It's beautiful to sit back and watch unfold
I hope your week is off to a wonderful start. The last few days have been filled
with delightful conversations about this idea. Your responses to the last email
were fascinating. We share many wishes for this community, but each of you has
your own clever twists on how to turn those wishes into something real. I have
no doubt that we’ll do just that.
Your thoughts
I wanted to share some of the thoughtful replies you sent this week. These were
answers to the question, What would you most like to get out of a community like
this?
A deeper, meaningful connection with people, not just random statuses,
or thoughts thrown out, but interesting conversations where the
takeaways continue on with you for minutes, hours, or days after
you have walked away. I am tired of internet noise. I love when I
talk to my friends on the phone, this is because the conversation we
share plays on in my thoughts for a great deal of time after we have
hung-up the phone. One of my favorite activities to share with my
closest friends is sitting around a fire, the conversation and ideas
just flow, you learn things about your friends and you learn things
about yourself. It’s beautiful to sit back and watch unfold. —
Patty
I’d like this to help me think deeper, develop insight and wisdom
(instead of just collecting information like social media does now)
and understand more about myself, other people, and what makes the
world work. — Grant
I ask lots of questions (and enjoy answering them), so it would be
great to participate in a space that encouraged exchange like that --
pretty simple, that’s it :-) — Semil
A new name
Our undertaking now has a new name! Since the first blog post, a few people who
love the idea have mentioned that they didn’t love the name. The more I
listened, the more I agreed with them. Though Toyed With has some of the fun,
whimsy and embracing of new ideas that I was looking for, it feels temporary and
experimental, which is almost the opposite of my intentions. My hope is that
this community will last a long time, and that what we’re sharing with each
other, including our favorite things in the world, is meaningful and worthy of
our attention.
So, we came up with a name that hopefully captures the spirit of this project
much better, Uncommon in Common. I hope you love it. You can
follow @uncommon on Twitter right now and sometime soon, uncommon.cc will
be a thing (but not yet, trust me). Though I expect Uncommon will quickly
become the way we talk about this, we’ll use uncommonincommon dot com now and
then, too, because it’s quite possibly the best domain name in the world :)
Uncommon reads
Hunter Walker wrote a post earlier this year about what we see happen to online communities time after time. Semil mentioned it recently and if you’re interested in helping this new community take root and truly be uncommon, please
take the time to. I’d love to hear what it says to you.
I believe most social communication products - from Facebook to
Twitter to Path are designed in a way which causes us to all slowly
ruin the quality of our experience. Basically we say we love high
signal, low noise services but then proceed to bring the noise.
Your turn
Finally, a few things for you...
- Do you have too much great stuff to read, watch, and listen to and not
enough time, or do you wish you had better sources of high-quality content? - Do you have skills and time you’d like to contribute to this endeavor? If
you do, let me know. The focus at the moment is on web and mobile
development. If you happen to be a talented designer or know one, the sooner
the better :) - Keep this question in the back of your mind and I’ll ask about it next time:
What’s the favorite thing you’ve heard this week?
Until we have a place of our own, feel free to introduce yourself to any of the folks I mention here or browse the fine people @uncommon follows. The community and conversation have already started.