Joshua Schachter, founder of the world-changing social networking service Delicious, late last night quietly unveiled his newest work. It’s called Jig and it’s a site for posting your needs and getting responses from other users.
In many ways “what do you need” is the most basic of questions for a tool to ask a human. Jig applies the best practices of contemporary lightweight social networks to the problem of people filling each others’ needs online. It’s not fully baked yet, but it’s got a team filled with rockstars, a beguiling simplicity to it and it may very well unfold into a compelling service to use. I began testing the service a few months ago but news about it unfolded publicly last night on Techmeme.
How does Jig look so far? Well, it’s visually much stronger than Delicious ever was. The user experience is pretty good. The URL structure is clean and predictable, something that makes fabulous things possible over on Delicious.
There are no RSS feeds anywhere, but hopefully that will change. Categorization of questions appears unclear to a number of early users. Network effects remain to be seen but the public nature of the posts seems to lead to a good number of responses. There is a clear need for spam control and moderation, already.
Why use Jig when you’ve already got Twitter or Facebook on one end of the spectrum and Quora on the other? I think there may prove something uniquely helpful in having the specific need of needs that need filling served on a stand-alone site dedicated to that. I think that’s the intention behind Jig.
Will people come back to it regularly? That’s the biggest question.
Simple in the Front, Brainy Behind the Scenes
For those unfamiliar, Schachter’s big win came from Delicious, a service that let people put their Web bookmarks online, instead of tying them to a single browser on their computer. The user categorization, aggregate discovery and network effects of that service were appreciated by far too few people – especially Yahoo, the company that acquired then neglected it. I love it and still use the heck out of it today. It’s now owned by the team that co-founded YouTube, who bought it this year from Yahoo.
Schachter isn’t the only big name behind Jig, though. Designer Drew Olbrich came from OnLive and did animation for Batman and Shrek movies. Lawrence Kesteloot came from OnLine too. Developer Samuel Clay came from DocumentCloud, the highly respected tools building organization supported by leading news organizations old and new. Nick Nguyen hails from Mozilla and Delicious. Perhaps the next-best known after Schacter is Paul Rademacher, famous for creating HousingMaps.com, the Web’s first great mashup.
Not a team to trifle with. We’ll see how the site takes shape and how often people come back to the site.
