Over the past few years, FIRST Objective has tried to be a website to bridge the gap between the FIRST community and the outside world. We’ve had moderate success using our forums and video galleries.
FIRST Objective has recently released an entirely new version of their website and would like you to try it out for free! We offer the FIRST community the ability to post team videos to help FIRST gain more exposure. We also offer a Q & A environment, in hopes of helping existing teams and to also allow veteran teams to promote themselves.
There are many other features and more to come soon. Try it out and let me know what you think.
Eh…To a point. A Facebook-like FIRST website is like a swerve drive. I love the idea, but you have to get it perfect for it to work, and any wrong moves and it fails. I see this as having great opportunity if implemented correctly. How? I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes. It’ll either get really popular, really fast, or fall down hard.
Since I see this as an investment with the ability to work solely because of the FIRST community, I support you 100%! I’ve got a feeling this can be a huge success, but be careful. Triple think everything, and strongly look into user feedback. This has potential, so much potential.
thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I’ve been working on this for about 4 years now (in various forms). One of these times I’m going to get it right.
Just registered
One thing i think would be better, is instead of having to be a friend with someone, you can just have it so everyone can see everybody’s stuff. Like if the “wall” showed all activity through the whole site, instead of only showing a friends stuff. reason is that alot of people dont know somebody in FIRST until they meet some how (like using this site). If you could see all of the activity then you can easily get to know more people in FIRST, and learn about wat other people are doing in FIRST. Sorry if im bad at explaining. To summarize you may want to take out the “friends” thing and have a huge community of people.
Good job though, looks like a great way to show what kind of stuff your team may be up to
Prior to logging in, its not exactly clear what the objective of the FIRST objective is… it sort of looks like a bland twitter feed or facebook newsfeed. Not to be harsh, but the point needs to be understood before the user spends the time and energy creating a login.
If this site doesn’t really find its own niche (think TBA), its going to be hard for people to want to duplicate effort to put things on an unknown site. Right now FIRSTers can already tie together for FIRST and Facebook, and with both of those providing much much larger audiences, they are much more likely to gather attention for their teams by creating Facebook events, or sharing FIRST videos or clips on their feeds there. Those are both very good social interaction sites. CD is more of a technical “for FIRSTers” type of site, not as much intended for the outside world, but you can share documents, photos and interact on forums. Videos are easily posted on youtube and linked via any of these sites, so its hard to see a reason to post them elsewhere.
Ultimately its always worth playing around with ideas, and for every great idea there are hundreds or thousands of not as great ideas, so keep playing and improving… determine what the actual point of the site would be and what niche market it fills and very clearly communicate that and you may have yourself something popular.
Joined. It’s nice, but I can’t access my profile settings nor add a profile picture. I understand server costs, however it randomly slows down sometimes, and if you expect this to have high traffic, you better be prepared to upgrade to more RAM, CPU, etc. I agree with everything Kims Robot said. You need to make it clear what your goal/purpose is the moment we type in FIRST objective.
Also some things for improvement:
-Love the blue/gray, however it makes things seem darker/small. A lighter color such as white works great for stuff like this, or at least for the feed.
-Like posted above, people in FIRST don’t really know other people in FIRST. I mean, we’re all friends here on CD, but if we were to meet IRL, nobody would know/recognize anyone. Even if we did, we’re not actually “friends” yet. For example, if I were to go to Facebook and friend akoscielski3, assuming he has one, he wouldn’t know who I was even if I told him I was SuperNerd256, and it could get awkward.
-Organize organize organize. I like how everything is now, however you could add more things with more things to make things clearer.
I sign in using my Google account, and it says when I click on where the profile pic would be to access my profile, it says “Profile not found”. I’m logged in, and everything.
i’ll look into the issues of using Google accounts as soon as I can. you can always log in without Google… we distribute no spam or other junk. Google was just an easy way for everyone to get on-board…
Wow! Thanks to all those who have joined FIRST Objective. I’ve been a little busy over the past few days, like I imagine everyone has. I’ll be posting changes soon, so please send me feedback.
Thanks again to everyone who has joined and wants to help promote FIRST.
From the 5 mins I spent looking at the site this is what I thought:
Generally, it seems kind of useless with Chief Delphi in existence. The only reason I could see myself using this is to do the things I already do on Chief Delphi. The “friends” thing, as mentioned before, I also think is not the best idea. I agree with akoscielski3 that it should just be one big community, although then it becomes like a forum, and, again, we already have that with Chief Delphi. I also agree with Kims robot that it’s not really clear what the “FIRST objective” is.
The one thing I saw that got me a little excited because Chief Delphi doesn’t have it was the “Videos” tab. That would be cool if it were a place to upload videos or watch links to YouTube if you could watch them right there like you can on Facebook. However, it’s not very appealing as just a bunch of links to videos elsewhere.
The whole idea behind FIRST Objective is to be a community to help promote FIRST. Chief Delphi is a great resource for teams looking for information, but it is horrible as a tool to promote FIRST.
The use of videos has been the focus since its initial development. The forums and Q & A section is an incentive for teams to go there to look for information. The idea behind FIRST Objective is to have a large community helping promote FIRST to schools that are not yet involved.
I started this site originally because the school district where I live didn’t have a team, and I realized that most schools do not have a FIRST team. Keep in mind that the focus of this site is not always what can it offer me, but how can it be used to promote FIRST.
