these relationships in the near future.

    -gentry

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