LazyCode

Cruising Proggit the other day I saw a sponsored ad for Forrst. There was some feedback on the ad (that's how Reddit ads work) and I noticed that Forrst's owner was providing direct feedback which is always nice so I decided to check it out. One word: wickedbadassawesomesauce.

It's a lot like Dribbble which I'd actually never heard of until I visited Forrst. Both services are quite similar, not only in seemingly going to the same "Whoops, we got an extra consonant... aww, fuck it." School of Naming. Both allow designers to post "snaps" of work they're doing and comment/share/tag/etc. What Forrst does differently is open it up to the other side of the field: Developers. ReadWriteWeb described as StackOverflow meets Tumblr which I sort of, kind of, agree with but it does it with the added twist of networking.

In a very MySpace Tom-esque manner the creator, Kyle, is automatically followed when you join which instantly connects you through at least one point to the rest of the community. I'm not sure if this is going to stay like this forever or if eventually the Forrst Rangers (Forrst's featured users that are particularly good at aggregating >=1 subject) will be presented when you join in the vein of Twitter's Featured Users.

To test the interconnectedness and the service as a whole I made the same first post I make in a lot of dev discussions as it generates a lot of discussion bandwidth quickly: 'Coding font of choice?'. Almost immediately someone commented, and as Forrst's Dashboard works it then appeared on the Dashboard of that person's friends and the post grew a lot quicker and opened dozens of members of the community up for me to follow. It all feels really natural and fluid, I don't usually like web2.0 social networks much (Who am I kidding? I'm wearing my Pownce shirt today...) but it is legitimately fun to see feedback from talented developers and designers on topics you care about.

Now for the downsides. It's *Alpha so it's invite-only at the moment, but don't fret it's a 100% acceptance rate so go ahead and sign up (link below). The userbase growth is throttled to test scaling and vet new features/bugs, etc. Aside from that there isn't much to gripe about. There's an active and conspicuously presented feedback link that is powered by UserVoice so the community can vote on features that should be added. As I've noted in a couple tweets, I'm very excited for Forrst and the potential for collaboration and discussion it can bring to the quite scattered web-dev community.

twitter.com/forrst
Forrst Signup

* Editor(stated lightly) Note: The service isn't technically alpha but the throttling bit is true