The Vision

I'm still working on the elevator pitch for Querki, but here are some of the thoughts, to help get the idea across. The most concise marketing slogan is:

Spaces for all of your Things

Although I like the technical one a bit more:

Easy Solutions for the Easy Problems

If we get a little longer, we can get to the meat of it:

Querki lets you keep track of all sorts of things online, in a way that is easy to use, convenient and social

In technical terms, Querki is to an online website-building platform like Rails essentially what a wiki is to an ordinary website: less powerful, not really designed for Big Corporate Use, but one heck of a lot easier for ordinary folks to use. It's a platform that will let folks develop Little Apps very, very quickly and easily, especially the ones that involve keeping track of stuff.

We all need to keep track of things all the time, and usually wind up just making do, using documents and spreadsheets and things like that. We get by that way, but often find ourselves wishing for more. Yeah, I can just keep my shopping list in a document, but I want to be able to check things off -- and for it to keep track of what I've bought before, so I can just pull it up again. I want to be able to jot things down on my computer, and check them off from my phone. I want to be able to share it with my lady. All of that should Just Work, without lots of fiddling and hacking.

On the other end, when people do try to make something better, they have to resort to big cutting-edge tools to do it. Sure, Rails is much better than the old way of building a website, but it's still serious programming. Normal folks don't want to program -- they just want to tell the system what they want, and have it deal with that.

That's the goal here: to fill that middle ground. We're building a platform that will be much easier to use and create than the powerful enterprise tools, but much more powerful than just doing stuff by hand.

And yes, it's going to be social to its heart. Figuring out how to organize things is useful, but the real fun comes in sharing it -- letting others adapt your applications, letting friends know what you've been adding (under your control, of course), and working with others on projects. Querki is going to work with the rest of the modern Web, to provide a lot of power than traditional systems haven't even thought about yet.