Bomis In Its 10th Year

Bomis In Its 10th Year

Bomis was founded in 1996. Since then it has served as a sort of laboratory for experimenting with new ideas about the modeling of information, about new systems of online community and collaboration. This laboratory has given birth to many crazy-seeming ideas. Most of these failed more or less immediately. Some of them showed promise, and then failed. A few proved to have some lasting merit. All of them provided useful insights.

Most of our ideas were modeled online. We designed websites which incorporated the concepts we were experimenting with. This allowed us to perform real-world tests, to get immediate feedback, and to learn by trial and error. We have attempted, with greater or lesser success, to build sites that could command at least a modest amount of web traffic, so that we could gather meaningful amounts of information in reasonable spans of time. These sites often have public faces which do not necessarily reveal their heuristic purposes.

We have aimed to make our activities profitable, since it is the revenue generated by our sites that allows us to continue developing and refining our ideas. This has placed constraints on our activities. Considering how many crazy ideas we have been able to come up with, these constraints are clearly necessary; otherwise we would go off pursuing whatever ideas caught our fancy and never stick with anything long enough to generate useful information. Being for-profit, and relying on income generated by our activities, has prevented Bomis from becoming an expensive hobby, and has compelled us to limit our efforts on ideas that are interesting because they actaully might possibly work.

There are many great ideas we've dreamed up but have never gotten around to, many great ideas that we've started but never fully pursued. There's a lot of interesting stuff left to be done, and we believe the next 10 years can be at least as crazy as the previous 10 years. Here's hoping.