First there was Blogger. Then there was the written word. No seriously. Blogger.com was a phenomenon. I'm not sure who's using it anymore.
Then there was Tumblr - a pretty sweet service until Yahoo made love to it, and then it disappeared into the sunset. Oh wait no, apparently its now owned by the fine folks at Automattic, the guys behind the ubiquitous WordPress.
I used the Blogger and Tumblr publishing systems for many years and they were really superb for that era.
Then came the usual suspects - annoying social media platforms like Facebook and the super annoying Titter. And like many millions of gullible fools, I migrated to these as well. Oooo shiny. Which gave rise to the likes of Instagram and TicTac and what not. And the world very quickly went down a rabbit hole that it may never recover from. Welcome to the attention economy.
And of course there's a hundred CMS platforms out there of various shapes and sizes - WordPress and Magento and home grown solutions and what not.
All these are boring fuddy duddy solutions.
Finally fast forward to the current generation of products and finally there's something amazing going on right now with products like Ghost etc.
PS: Additionally, there's various forum products, right from the days of bulletin boards to today's Discourse etc. But we are not comparing with forum sites since those have a different purpose in life.
So that brings me to MainCross.
A bold vision for the future
On one side we have the pure play social media companies - superb networks but which are essentially walled gardens. The content that's produced here is "UGC" ie User Generated Content, usually short and sometimes even character counted. I've been told that's its a thing, but what do I know.
On the other side we have superb publishing systems, but with no networking ability, on which reams of longer content is published - journals, publications, news sites, personal and professional blogs and so on. And thats PGC - Platform Generated Content.
And in the middle, the real "internet" just effed off to pluto and is still sulking there.
A large part of the internet has always been about content - content is getting richer and interactive, and there always will be the need for systems to manage content, produce, consume, edit, track and enable all the meta data around it, as well as present it in structured forms.
So that's where a Network CMS comes in - a content management and publishing system that has been built grounds up to enable diverse networks and their needs, and perhaps enable the true internet.
Diverse networks, with similar use cases
MainCross is a system that allows anyone to launch their own branded & customized network site or community in a few mins - distributed, interoperable using a common core, where each network is built, owned & monetized by its own operator with its own rules and ethos, and of course visual look and feel.
Distributed interoperable networks
Now what if we could hook up multiple network sites together and serve up a more equitable Internet, an internet made up of interconnected networks, rather than just interconnected servers serving up websites.
At most organizations, the intranet works like this - there's a thriving set of people rallying around a cause, using various systems and tools, within the organization. This is so common that we don't even think about this. Where's the equivalent on the Internet?
Why does the world have 1 Facebook as the super duper network site, rather than 1 million smaller, tribal, thriving network sites - in myriad hues and colors and with different purposes?
So that's our vision - let a million gardens bloom. And like bees, we can flit seamlessly between these gardens, sampling what we like along the way.
The Network CMS that we've invented may just allow a network of networks to be created - the true Internet.
