It’s been a heads-down ride so far at mycirQle, which we recently evolved to Delve, and I’ve been generally struggling to invest the time in tending to this piece of turf. But as I start to have a bit more time to think, I realize I’ve missed this, and I’m looking forward to posting a bit more frequently here. I’ll start with a letter I wrote this weekend to our mycirQle readers about our shift to Delve:
Almost exactly a year ago, a simple idea went live. It was an energy news portal called You and Your Energy built to test the idea that in today’s news landscape, thoughtfully curating news around a particular topic had a place. Soon after, we launched mycirQle, a far more ambitious product built largely from scratch. We curated news around three massive verticals with original sets of categories and tags for each with the ability to personalize your own feed based on the same metadata.
Tomorrow, mycirQle will go dark. It’ll be because a good idea became a better idea, because we realized that good curation didn’t need to be hosted at a single place. Instead, curation is contextual – it depends on who does the curating and who the audience is. In fact, many of us are curators. We care deeply about certain topics and we dive into them, finding news stories and blog posts, assembling newsletters and amassing followers. We email them to friends, family, colleagues, we tweet, we post on Facebook.
Over the past few months, we’ve come to realize that our role was not in doing all the curation but rather in enabling curation. We found via mycirQle that good stories help us understand big problems – problems that we build organizations to solve. News has an important role to play in helping us break down these problems – our enormously complex and inefficient health care system, our broad disparities in educational outcomes, our terribly inefficient, outdated electricity grid – and by engaging with stories about these problems, we ask better questions and we create better solutions.
We’re now shifting our attention towards building Delve, a tool to enable better curation within organizations. We’ve begun testing a very early version of it with a handful of clients, and we expect to launch it publicly early this summer. If you’d like to keep up with our progress on Delve, either reply to this email or drop your email at delvenews.com.
mycirQle helped us better understand how news is organized and shared, the breadth and diversity of perspectives online, and how to build and market a news product. As much as we learned from our own mistakes, we are deeply grateful to you for being our early adopters – for signing up and playing with the various iterations of our site, for sending us your thoughts, and for sharing us with your friends and colleagues.
Thank you for joining us on this adventure, and we look forward to showing you what’s next.
deep thoughts 