My Startup Story: The History of DashBurst

I love social media. So back in 2011, I decided to start a business around it.

Downtown of Pittsburgh (view from Mount Washington) by Pavel Ko

 
But at some point, social media just stopped being social. All the major social networks started to restrict access to their data. It seemed like every day one of the top social sites went out of its way to stymie another, like when Twitter blocked Instagram from using its API to find friends, or when Facebook cut off Twitter’s Vine from embedded playable videos in the News Feed. How could I risk starting a business that relied on closed-wall, feuding networks for data?

The Neverending Risk game in AT by Aaron Brown
 
I realized I was on the wrong track, on the outside looking in. I started thinking about my hometown, Pittsburgh, and it hit me: where I come from, we don’t burn bridges, we build them. The people around us are the bridge to our happiness! So what if I could create a social network that brought everyone back to the table? I decided to create the world’s first truly open and friendly social network 🙂

Pittsburgh Skyline by Joseph a

City of Pittsburgh by alliser

Pittsburgh Bridge by Adam Gerard

 

What Is Social Media?

And if you really think about it, what makes up social media? Social media has taken on many different forms of content types like articles, photos, videos, audio, infographics, presentations, and more. Social media is also the sites and apps we use to communicate with one another, meaning our posts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud, SlideShare, and many others. The problem with the social Web is that it never stops sending information your way. The information becomes hard to consume, navigate, and organize because it’s so fragmented across multiple websites, apps, and unfriendly media formats.

DashBurst looks to solve this issue by creating one central place where you can share all your work online and find your media. Soon DashBurst will introduce a new social dashboard, content marketing platform, and search engine rolled into one site.

On DashBurst, users can share all media types and content in one place! No more petty wars with social networks or searching through multiple sites.

He never stops thinking by IamNotUnique

 

Meet DashBurst

Our mission is to make communicating fun and social again. DashBurst is an open place to discover and share media of all types, a social network for content creators, and a place to discover interesting new material. DashBurst is for everyone and especially suited for photographers, artists, brands, musicians, authors, businesses, marketers, designers, educators, and general citizens looking to stay informed.

Similar to tweeting, users can post “Bursts” that can be made up of word-based status updates, photos, videos, audio, infographics, presentations, documents, lists, and even other social media posts embedded from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. In theory, a burst is a high-speed transmission, or concentrated pulse of information that enables the communication of networks operating with dissimilar data. When interacting with media on DashBurst, we use “DB’s” to measure the strength and engagement of your messages on social media, similar to a +1 on Google+ or a “Like” on Facebook.

 

Who Is DashBurst?

DashBurst is a five-person startup where the work is balanced among computer programmers, content producers and marketers.

 

Milestones

DashBurst was founded in 2012, and soon after we launched our design and marketing services to help support our continued development efforts. A year later we launched our blog which has now grown into one of the top 12,000 sites on the Web according to Alexa.com, with approximately 400,000 unique visitors last month! We also recently launched a helpful new Chrome extension called Bookmark My Tabs.
Pittsburgh Reg Mtg Aug 09 by Tom Hamilton

 

What’s Next?

So what does the future hold for DashBurst? Get ready for the launch of our social network in December! You can sign up here at: dashburst.com/signup
Mount Washington, Pittsburgh by Hidden Peanuts

Los Angeles Skyline from East LA. by Keith Skelton
 
Thanks, see you soon!