Refurber is a new social and reference website for the Do-It-Yourself crowd from Perth, Western Australia based Vibe Capital, makers of parenting site Minti.
On Refurber, users are able to share advice on a wide range of home improvement related topics. Content throughout the site is user generated with articles being tagged, rated and commented on by the greater community to encourage integrity and relevancy in the information created.
It’s a decent resource if DIY is your thing and the layout is well thought out and accessible.
The backend is the same as Minti; the “vibEngine” API powers both sites. The vibEngine platform is being licensed to other vertical sites in a move that sees Vibe evolve from site creator to solutions provide. The first licensed partner of vibEngine is the niche city focused site BuildingInLondon.com with further sites running vibEngine launching in the coming months.
We should name this period of the Social Web the DIGG era – it seems these concepts are appearing every week
The particular Website has a very good idea, but there would have to be a real incentive for knowledgeable people to constantly contribute.
It is one thing to be a student with lots of free time to contribute to social media – but homeowners and condo owners usually have jobs and families.
Retirees just are not that Web savy – YET – and are probably still reading DIY magazines and books.
The web 2.0 tagging phenomenon is changing the way people aer sharing experience and generating elephantine amount of info every day.
Yawn….
Hi,
This is a really neat site. Clean graphics, attractive template and avatars. It appears to be user-friendly with Q&A similar to Yahoo, but one can refine the searches and there’s a (star?) ranking system once participants become more pro-actively involved in the site.
Regards,
Coral
and buildinginlondon.com is just _buzzing_ with activity..
22 hours schmitzy New Answer: Decking or paving, I need to make a quick decision.
3 days muriel Welcome New Member: muriel
4 days stewywilson Welcome New Member: stewywilson
5 days blueberrygirl New Answer: Decking or paving, I need to make a quick decision.
5 days nickcurtis Welcome New Member: nickcurtis
5 days nick Welcome New Member: nick
5 days acjarvis Welcome New Member: acjarvis
10 days System New Group: Borough – Hendon
10 days Isabelle Member Blog: Article on Building in London
Honestly these web2.0 sites are as easy to throw up now as geocities pages used to be in the 90s.
“The vibEngine platform is being licensed to other vertical sites in a move that sees Vibe evolve from site creator to solutions provide.”
hmmm… they should stick to being a “site creator.”
without too much work, you can just modify wordpress with thousands of already built plug-ins to create this site.
and wordpress is FREE!
Yawn… this is really unworthy of techcrunch. They launched minti which has gained next to zero traction and now they launch another site
There must have been a 100 better stories to cover?
Yeah, the technology merely enables these kinds of sites, but there is a perception that the technology is the hurdle. It’s not: it managing the content, and the people who create that content, is what can eat up a lot of the time and effort. And if the content is mostly user created and there is not a detailed editing cycle, then this is just a new skin on web forums, where people have been helping each other, creating their own little fiefdoms, and generating user-sourced content for years.
I do like the much simpler and more “free-for-all” approach of AskSolvers.com . Here is an example of the kind of Q&A DIY topics it has. http://asksolve...viewasks/?go=79 It seems to be a little rough around the edges though, since it just got released not too long ago.
This is funny. So if we skin our Q&A site to cover a new “niche” we’ll be techcrunch worthy now?
Back in the day, people referred to a set of sites on the same exact platform, from the same company, as spam – why can’t you cover the same set of topics on one site? The parents who are on minti CAN’T possibly be interested in home improvement? Bullsh!t
People who have kids – are also more likely to own their own home. If the minto folks had done their homework, they’d know this. The thing that makes a community worthwhile is the network effect – by fragmenting their potential market across multiple sites, they’re also damaging their chances of long term success.
I do like the much simpler and more “free-for-all” approach of AskSolvers.com . Here is an example of the kind of Q&A DIY topics it has. http://asksolve...viewasks/?go=79 It seems to be a little rough around the edges though, since it just got released not too long ago.
I’m still a big fan of http://diynetwork.com/ . they cover loads of topics in both text and video.
I was kind of expecting more of an Instructables style rather than Q & A, but I still think it’s pretty nice.
And seeing how there are on average 6 stories on TC per day of the last year, you’d think folks might just skip a story rather than take the time to post negative comments about the subject choice, but different strokes…
This is not worthy of TechCrunch coverage. It would have to be named Refurbr to achieve TechCrunch worthiness. Any Web 2.0 startup that doesn’t drop the “e” is obviously not run by true Web 2.0 visionaries.
http://seminar7...t-yourself.html
Again, the negativity spewing forth from this site amazes me. Constructive criticism I understand, regardless of how ruthless, but negativity in order to big-note oneself is a little childish, and even bordering on the pathetic don’t you think?
As Duncan says, “It’s a decent resource if DIY is your thing and the layout is well thought out and accessible.” DIY is not my thing, but even as a pleb I can see the potential of the site and the need that has brought it about.
Justin – How long has the site been live? And how much traffic do you expect it to have in this amount of time? This is not Guy Kawasaki putting forth his latest social experiment here and capturing the immediate attention of every coat-tailer worldwide. Are you going to complain every time a small company releases a new site and doesn’t make the 100 million user mark? I guess I’ll be responding to your inconsiderate comments fairly frequently then. Give the guys a go. You could try commenting on their lack of users a month after launch, but I guess then you wouldn’t get the attention you crave would you…
Craig Hughes – Yes it did work. I did go and check out your site. And if that’s all you set out to achieve good for you. Hope you go places. If not, snap out of it and get of the bandwagon. Stupid, negative comments straight after a post demonstrate nothing but search engine scamming and blog spamming. If your site had actually been worth the look, the negative feelings I would have taken with me when evaluating it would have kept me away anyway.
And Jeremy – At least you thought about it a little. Pity you didn’t do your homework and just ended up looking silly. It’s not Minto. It’s Minti.
“The thing that makes a community worthwhile is the network effect – by fragmenting their potential market across multiple sites, they’re also damaging their chances of long term success”???. Maybe you should have a look at the crossover between MySpace and Flickr, or even Facebook and MySpace. When was the last time you went to a DIY site to ask for parenting advice, or to a parenting site to ask for DIY advice? Maybe in doing this the “Minto” guys are not “fragmenting their potential market”, but tapping into another part of it…
btw. Nice review. Short, to the point, and offering just enough to invite interest. Sorry I forgot to mention that in my haste.
Sounds like the niche` is big enough / diy seems the 800lb gorilla
– Also it seems / this site doesn’t compete
>>>When was the last time you went to a DIY site to ask for parenting advice, or to a parenting site to ask for DIY advice? Maybe in doing this the “Minto” guys are not “fragmenting their potential market”, but tapping into another part of it…
OMFG please. MySpace *has* lots of groups about this kind of stuff. As also mentioned, instructables does this well to. What is it these guys “solved” by reskinning & retargeting a different niche?
Nothing their last 2 products *didn’t* already solve. Period. Is there a restriction on what questions you can ask on minti? And yep, I misspelled – fuck me, but I don’t use a spell check when I post a comment.
Seriously, if you CAN’T post remodeling Q’s on minti, this makes sense. BUT, that’s simply not the case – you can. They launched a 2nd product for extra buzz, not for consumer / user benefit.
First of all thanks to Duncan and the TC team for the review, much appreciated.
We are very excited with the potential of Refurber as it serves an extremely large market that has not (to date) received the attention it deserves.
Home improvers are not all old men. Those people who read this blog and actually run a social network which is not targetted at the youth market will understand just how interesting this Web 2.0 technology has become for all age groups.
For those who feel Minti has failed to scale, we are very happy with our continued growth on traffic, but more so with the fact that we now have over 4,500 parenting articles on the site generated by concerned parents. Thousands of members have found solutions to the daily challenges of parenting by coming to Minti and they often return to enjoy participating in the community. Sometimes success is not measured only in traffic stats and not every Web 2.0 company has a YouTube Alexa chart. Wikipedia certainly would have been considered a dud after 15 months of operation if you only looked at the traffic stats.
For those who believe this type of site is easy to build and launch perhaps you would be interested in some of the more innovative behind the scenes technology that supports our ranked-advice communities:
1. members earn rank and this gives weighting to their subsequent contributions – the systems automatically determines which participants are “more trusted” than others according to the opinions of the community and this influences the ranking and results accross the site
2. members automatically become administrators and then self-manage the site once they reach a pre-determined ranking – the site is thus fully user controlled and you may be interested to know we have no full-time staff supporting Minti despite its considerable growth since launch
3. blogs do not provide reference information – the information on them fades from view over time. Our technology brings a unique and common reference point to the community in the form of reference/advice articles, there are few other vertical offering which have done this in more than one market.
4. we have tags, RSS feeds, blog claiming, friends features, user generated groups, private or public photo storage and many other features merged together in a style which has been driven by an active community. This is the key differentiator of the vibEngine from other software solutions, we run a live URL and have dealt with many of the challenges of an open user-generated community in advance of a new licensee having to face these issues.
Building in London is not our site and they have not commenced any active promotions as yet, so I really don’t believe it is reasonable to judge our offering on the activity there.
To those who responded positively to the design and features we thank you from the bottom of our hearts – it is a real pleasure to get such feedback.
All the best
Clay, Matt and Rachel – from Vibe Capital
How does Refurber differentiate itself from other pre-existing DYI social networking sites like Curbly.com? Curbly has a thriving community and has been around a lot longer.
Jus,
Good question.
Curbly seems to have a broader focus, for example this article on 10 uses for used coffee grounds… http://www.curb...-Coffee-Grounds
Refurber is specifically home improvement focused.
Without putting a lot of thought into our differences I would also suggest that it is easier to find quality advice on Refurber (once we increase the number of articles) as each article is rated and so is the author.
Kindest Regards
Clay
Refurber Co-Founder
on the topic of DIY, here’s a great free tool with a focus on ease of use.
http://www.floorplanner.com
Have been using it to plan my new home.
I agree that it is stupid, negative comments straight after a post demonstrate nothing but search engine scamming and blog spamming. If your site had actually been worth the look, the negative feelings I would have taken with me when evaluating it would have kept me away anyway.