I have been blogging on Steem since May 2016. It has been a wild ride, it's changed my life and the life of so many others. It remains, for me, the most exciting thing to ponder about. So many people are creating businesses and projects on top of it. To date, SteemProjects.comhas a directory of 382 apps, sites and tools build for it's community.
Beyond Steemit.com, Busy and Others...
Steem has a lot of users that mostly understand the Steem blockchain as Steemit.com or Busy.org. It's understandable since it's difficult to abstract a technology out of a context like a website.
But it would be an error to think that if Steemit.com becomes a top 50 website that the Steem Blockchain succeeded in its mission. The vision is much bigger and more all-encompassing then most people think.
Steem - The Token Layer of The Internet of Content
My vision of what Steem looks like when it reached its full potential is this:
Wherever you go online, no matter what website you go on, publishers and the people who comment can get rewarded with tokens.
That means that Steem is not only a collection of fancy UIs and apps. It means that it is fully integrated into the infrastructure of the internet.
I will repeat this again: Full Integration Should Be The Goal.
I'm talking Wordpress sharing plugins like AddToAny, a Disqus like comment widget, IFTTT integration, themes for Wordpress, Joomla and even Tumblr.
At that point, the ranking and traffic of a single website won't matter. The content of the internet would have a permanent backup on the blockchain for anyone to see...all monetized and tokenized.
Integration is well understood by Facebook, Twitter and Google...but completely ignored by reddit or medium, this is why they will never be as big. If you have a blog or a website, you MUST integrate with Google, Facebook and Twitter. Otherwise you are losing an opportunity to reach out to your audience. The goal of Steem shouldn't be any different. If you have a blog, we have to make it foolish NOT to integrate us into your content strategy.
STEEMPRESS Is Part Of The Solution
SteemPress is the first project I've encountered that is working on integrating with a major content publishing platform. That is a big deal since Wordpress is 30% of all websites on the web. They are working on a 2-way integration that will allow comments, upvotes and everything else to be integrated. It's a huge task and I hope the community will rally together to vote their witness when they decide to launch one. Make sure to follow their account on Steem @steempress
But I hope SteemPress won't be the only one pushing integration. There is so much work to be done on that side that no one team can do it all.
Conclusion
Please share below what you think are good places where the Steem blockchain should be integrated. I'm curious to know since I'm currently working at learning how to code and I'm looking for integration projects. If you have another definition of success please let me know.
