86 percent of Internet users don't create content

June 25, 2013 - Potluck Is A New Link-Sharing Service For The Internet’s “Lurkers” Who Don’t Tweet Or Blog

If, according to the Internet’s 1 percent rule, only a small minority will activity participate in content creation (as with Branch), then think of Potluck as the service that appeals to the larger majority of so-called “lurkers.”

Potluck is essentially a link-sharing network built on top of a users’ social connections from Twitter, Facebook and Gmail. But unlike many of today’s social networks, including both Facebook and Twitter as well as Branch, the focus is not on having users craft an online persona, but rather on the content being shared.

“Potluck takes the performance out of sharing by making it more personal and less stressful.”

He says that on most social networks today, there are pressures to produce “double-digit likes, original witticisms, breathtaking images,” and by emphasizing the content instead of the people sharing that content, the hope is that Potluck will be able to build a sharing service where the first thing that’s noticed is not the who, but the what.

“Eighty-six percent of the Internet has not written a tweet or a blog post before, and doesn’t really want to,” Miller explains, citing data from Pew Research.

“The whole reason we took the time to even focus on Potluck, is because we really do want to empower the people who are not having conversations to have conversations.”

The launch comes at a time when the most popular social networks, like Facebook, Instagram or even Snapchat, are all based on a “friend graph” that replicates your address book in the cloud, so to speak. All these services are about connecting you with people you already know.

Miller, meanwhile, says there’s some nostalgia for the time when the Internet was able to connect you with people you may want to know – like you once found via old comments sections, Internet forums, BBS, or elsewhere.

“I, and none of my friends, have ever known the Internet as a place for anyone but the people we know,” says Miller. “It’s inevitable that on a network of billions of people, there’s an opportunity to connect you with people you might know or should know.”

Plus, he adds, “the next big social network is going to be one that offers you a very unique network that you can’t find elsewhere.” That is, it will build something beyond the social graph everyone is spinning off of today.

Medium.com - Meet Potluck, a new product from Obvious-backed Branch

Medium.com - The Liquidity of Ideas

I publish on Twitter because of my Followers. I publish on Facebook because of my Friends. I publish on Hacker News because of the community. I am publishing here – instead of on my own blog – because Evan Williams, Scott Heiferman, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Anil Dash, and David Galbraith are here too. Whatever comes next will offer a compelling, differentiated audience.

While interning for Senator Feinstein, in Washington D.C., I read Politico religiously. But I found myself without a medium to express my thoughts about what I read. The comment sections were chaotic, Facebook is for party photos, I didn’t have Twitter (even today, my Followers care about tech), Forums are archaic, and email is a todo list.

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