Soup.io is an Internet community clearly based on the principles of twitter.  It has a public time line and people put stuff in it. Soup.io is also clearly built in the image of the now deceased Pownce.  It also has a whole lot going for it.  The interface is amazing, clean, powerful , and easy.  The community is wonderful, and constantly adding useful content.  They have solved the twitter dilemma, by creating group subscriptions.

The community currently involved is astounding.  They are constantly releasing content and it's always high quality.  Pictures, movies, blog posts, and short form messages.  Often, the items I saw were copy and pasted from other locations, but was still brilliant.  The way this website forms it's publishing tools , the main public time line always has a very clean appearance and it's easy to switch your focus from one item to the next.

My favorite feature is the grouping feature. This allows anyone to define a group of any type.  When you join a group, you then receive updates from all members of that group, and they receive yours.  Essentially, you are creating an alternate public time line for this group.  This feature is still in it's infancy, but when the community starts to utilize it's full potential, I expect wonderful things to happen. On any given day, you can  join the tech group and meet people who have tech interests or move over to the photo group and find all of the people posting photos.  This feature really solves the problem that twitter is facing, which is, how do we connect all these people?  The public time line just gets crowded with half a million people posting to it.  This makes it difficult to find new people to follow who post content you like.  Groups eliminates that problem entirely.

Soup.io still has room for improvements.  Many of it's users have the tendency to post materials which would be offensive to a whole lot of people. I think there is definitley a place for this content, but for their own sake Soup.io should relegate this content to opt-in viewing areas only, and clear it out of the public time line.  Soup.io also does not currently have a clear or well thought out way to find people you already know, which is a major drawback to new users.  The nature of this communitie's content makes duplicates common.  I would like to see the website developers create a mechanism that can pull duplicate posts from the main time line.  This would make public time line viewing more enjoyable.   The other issue with the time line is that it displays multiple languages, creating some garbage.  I cannot read German or Spanish, so why would I want it in the time line?

Soup.io is an awesome product and will only improve as the community grows larger and more skilled.  It has many awesome features and I will definitely be recommending it to anyone with content to contribute.

Soup.io

Written by Jon