Bob's Blog

I recently received a nice note from a dear friend who is going through a difficult situation with her daughter that was going to require surgery. The note included a link to a site, CaringBridge.com, where she would be posting updates while in the hospital and beyond.

When I visited the site, I immediately noticed a strong contrast between this site and the more popular sites, including Facebook and MySpace. MySpace, Facebook and others offer limitless customization options, from adding music, games and even an extremely unusual werewolf application. These sites have opened up the ability for developers to create additional applications to further add to these social networking sites.

CaringBridge offers none of this, and it was quite refreshing. On this site, you can quickly set up a sharing page for her daughter, adding pictures and posting comments. We could add our comments for support, but no links, photos or werewolves. Rather than having to send out email blasts to everyone along the way, my friend would simply post an update to the journal and everyone who wished would be notified.

Often times when building a solution, too many options can be more of a problem than too few. Bravo to CaringBridge for getting it just right.