Yourminis Practices Groupthink

If you spent the last few months’ worth of mornings pointing your browser to Yourminis.com, you noticed that things suddenly changed up on you a little earlier this week. Your start page didn’t greet you. A community “landing page” did. Nothing to be worried about though. The friendly faces at Goowy Media just restructured.

Your “minis” will still be all about you. The only major change to the system has been the creation of a central hub, where you and other users get to discover what Flash favorites people like you have picked as their best-of and recommend. Call it social networking if you will, but the term seems to be getting broader in meaning and in scope by the minute. The inclusion of user profiles and the ability to discuss Yourminis gives it an edge into that category, but if you were to compare this place to Myspace or Facebook, you’d be comparing apples and oranges. (No, I couldn’t think of a better analogy. My apologies.) It’s more like a start page for everyone. Except it’s not, so…nevermind.

(There are quite a few of ‘em too. Users, I mean. 898,832 at 11:17am on February 22nd.)

If you want to bypass Yourminis’ community page, just tack on a ‘/start’ to the end of the URL and you’re there. Or click on the ‘Open Startpage’ link. Whichever. You’ll notice your start page has changed little, if at all. The RSS feeds are there, widgets upon widgets (you can find which are most popular, etc., on the community page) are there. Everything is there. But there’s more.

Perhaps the best thing about your start page is the inclusion of a new ‘publish tab’ button, which does exactly what it says. The purpose of this is to share with others what you’ve created, allowing you to contribute to the newfangled community center. See how things are coming together?

The apex of the new and improved Yourminis isn’t anything that’s already been mentioned though. It’s what’s going on in the background. Actually, what will be going on in the background.

See, Yourminis has grown quite a bit. Some would say it’s even more popular than its older sibling, Goowy. So to match the growth, its owners have decided to release the secret widget recipe to developers. A select number have already received invitations to try their hand at it, and a wide release is expected to be done in 2 weeks. We probably won’t see Dashboard-like growth right out the gate from the public debut of the API, but you can bet that the number of widgets available for Yourminis users will expand greatly. And if we do see an explosion in the number of those little flash apps, the more the merrier.

Yourminis is destined to crack the 1 million mark in registered users with the new release. I have no doubt about that. Any wagers on when that moment might be?

Screenshots: