Collective Detective Blog Archives

Identifying with Internet Inspiration

I’m chronicling the development of Collectivus because I appreciate it when others share their stories and I wanted to contribute as well. With now ten years in the ‘Net biz, I have benefited from the advice and learned from the successes, failures, and online adventures of others. As developers, we search for how-tos when we get stuck; as entrepreneurs, we look for advice, tips, and lessons to apply to our own ventures; as designers, we look for new techniques, inspirations, and trends (both on their way in and out) to be aware of. And so on. The world moves at Internet speed because we can share and process information so quickly. Many times an article or helpful post or comment on sites both large and small have helped or inspired me. These influences are baking themselves into Collectivus and all projects I have a hand in — oh, and sometimes people are just curious how a project came to be.

I had seen something similar a few years ago. Ryan Carson and team at Carsonified ran a blog called “Bare Naked App.” It detailed the building of an app called “Amigo” in 2006. I remember reading through it at the time and thinking how refreshing it was to see what a team was going through in detail, while building and launching an app like that. That’s something the Carsonified crew continues to do today and I see a few other projects sharing their stories as they build new businesses. That’s awesome.

Interesting side note: I met Ryan in person at FoWA in Miami this year, but embarrassingly I didn’t connect the “Bare Naked App” project to him until I started thinking about writing this post. D’oh!

So why not spell out the entirety of the Collectivus game plan right now? Hopefully, there’s an air of mystery, anticipation and interest that will develop over time. Publishing all the wireframes, mocks, user stories, descriptions, and other information all at once isn’t a good strategy for building awareness and interest. Besides, I’m not sure exactly what will happen next either. Details change, sometimes daily. Not in a “directionless” kind of way, in an iterative and adaptive kind of way. The plan is to continue to share information as we can as it happens.

Whether you’re reading it hot off the “post” button or part of an archive in the future after Collectivus launched and you’ve became curious where it came from, we hope you find these posts interesting and maybe useful.

Thanks for reading!

The Making of Collectivus

My development experience has been that collaboration, iteration, and communication lead to better products. To that, we’re going to chronicle a lot of the happenings and progress of Collectivus, with some flashbacks thrown in for color.

Quick back story: the Collectivus name was first used as a meta-blog talking about many “hive mind” related topics. I ran from 2003 to early 2005 (I think). It was also an effort to diversify the interests of the site beyond the online mysteries and applying collective brainpower to other subjects.