FirstQuarto - An alternative blogging platform; Will you use it?

Ever since the blogging bug bit the world, there has been no dearth of the things people have written about and shared over the internet. But what still remains elusive is how to discover new and interesting blogs from across the world, and also, how do you share your blog with the entire blogging community? Faced with this problem, Prasenjit Singh, a graduate from IIT Delhi, set out on the task of developing a kind of social network where people could share their blogs, and has come up with FirstQuarto.

Prasenjit describes FirstQuarto as “a social original-content sharing tool that lets you post original content in the form of articles, blog-posts, opinions, commentaries, reviews etc. and have your ideas rated, shared and publicized by fellow users.” FirstQuarto gives you the option of connecting your blog to the site easily; in addition, you can choose to write your posts on the site itself. The site has a neat interface, where your homepage has just four labels at the top. You can follow various blogs/writers, as well as categories, and the feed from the users/categories you are following is displayed under the Bistro label. Under the Top label, posts that have been most popular on the site are displayed, while the Latest label displays the newest content posted on the site.

What probably distinguishes FirstQuarto is the unique way in which the rating of a post is calculated to determine its popularity. While most social media sites currently determine the popularity of a post by either the number of “likes/stars” that the users give to it, or the comments it receives, or both. However, such a method has the inherent flaw of marking as popular any article where you could canvass for votes/likes by your friends, with or without the post actually deserving it. “In FirstQuarto, popularity for a top article is a function of its rating, the number of unique users it has attracted recently and the magnitude of activity seen on the article recently,” says Prasenjit. “Much of FirstQuarto is based on the idea behind the TOP feed - to make the search for quality content easier and quicker - and shall never do away with it.”

As of now, their focus remains on building the site and improving upon its feature and acquiring more users. In the future, their revenue model will be based on promoting blogs of various companies on the site. With much of its focus on original content, the task of ensuring what gets shared on the site by its users doesn’t infringe on any copyrights, or isn’t plagiarised is the major challenge, and they have already come up with automated checkers. “We already have an Android Reader app out on the Play Store and the iOS and Windows Mobile apps are ready for launch this Monday.,” informs Prasenjit.

Check out FirstQuarto for an alternate blogging platform

Author Credit - Sukhdeep