MNteractive

Curbly - the latest project from Minnesota Ruby on Rails Rockstars, Bruno Bornsztein and Ben Moore - is like a Web 2.0-compliant Digg + MySpace + ReadyMade magazine (Between you and me - this is great because ReadyMade got a little too cool for itself a couple years back).

Curbly has lots of big pictures, tags, tips, how-tos, and a few holes cut for ad placement, and the most interestingly - members can be vendors. Giving Angie’s List a little pressure. Cool. I’m definitely interested in how Curbly evolves as a place to find contractors for an upcoming home renovation.

On the downside, sign-up is lengthy (nothing like Zune though) - preferring I walk through the entire profile-setup process before I can get down to business. Skip, skip, skip.

A couple of suggestions off the bat:

• Shorten the sign up process
• Gimme RSS feeds for the major sections (thanks for having it on the individual blogs)
• I’d prefer to point you at a url for my photo instead of uploading (customer-as-silo and all that).
• Drop the ‘users’ label - Both ‘writer’ and ‘member’ are more respectful and you’re already using them.

UPDATE: Ben, Bruno and I sat down for the First Crack Podcast

UPDATE: Curbly on Future Tense