Mixx.com’s biggest competitor… Web 2.0 is evolving…

Posted on June 24, 2008
Filed Under web 2.0 news |

Eric Karjaluoto, Eric Shelkie from Vancouver Canada have recently launched a startup that reminds me a bit Mixx.com. It’s called Makefive and it’s a project that hasn’t received much media coveraged and I don’t know really why. Fortunately guys, businesshackers dot com is always willing to help startups succeed and we have an almost 2,5 years old track. Ok, let’s got straight to the point.

MakeFive is a website that allows people to connect through top-five lists. In it users can start topics of any nature and then share their opinions. This can be useful for finding new restaurants, noting favorite movies, debating topical issues, and a raft of other possibilities. Active members earn points for their activity, which increases their authority in the community.

The founders are planning to integrate a voting/rating system which can be inspired by the one applied Digg.com. The site is expected to remain free to use and the authors do not seem to be particularly interested in finding investors. What seems vital is to exceed what businesshackers.com calls critical mass, which is the minimum number of users that make a startup succeed.

That’s how Eric explains how it all started. “In the spring of 2007, we started to fiddle with social networking. We connected with some old friends got “poked a couple times, but after a little while, we wondered “What’s the point?”. We talk to our friends all the time, and if we lost touch with someone, it was for a reason. We had to ask why this “networking” thing had so little to do with meeting new people.
We reminded ourselves that although some friendships are due to circumstance, most good ones allow us to share ideas with like-minds. We started to noodle with the idea of exchanging ideas and forming connections with people who had similar interests. Soon enough, we were up to our eyeballs in ideas and prototypes for an online environment entirely built around conversation and debate“.