1.  Why sharing ideas that matter, matters

We built Scoop.it to make it easy and rewarding to share ideas that matter.

Ideas matter: they make all of us, individuals, businesses and societies, progress. Sharing ideas is equally important as creating them: it honors the creators; it enriches the recipients; and it also benefits the “passers”, who enhance their reputation through propagation of wisdom.

Why are we here?

For a long while, the Scoop.it team has had a vision that fostering ideas, molding existing content into more valuable forms, and sharing knowledge with their communities of interest is what our platform can do best. Recently, after many conversations and interactions with our community, we realized that these values and behaviors were being adopted by more and more users across the platform. As a team, we immediately resonated with these users and we’re excited to be seeing our vision become more and more concrete as time passes.

Be prepared, and don’t say you haven’t been warned. Our very own Guillaume Decugis will be speaking at Techweek Chicago 2013 about his experience as an entrepreneur and “Building Startups to Scale and Success from Any Market.” If you’re attending Techweek, be sure to check out Guillaume’s presentation on Saturday, June 29, at 3:30 PM CDT.

Some of you have asked, “How do we decide on making changes on Scoop.it?” We felt that this is an interesting opportunity to share the answer openly.

First, let me start by saying that it’s a process that has evolved to become much more complex now that millions are using Scoop.it every week. In the beginning, we were able to let our vision and intiution guide us, but now we have a responsibility to you, the Scoop.it community, who have decided to use this service as your content curation hub on a daily basis.

Sometimes decisions are easy: when you asked for curated newsletter capability on our feedback forum, it was just a matter of planning this together with the right resources and partner. It can take some time (bear with us…) but the decisions are simple. Sometimes,  it’s a question of vision: we have strong values and a vision for what we feel content curation and the interest graph should stand for, and that of course. continues to guide us just like we recently experimented by launching Read.it.

At the UX (user experience) level though, this can be more difficult: not so much for the inspiration and the big ideas but for the little details that can have a big impact. Should this button be at the top or the bottom? Left or right? Should we give users one main option and a bunch of secondary ones or should we highlight the three that are the used most often? Did we make that feature visible enough? Or is it too prominently displayed and annoying? A lot of these questions don’t have good or bad answers you can easily guess: you have to try out to find out.