Talentopoly.com - Social Bookmarking for Programmers, Designers, and IT Professionals

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Following is a guest post from Jared Brown, a friend I've made via Twitter and Talentolopy. Jared Brown is the founder of Talentopoly.com, a community for programmers, designers, and IT professionals staying current by sharing the best of what they discover online.

I’m a programmer by education, a designer by desire, and an IT profesional by necessity. One of my favorite apps for the past couple of months has been Instapaper. It’s such a simple but big impact concept. Before Instapaper I would save links to articles by emailing them to myself. Then later that day when I was winding down for the night and looking for something to read I’d read through them. Instapaper has simplified the process and I now read more articles than I used to.

I’m fascinated with apps that change the way people consume information. Flipboard, Pulse, and Instapaper are all great applications for consuming articles. But none of them are any good unless you have great articles to put in them. That’s where the inspiration for Talentopoly came from.

At its heart Talentopoly is a link aggregator. It’s a way for talented people in IT fields to see what their peers are reading.

I get together with my developer and design friends once a month. We have these amazing conversations in which a lot of technologies and ideas are discussed that I’m not familiar with. These discussions are vital as they make me a better programmer. They keep me sharp by helping me stay up to date on the latest best practices and techniques. I was left wishing there was a place where I could go to see what my peers were reading daily. I wanted to see what techniques they were learning.

Talentopoly fills that void. It’s incredible how many cool apps and articles members have submitted to the site. There are 15 links posted to the site on average. Talentopoly publishes these links via RSS and a Twitter feed.

Now I have a constantly updated, highly relevant source of articles to feed into these great apps like Instapaper and Flipboard. By combining the Talentopoly feed with a few other feeds I get a robust view of what’s going on in my industry.

It’s been a fun ride developing Talentopoly. I practice a rapid, iterative development cycle, which means new features are released weekly. The site is built on Ruby on Rails and was designed by Brian Hoff, a Dribbble All-star. There are so many features I want to tackle with the site that it’s difficult to pick just one to work on next.

Talentopoly.com

One of the things I believe every site should do is listen to its community to help direct the feature roadmap. On Talentopoly users can vote on which feature they’d like to see developed next. I use this as my priority list. I encourage users to get in touch with me via Twitter and the official blog to let me know what they think of the site and how I could improve it.

The site is currently invite only. Though you don’t have to know a member to get an invite like some other communities. You can simply request an invite from http://talentopoly.com/ and within a few days you should receive an invite. You can also browse the site without an account as most of it is public.

If you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear them. You can find me @jaredbrown and follow @talentopoly for updates on the site.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.