Yet another Web 2.0 thingy Boxxet.com
Ages ago, while watching something on Rocketboom or reading something on BoingBoing (or somewhere else, I can't remember), I ended up on the Boxxet (box-set) site, and signed up for an invitation. Then the other day, I got a mail from You Mon Tsang (founder of Boxxet) saying my account had been activated, etc, so I went along and had a wee look.
Boxxet appears to be a fancy-schmancy aggeregator of sorts, but then there's a little bit more. As it's in beta, there isn't a lot of content, but it seems you can create a boxxet with just about any content you desire, and the aggregator will fill it up with news stories, blog posts, pictures and other related content. The aggregator seems to be kind-of 'clever' and in my first boxxet there was a link to Google's very first search page, which I had never seen before, and some other stuff including a 'Chuck Norris Facts'-style blog post, but about Jack Bauer, which I found hilarious ("When life gave Jack Bauer lemons, he used them to kill terrorists. Jack Bauer fucking hates lemonade"), if slightly derivative.
You can submit websites, blog posts, news stories, books, photos, etc to a particular Boxxet, and users can rate them (kinda like on Digg), but you can only choose from a (currently quite limited) list of types of link. In that way, it is very like Digg, but not solely tech/geek-centric, which is something I think there could be a huge space for in the interweb. The only problems I can see with the UI is that it is a little cluttered, there's not enough content as yet, and it really, really needs some sort of 'submit to Boxxet' bookmarklet or something similar, but this is made difficult as submissions have to be on a particular subject, not user-defined tags like on Digg and del.icio.us.
Another thing is that Boxxets of particular content can have wildly differing content than their name suggests. For example, in the Boxxet for 'The Office', there are story links to stories about Catherine Tate (am I bovvered?), and other links that just have the words 'the office' in them (and are completely unelated to anything about The Office), so it certainly needs a bit of fine-tuning. That said, it's only a little bit of tuning it needs, it works reasonably well at the moment.
I'm all for thingies and widgets which enable me to find even more useless information on the internet (and the odd useful thing), and from the looks of things Boxxet could (with a few more months ironing and massaging into betterness) be really good. I'm going to contribute a bit here and there when I can and see how it goes. If anyone wants an invite, I have 10, so let me know in the comments or mail me at the address at the bottom of the sidebar.







4.21-en
Comments
Glad you like and great feedback. When we go public, we hope to have the UI a bit less dense and think about easier submissions.
But you definitely get what we are trying to do. If you run out of invites, let me know.
You Mon,
Founder, Boxxet
Posted by: You Mon Tsang | May 1, 2006 8:20 PM