Today I was asked what the essence of PandaWhale is, in 140 characters or less.

Here's my first attempt at it:

PandaWhale is a community of people who want to share, organize, display expertise, and promote things we are interested in.

Here's my second attempt at it:

Pandawhale is making an interest graph through the actions of our users.

I like the second attempt better than the first.

What do you think?

For me, it's all about "Follow what interests you, ignore the rest". By following specific stashes, I only see the things I care about. For instance, I love your content about startups and technology, but I don't need to see photos of kittens. I'm losing interest in Twitter because there is so much junk to filter through to get to the things I care about. PW does that for me.

Thanks Casey; the stash I get the most comments about is growth hacks.

I also enjoy Joyce's exercise stash and your robots stash.

I like your description of PandaWhale:

Follow what interests you; ignore the rest.

Now we just gotta work on making our follow mechanisms better.

Follow the best, ignore the rest!.

Wait is the homepage only a feed of my stashes? Dave morin said it best -- mobile is about single screen; I think the desktop web is trending towards mobile. If its not on my home screen I may be too lazy to find it.

I like the first 140 chars better, sans the word "expertise," which breaks up the flow of the sentence.

So we have two more candidates:

Follow the best; ignore the rest!

And:

PandaWhale is a community of people who share, organize, and promote things we are interested in.

David, to answer your question, the home page has three different views right now:

1. All convos, in order of most recently added to PandaWhale.

2. All convos, in order of most recently commented on.

3. All convos in stashes you're following, in order of most recently commented on.

As PandaWhale grows, the firehoses (#1 and #2) become less interesting and the "follow the best" (#3) becomes more interesting -- as with Twitter and Tumblr.

This makes sense. For some reason I have never clicked #3. I enjoy both 1 and 2 immensely. My first stop in the morning and my last stop at night.

I do like the interest graph explanation, just not for the average person. For me, pandawhale is like a smarter pinterest: collect and stash funny, fascinating or insightful articles to share them with the community. But at least, that's just how I use it.

How you use it is how we'd like many people to use it.

Now we just have to figure out how to make it intuitive for them to figure out what you know. :)

To be honest I have no idea what Pandawhale is in 140 or 800 characters.

I loved it initially because I would always get an email in the morning with 3 nice articles to read over breakfast. They generally always had to do with startups so they were always relevant to me. I think this is just because all the users were startup people.

Nowadays I can see a greater variety of things being posted, some of which are entertaining (videos of pandas), some of which just don't interest me at all (gossip such as Zuck's roommate in the olympics). So I never visit the home page any more.

PandaWhale is a community of people who share, organize, and promote things we are interested in.

This doesn't mean anything to me. That's every community on the web, no?

Follow the best, ignore the rest!

Twitter?

Pandawhale is making an interest graph through the actions of our users.

I know what it means, but it's still technobabble. Why should I care about an interest graph?

Are you going to help me identify what interests specific people? I could see that as useful if I have a meeting with Adam and I can look up on Pandawhale to realize that he really likes videos of Pandas. But I could do that on Twitter anyway. So I don't get it.

So I don't really know what Pandawhale is. I just like it because of the current people. I'm not sure if I'd hang out if another 10k people I didn't know where posting random things.

Tristan, we have tried to make our emails very easy to unsubscribe to, so if they are no longer interesting to you then you can stop receiving them with a single click.

Tristan, you're not the only one who doesn't get it.

That's why, every day, we work a little harder to improve the service.

We have a vision for it that's new, and makes it hard to compare to anything that came before it.

PandaWhale is deeply social, and a place to discover interesting things and talk about them.

We believe a lot of the value is in the community.

And new members of the community join every day.

But we're still learning how to tell our story.

Yes, our goal is to help people identify what's interesting to them.

Sure you know I'm into pandas, but did you also know that I'm into kindness, Batman, the 49ers, and lifehacks?

PandaWhale does let me share, organize, and promote what interests me.

But I'm sure there are better ways to say that.

Pandawhale - building communities one story at a time ;O)

Christine, I like that.

It certainly does feel like we grow one story at a time. ;)