As regular readers will know, there are few things I love more than a good list (see here, here, here, here, here and here). So, you can imagine my delight on discovering Listphile, an LA-based startup taking the humble art of list creation and showering it with Web 2.0 goodness.
Of course, we've seen online list makers before, however they've tended to be either geared towards personal 'to do' lists (e.g. Bla-Bla List, Remember The Milk, Ta-da, Tudu), limited in functionality (listography, List of Bests) or frankly just a bit scrappy (ListBums).
In contrast, Listphile is wholly collaborative, looks great and is chocked full of tasty 2.0 functionality including photo and video upload, digg-style voting, wiki-esque edit histories, RSS feeds, tags, comments and integration with Google Maps, enabling you to create an atlas view of your list.
In addition to the map view, lists can be displayed as thumbnail galleries and sorted by a range of criteria (alphabetically, by rank, by recently modified or by the owner's order).
The icing on the cake is that the whole site is shot through with a philosophy of openness, borne out by its use of OpenID, the Creative Commons license and the wonderful list of 'things Listphile is' on their about page (the top ten of which I've reproduced below as a good check-list for any company playing in the Web 2.0 space):
Listphile is...
1. Free
2. Open
3. Flexible
4. Powerful
5. Mashable
6. Shareable
7. Grassroots
8. Easy to use
9. Embeddable
10. Collaborative
The site's only been up and running since June so there are only a few hundred lists at the moment and not many votes contributing to those lists with rankings. However a recent mention on TechCrunch should see usage increase.
One bit of functionality which isn't yet available is the ability to take away lists as embeddable widgets (although I guess you could create your own using the RSS feeds). I therefore present, in a manual style, a list of my top five Listphile lists to whet your appetite:
1. Gifts for Geeks (it includes a life-size Yoda and a replica Space Shuttle Pumpkin Suit for heaven's sake)
2. Famous Left Handed People (there can't be that many lists which feature Jimi Hendrix, George Dubya and Einstein)
3. Open Surf Atlas (nicely showcases the Google Maps integration)
4. Nintendo Wii Virtual Console Games (an extensive list but needs some voting to sort the wheat from the chaff)
5. World Shark Attack Database (Cornish coast conspicuously absent...)
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Listphile delivers Lists 2.0
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4 comments:
Hi Dan, Steve from Listphile here. Thanks for the review. Looks like you quickly grokked what Listphile's about. The collaborative component ifs really important for us. Our dream is for Listphile to people to join up and create bodies of knowledge that otherwise would be very time consuming to do (not to mention slow).
One small point of clarification: Listphile launched late Monday night of this week, on September 10, 2007.
Thanks for the correction on launch date Steve - was confused by number 16 on your about page ('New to the world, as of June 2007') - is that when you set up shop rather than launched?
Hi Dan, we've been working on the app for quite some time. June is about the time we started getting serious about launching so you may find a few references from back then.
I just finished coding our widget system that will allow you to embed our lists in your blog or website. You can get the codes when you view a list on listphile.com. We'll be designing new features into the widget system based on how folks are using it, so if you try it let us know what you think.
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