Minti is a collaborative advice site for parenting. Members write articles on parenting-type stuff (example) and other members rate the content, and add comments and tags. While search is not entirely driven through tags, you can browse by clicking on them and they do a good job showing related tags for a given article.
There are good reasons not to mention Minti and push traffic to it - it’s actually not doing anything feature wise that’s new and it’s another walled garden of content.
But I am going to mention it because it is well designed and built and has good features. It also may be useful to people who have or are planning to have children. Also, I like to see niche content sites spring up that use web 2.0 ideas - these services will help the masses start to use and understand things like tagging, ajax, etc.
And writing about Minti also gives me an opportunity to talk about user generated data and who exactly owns it.
This is another “walled-garden” solution - meaning the founders did all of the easy web 2.0 stuff - ajax, tagging, comments, etc. - but couldn’t make the hard choices when it came to site architecture and fell back on old web 1.0 ways of doing things. In this case, the easy decision was forcing people to write the content at the Minti site instead of aggregating it from the many blogs and other websties with content on parenting already out there on the web.
And you have to read the content on the Minti, too. No RSS feeds.
Visitors can also read all of the reviews written by a particular user. This is a good start because they’ve effectively set up a blog-like area for each user where all of their articles on parenting are aggregated (and have the nice Minti search engine attached to the blog). But again, without an RSS feed and the ability to syndicate out the content, Minti is telling its users that Minti owns the content that they write, not them.
Bottom line - this isn’t revolutionary and if you aren’t a parent you won’t find anything useful there to inspire you. But Minti could be a good resource for parents and maybe they’ll add the better ways to get data into and out of the service over time. Minti, if you are listening, I’d be happy to enter into a discussion with you on how I think you could accomplish that.
Minti is based in Australia and launched on March 8, 2006. They have raised A$1.6 million in seed financing.
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So I’m a parent-to-be and I barely have enough time now to fit everything into my day. A newsvine for parents would be great, to be honest.
Hi Mike and thanks for the comments!
We certainly are listening and the site will be developing substantially over the coming weeks and months.
Like most early stage Beta’s, we launched with our basic feature set so we could get to market as fast as possible without leaving too much out. We have taken your advice regarding possible “edge content” contributions into serious consideration and would love to chat more with you about taking this further.
I will try to give an insight into what we have planned over the next few weeks/months…
• Friends linking - to allow subset user groups to develop (ala: MySpace/TagWorld).
• Groups – choice for members to be automatically assigned to groups based on age of their children. Create your own groups or join existing groups with a one-click introduction.
• RSS feeds enabled – by member / tags / topic
• People able to seed advice located on other sites (ala: Digg)
• Improved vote tracking (so a member can see all votes cast and revisit where appropriate)
• Active members online features with live chat
On user content every user is able to review/edit anything they write quite easily through their user account - we are actively looking at how copyright may be better “shared” but for now we don’t have an easy solution which will keep copy-cat competitors from scraping our whole site (not much there yet but hopefully there will be! )
We appreciate your comments and review. We have been keen readers of TechCrunch for a long time now.
Clay and Matt
Minti Co-founders
I totally agree with Mike, there is no way I (a parent) would give up my copyright in this age.
Also: I think one of the worst ways you can spend your time as a parent is to get involved in parenting communities were you talk with other parents about parenting. It makes you feel parenting is a set of problems that requires a certain skill. It makes you angry when you see people advocating methods you do not agree with. The battles are always the same (breast vs formula, cry-it-out vs in-your-bed, spanking vs time-out vs hugging etc.). The advice is often overly simplistic: every parent thinks that the things that go well with their child go well because of them, and the things that don’t go well don’t go well despite of them.
I created an RSS feed of their Most Visited Articles page using Feed43. You can view the feed here - http://feed43.com/4850875557157435.xml
Let me know if you find any issues with it.
I agree with Helena to some extent. As a the parent of a 1 year old, I know my wife and I struggled with the abundance of parenting opinions and the debates (shouting matches) that result. Local mom’s groups have the same issues, yet they are still extremely popular. When you have that social connection, the dynamic changes. So, if you can re-create that environment on a larger scale where it’s a true social networking thing, and not just another forum, I think you can have some success. If people get to know one another you find the other parents that believe in the same style of parenting and get support and advice from within this group. It sounds like the team has identified this with the group features mentioned in the earlier comment.
“it’s actually not doing anything feature wise that’s new”, could also be extended to their brand, which is uncomfortably similar to hello design’s logo -
http://www.hellodesign.com/
Looks like a lack of originality all around.
Not yet ready for prime time. This reminds me of the “public beta” fad from a few years ago where inferior products were rushed to market to satisfy metrics other than making money.
A Digg-like sites for parents would be useful, though.
Lost in our desire to find ways to sell to Google for millions is the fact that the explosion of Web 2.0 services is adding so much richness to our lives.
Minti is just an example of the sort of thing that can take things like message boards and community 1.0 and make it into something more useful and usable.
I agree with Mike’s criticisms, but I think that the true benefit of niche Web 2.0 (Niche 2.0?) is the way it will be so fragmented. I call that targeting. And maybe something like Minti won’t result in a big buyout for Clay and Matt, but the world will be better for their having introduced this concept.
Creative Web 2.0 mixing-and-matching has the possibility of creating lots of interesting niche sites. With an hour or two stolen here and there I’ve put up a collaboratively-edited religion blogwatch called QuakerQuaker.org (forget A$1.6 million, I got part of a $500 grant to cover a few month’s server time!). Yeah, it’s walled and yes, Google might come out with something automated that might blow it away, but in the meantime this walled niche is creating an fantastic community of a few hundred people who get to know each other through the site. I suspect a lot of these bloggers will become important writers five-to-ten years down the line (important to our larger denominational niche at least!).
That we can communicate like this with no money and barely any resources is a testament to the power of Web 2.0 to knit content together–this is RSS feeds on top of RSS feeds (here’s the Powered by listing). Ajax is fine and cool, but content-mixing is what builds a community, whether it’s a hundred people or a million. People want to communicate. Del.icio.us and Feedburner and Feedblitz, etc., etc., let us do that.
I wonder how others are using all the cool online toys to put together outwardly-simple niche sites?
(This feels maybe to self-promoting so delete my commment if you like, but I think my site is further proof of your point.)
As an alternative example of a community-powered site that’s not a ‘walled garden’ like Minti, I’ve tried to adopt web 2.0 concepts while building a site for home improvement hobbyists:
http://www.houseblogs.net
We certainly don’t have all the features (yet) of Minti, but I haven’t spent $1.9 million either. (More like $190, including a year’s hosting fees.) This stuffs getting very easy to build by just mashing up open source scripts and a few web services.
I agree with your suggestion that niche web 2.0 sites will explode with a thousand variations. They just keep getting easier to build.
- Aaron, Houseblogs.net editor
I’m not too keen on this idea, probably because I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in the widsom of the crowds when it comes to parenting. The reason that the crowd loves expert parenting books is because, for the most part, they don’t really know what they are doing.
Its like using Google to search for recipes - the most popular matches are easy but average. They don’t require people to move outside of their comfort zone, but they are popular because they are better than prepackaged food or what you could make by yourself. Many of the best recipes are quite challenging and require above average skills and tools. People looking for easy recipes would under-rate these recipes because they rank recipes on very different criteria than what I am looking for.
Ranking something answers the question, “To what degree does this thing exceed my expectations?” But when taken in aggregate, its highly dependent on the average level of expectation of the rankers, and their average ability to perceive the value of what they are ranking. I think that with parenting, as with food, neither of these is very high.
Hi Clay and Matt
Its good to see some more Australians in the mix, and one with funding, even more impressive.
Im no VC but 1.5million seems like an awful lot of money to spend on such a niche 2.0 site. What do you see as your profit model?
As an avid follower of new AJAX chat techs I noticed you mention you will be incorporating chat into your site. How do you plan on implementing the chat, AJAX, Java, Flash? Will it be a proprietry or purchased.
And to the person who commented on the unoriginality of thier logo: I find that rather amusing comment considering all the Web2.0 logo comparisions going on at the moment. http://www.fontshop.com/fontfe.....-logos.cfm. It really doesnt look like ANY 2.0 site has a notably innovative logo.
Mike - please allow us one more post to respond
Thanks for all the comments people, we listen to them all and will stay focussed on making the experience for our members as good as it can be.
A few quick points of clarification:
1. Helena – We believe there are millions of parents online that are open to learning from other parents. In part this is demonstrated through so many parents around the world being part of Mothers Groups.
2. Ben - We have never seen the Hello Design logo before despite extensive searching, and we are certainly not trying to pass off as Hello Design.
3. Bill - thanks for the feed link and creation - very much appreciated.
4. To those mentioning money - we raised AUS$1.5m not $1.9m and this is our current “funding” requirements for the foreseeable future. It is “raised” but it is most certainly not all spent. We plan to be around quite a bit longer than launch on our funding.
5. Thomas - we have yet to decide on the implementation vehicle for chat, feel free to get in touch.
Everyone else - positive or negative we take it all in and will strive to get better.
Clay and Matt
I hate to rain on anybody’s parade, but this isn’t the first website of it’s kind by any means. There are already dozens of niche web 2.0 sites out there.
We launched families.com about 6 months ago and have been doing the “niche web 2.0″ thing the whole time.
I think minti’s got some good ideas (their slashdot-like commenting system is one of the better approaches that I’ve seen), but, well, the “web 2.0″ aspects aren’t all that important.
User-generated content has been a staple of community sites since the beginning.
Tags, ratings, RSS feeds, etc. are standard features that just about every site employs these days.
So, good luck to the Minti folks, but remember: in community sites, community always comes first.
FlyInside.com is another Niche Web 2.0 service, providing the ability for real estate agents to create free virtual tours. Using the service is absolutely free, users can create as many virtual tours as they want, they can add descriptions, organize their photos, add music, and publish their tours to share with the world and other users.
The site uses open source MySQL, PHP, AJAX, and Flash. There are a few upgrades available for money, and users can buy generated leads for $1 apiece. Check it out http://www.FlyInside.com
“I totally agree with Mike, there is no way I (a parent) would give up my copyright in this age.”
They aren’t taking your copyright Helena, this is how all of the user review sites work. They are giving themselves a full license to use what you write on their site in any way they want. You are still free to go write that on your own blog or do whatever you want with it.
Mike, I challenge you to find all that content you claim exists on blogs. You claimed Riffs was a bad idea since there exists already lots of review content on blogs, yet when I search around, there really is not (though Riffs IS a bad idea for other reasons). Most blog content is actually pretty crappy. There are a few good blogs, like this one, but for the most part, I’d say aggregating blog content isn’t something required for a site like this. It might help, but claiming anything that doesn’t incorporate blogs is going to fail is just plain silly.
Also, any business model around aggregating provided content, especially if you expect people to use a microformat, is going to be very challenging.
Spelling Mistake Here:
In this case, the easy decision was forcing people to write the content at the Minti site instead of aggregating it from the many blogs and other [websites] websties with content on parenting already out there on the web.
It’s been 8 months since we launched and we have added the functionality for members to claim their external blog and keep their content on their own site whilst also getting something published and hopefully some back traffic from Minti.
Take a quick look at the site and you will see there are a huge number of new features since this review was done and the vast majority of suggestions/comments above were added to within a few months of launch (eg RSS feeds, edge content, etc)
We are happy to aggregate content but licensing deals for non-consumer generated content would actually detract from the vision of the site. It’s all about parents helping others not about management cutting deals to show “more of the same” to parents.
It’s notable that none of these concerns have been highlighted in the now-imfamous post on Maya’s Mom launching… this blog is Mike’s “walled garden” to do as he likes
Much love to him for being up front about it just as we are.
I love the external blog feed feature at Minti. I am thrilled that Minti Members can read my posts right there at Minti.
The other major strength at Minti (one of many) is that the parent to parent idea is exactly that. All parents. Not just moms. I love getting the fathers thoughts and input. Getting the dads involved is not happening at sites like Maya’s Mom.
My wife and I just launched the site http://www.efamily.com this week. We are young family and don’t have a tremendous budget to market the site. Any help you can provide in getting the word out would be great. Let’s tip the world towards goodness and truth.
I Already use this site and its Fantastic, never have i met a more concerned bunch of parents in my life. Great Job