Meet WikiTribune (Facebook’s New Competitor from the Founder of Wikipedia)

Here’s the gossip on Jimmy Wales’ new Facebook competitor, WikiTribune and how it may be useful for you as a business owner.

I got early access to it, here’s what I’ve found:

1. Facebook
The Good:
– Allows all media
– Direct multimedia chat
– Ownership of groups/pages with many options
– Ability to run ads
– 2.5 billion users apparently

The Bad:
– Ads all over the place
– Addiction optimized
– Ad optimized
– Hard to do anything if you don’t spend money on ads

WikiTribune:
The Good:
– You can build your own sub wikis, which are facebook like groups
– Articles in subwikis can be collaborative
– Content consumption profile is free
Bad
– You need to pay or invite lots of people if you want to use the good publishing functionality
– Only 300k users at time of writing
– Broken site functionality

How should you think and act as a business owner given this new opportunity?

I’d spend 30 minutes a week exploring opportunities on WT.

I’m currently posting stuff that’s doing well on facebook on my subwiki on WT.

If the platform keeps growing and you are getting readers, and others have made it work over the next few weeks, it may be worth investing a bit more time to grow a network and post more content.

Is this a threat? Opportunity? How will the strengths and weaknesses of your business apply to this?

A threat to social media platforms. A very small threat but mostly an opportunity.

I’ve already registered several popular name sub wikis like Business Mentor.

Will business owners be able to destroy this platform too, or is the format invincible?

Perhaps the fact that articles can be collaborative will lead to non-collaborative articles being completely ignored.

It’s unlikely the platform will become successful as it’s super hard to launch a platform.

If it does become successful they will need to figure out a way to make it resistant to marketers.

Marketers ruin everything eventually…

It’s competition for Reddit, Quora, News Outlets and maybe even Facebook.

– Aleksander Vitkin