9rules - The best content from the independent web.

There is a saying about eating your own dog food and at 9rules we get to experience that everyday because of how we participate on the site. Hearing the suggestions that people give on improving the site goes a long way in helping us get to where we want to go, but using the site ourselves helps us even more. When Ali launched we were mighty proud of what we accomplished with it. We felt we put ourselves in a very good position and made 9rules a better place, which seems to be backed up by the amount of people participating on it.

But after a month of use, we started to see the holes in our ship and when it comes to us that usually means an overhaul of how we do things. Admittedly it would probably be easier to just fix up the bugs (we do that as well) and do small increments that improve the site, but we seem to get caught up in fixing things and implementing cooler stuff because we want to use them ourselves. And if Mike sees a better way he can design something then I can tell you there is no stopping him and once Tyme gets a hold of a site you can guarantee there will be a Top 100 list of improvements to be done.

That brings me to the next version of 9rules which is currently in development. I can’t tell you how excited I am to use the stuff we are developing over what we presently have. Don’t get me wrong, I love the 9rules that you see now, but I really am addicted to the one you don’t get to see yet. We have already provided you with a preview of The Stream, which many of you seem to love, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

When 9rules first started we were simply a listing of sites (mostly blogs) that helped people find quality content. We are still a Network of those same great sites with the added features of allowing anyone to join in one quality discussions and find others with the same interests. We are taking that a step further and giving you even more reasons to comeback to 9rules to find quality content along with providing you with more tools to control the direction of 9rules itself.

Social Networks are great, but Social Content Networks are even better. We are still a couple weeks away, but like The Stream we will be releasing some of the goods early to see what people think.