Sorry for the relatively light posting. I have been absolutely slammed lately and I haven’t had those moments to sit back and reflect on things. I also happen to be a relative newbie to efficient blogging, so that hasn’t helped.

Today I read an interesting piece in Businespundit. It was interesting to me because the article gets to the heart of PlansForUs’ value proposition:

My point is that networks are valuable for what they provide, not for their own sake.

PlansForUs continues to underplay the social networking aspects of our service because we aren’t building a social network. We are building a tool that supports a teacher’s effort to find and deploy engaging lesson plans in her classroom. We use the network to support clustering around individual teaching ideas. We use these clusters to filter the wheat from the chaff for our individual users. The article also makes an important point, particularly given our corporate mantra of Creation through Collaboration.

I think we sometimes decide to network to advance our career or business, and after a while become complacent. We network just to network, just out of habit. That’s unproductive. You don’t build a network just to have one, you build a network to use. And I don’t mean that negatively. You should give back to the network as well.

We haven’t built PlansForUs just to network. MySpace can be used for that. We built PlansForUs to simplify lesson plan sharing. Simplified lesson plan sharing means that teachers can easily collaborate to create new plans. We are seeking to make it easy for you to contribute. Tell us how we can improve that experience.

by Tyler, CEO