Meet Topick, a newly launched startup that wants to create a sort of social network for your favorite topics. After selecting your interests, Topick offers an unfiltered feed of people sharing the same passions as you. It’s a small Facebook, but without all the mainstream news and noise from your friends.
Like on Product Hunt, you sign up to Topick with your Twitter account. You then need to pick your favorite topics from a very long list of topics.
Topics range from “tools for building products” to “essential reading for editors” and “the future of fashion.” There are already hundreds of people in the most popular topics.
After that, you get a nice feed view with posts, comments and likes. It’s a Facebook-like feed that brings together all your interests and messages from all your communities. You can of course filter the site by communities, but I think most people will spend their time on this general feed.
A lot of people are sharing interesting links with their own take on the subject, making Topick a curation platform. You can share each post on Facebook and Twitter so that other people can see and join the conversation.
It’s still the very beginning for Topick and most posts don’t get a lot of comments and likes. But it looks like a promising start. It’s great that you can follow individual communities, but it also fragments the user base into multiple communities. Some of these communities nearly cover the same subject.
Many have tried to create communities around interests, like Branch, which was acquired by Facebook. The main challenge for Topick is that the team will have to prove that we need a separate service for these discussions. Some people are using Facebook groups, Slack communities and other things for this kind of things.
But in many cases you have to make your existing tool fit your needs, which isn’t ideal. Topick has a key advantage as it is a separate service made specifically to share ideas and discuss them with people who like talking about these ideas.
Fostering an active, positive community is no small feat. But if Topick can do it, it has a chance to become a sort of modern forum with a social network look and feel. And it’s true that I miss forums sometimes.
