Heather Champ has a new service called Favorites, and it already seems like a kick-ass winner to me.
Heather, if her name isn’t familiar to you, is the former Director of Community for Flickr, back when Flickr was the go-to place for photographers to hang out, and the way she managed the community aspects of the site was no small part of why photographers loved hanging out there. She is also the co-founder of JPEG magazine, which was an early try at building social-based curated publication of crowdsourced photography, only before most of those words became commonly used (and abused).
She is also one of the people on my secret “it would be really neat to work with/for this person some day because I’d probably learn an awful lot if it didn’t kill me” list. This is a list I think everyone should keep in some way, both for the insight it brings (what does that list of names say about your interests and goals? Try to steer your career in that direction) and because it’s nice to know what those names are if an opportunity with one of them actually occurs — as it did for me when I went to Palm to go to work for Jon Rubenstein. Palm didn’t work out, but I did learn an awful lot and it didn’t kill me, so I win. Most of that list will remain secret, and it changes over time as my goals and interests change, but I will admit it includes people like Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen, Chase Jarvis, and the MacAskill clan over at Smugmug. None of whom would know me from a hole in the ground, but that’s not the point. It’s about identifying opportunities and knowing if one appears over the horizon.
But I digress…
The Favorites setup is amazingly simple: it’s a web page to explain and let you sign up, and it’s a mailing list powered by Mailchimp. No major complicated web design, no massive user reputation systems, not even a like button. Just Heather’s curation skills and eye for a good photo, and an old-school style mailing list.
As someone who’s spent the last few months trying to beat together a proper curation system for Stuff You’ll Find Interesting, I stand in awe at the simplicity. (Don’t be surprised if I borrow this and adapt it for my own, with full credit. If I do, Heather, name a charity to take a donation in your name…)
Heather has struck a chord with this on me because I think she shows up a classic failure in how those of us who live in the high tech universe think: we try too hard to chase technological answers and over-engineer and over-build overly complex systems because, ultimately, we’re geeks and we love building things, and we end up with things that don’t scale, are too complex, and never work quite right, but which we can go to conferences and gloat about all of the neat crap we did to the infrastructure…
I’ve signed up, and so should you. I can’t wait to see what shows up in my inbox.