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.

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.

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.

Michael Arrington gets some stick again for criticizing Minti, a new parent community site, because it is a walled garden. Michael is a strong believer in edge content — system that scoop up and repurpose information from blogs using RSS…

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.

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.

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