Thanks zoroeye for the encouragement! The hope is that most of the designs will be suitable for RepRap printers or any commercial printer. As for a preference for one site rather than ten, sure most people don't want to be on two Facebooks or two e-mail providers. And many people might only want to share on Thingiverse. But we think that
(1) for print-ready objects people won't really care where the files are hosted: they just want the objects, and
(2) many people will want alternatives.
For example, when you google a question, you will find answers on a number of sites whether it's through a news article, a blog, wikipeidia, or wherever. So people rely on a number of reliable sources not just one. And we think that's what it'll be like for 3d objects. For instance after Makerbot went closed sourced, there was a huge schism in the community. Amazing designers like dzingof migrated their files to other sites like Ponoko. You simply can't access those beautiful designs on Thingiverse. Or take another printer company like Ultimaker and their own repository, Youmagine. That is a whole network of objects outside of Thingiverse.
So we thought that there is a need for independent parties to make it easier for people to find great objects regardless of repository host. That's where bld3r.com might help. We wanted to put the whole community in the loop and let people decide what's interesting (by voting up/down objects) and what are prints of high quality (by rating objects with stars and commenting on objects). So our idea is that it's not just about finding objects. It's about discovering interesting objects from anywhere that you'll not only want to print but will be confident in printing because others say so. And with an emphasis on learning rather than searching, we wanted to include tutorials and news in particular.
Anyway the site's still in beta, and while it's functional, we're still fine tuning. We'll only ever be as strong as the users who use us! We hope you like the site and will join.
(1) for print-ready objects people won't really care where the files are hosted: they just want the objects, and
(2) many people will want alternatives.
For example, when you google a question, you will find answers on a number of sites whether it's through a news article, a blog, wikipeidia, or wherever. So people rely on a number of reliable sources not just one. And we think that's what it'll be like for 3d objects. For instance after Makerbot went closed sourced, there was a huge schism in the community. Amazing designers like dzingof migrated their files to other sites like Ponoko. You simply can't access those beautiful designs on Thingiverse. Or take another printer company like Ultimaker and their own repository, Youmagine. That is a whole network of objects outside of Thingiverse.
So we thought that there is a need for independent parties to make it easier for people to find great objects regardless of repository host. That's where bld3r.com might help. We wanted to put the whole community in the loop and let people decide what's interesting (by voting up/down objects) and what are prints of high quality (by rating objects with stars and commenting on objects). So our idea is that it's not just about finding objects. It's about discovering interesting objects from anywhere that you'll not only want to print but will be confident in printing because others say so. And with an emphasis on learning rather than searching, we wanted to include tutorials and news in particular.
Anyway the site's still in beta, and while it's functional, we're still fine tuning. We'll only ever be as strong as the users who use us! We hope you like the site and will join.
