How Much Social Networking Is Enough?

For me it started with MySpace. Then everyone jumped ship to Facebook. Then we signed up to Twitter. Professionals joined LinkedIn. Middle aged women found cake photos at Pintrest.

Every once in a while I think that Social Networking has had its day. Then another site come along. I wait for a few months. Then another. And another.

Just because I have an account at Facebook, doesn’t mean that I don’t want to show off photos of my cat on Flickr. Or check out the latest popular pics on Mlkshk. Or even make a Post on PJs.Cat.

The Merits of Positive Feedback

The like button 

The +1 button 

The press this button 

People love positive feedback. People love praise. People like cats.

That’s one reason why PJs.Cat is going to be great. Gamification is written into its design from day one. Below is a sneak preview of what I am working on at the moment. It’s not complete, but with the Star, Save and Follow icons, users have three different ways to give positive feedback; which I hope will help encourage users to contribute quality content to the site.

The design is not perfect but I am …. positive that you’ll like it.

Cool TLD Hacks

Most websites use normal TLDs like .com, .co.uk, or .org.

Legitimate. Normal. Boring. Some websites, like PJs.Cat (launch and patent pending) make use of the noble art of the TLD hack. Google for example owns Goo.gl (with .gl being the TLD for Greenland) and Youtu.be. Perhaps the most famous examples of this include del.icio.us and bit.ly.

You can even have boo.bs! The .cat TLD is under utilised, and the only site I have ever heard of that uses it is nyan.cat.

The Internet is full of cyber squatters, sitting on all the best .com websites, so using a good TLD hack is a great way to get a catchy, interesting, short and unique URL for your website.

If you want to make your own try tldhack.com, though it is not allways 100% accurate, as I found when I tried to register c.at and found there is a 3 character minimum for Austria’s .at domain.

So how did I feel when I finally registered PJs.Cat?

Meowtstanding

Site Lunch Possibilites

When I put the Beta testing version of my site online, I will need to recruit Beta testers, before going on to accumulate new users. Jeff Atwood announced the launch of Stack Overflow of his blog. Gabriel Weinberg announced the launch of DuckDuckGo in Hacker News. It looks like MLKSHK announced it’s launch from Typepad.

One thing is for sure, when PJs.Cat launches, you will hear it here first.

We are Biding our Time 'till the launch

In the mean time I’ve just created the PJs.Cat Twitter account, so why not follow?