Palnet.io

I don't know if you have been following everything happening on STEEM over the past few months but at a minimum I'm sure that you have come across palnet.io so far. It's a separate STEEM site based on the blockchain but with its own tokens and economics.

It's a purpose built site for a specific group of people to showcase what is important to them. Right now it's still in it's most basic version but with a lot more to come. It's still just a blogging site but one which can be the base layer for a community.

What I can see it doing right now is taking a group of people from the PAL discord that is very active and beginning to bring that community onto the blockchain more. While it is a great tool, discord has far too much of our activity and even with myself will always have it open on a side window when i'm online.

Tribes

From reading parts of @aggroed's posts and from other members involved in the development I have started to form my own picture of what we could see in the future. Think of a thousand tribes for everything from sports, movies, books, Man utd, your local city.... Whatever can bring a group of people into the one space with a common ground.

My first choice would be sports. I can spend all day watching sports, watching clips, analysis stories about the ones that I like. As it stands, STEEM is a terrible place to write about them as we are such a diverse group with totally different views and interests. That's why you had Scorum which was a fork of STEEM.

A good idea in theory but wouldn't it be much better as a tribe of STEEM and have all the benefits of the STEEM blockchain as well as it's own community for sports. As it is they tried to take those people to a seperate chain to operate which doesn't make sense for me as you already drawing from a small pool. Splitting that further isn't a great business model.

Now imagine it as a tribe. One where the interface has been developed properly and it functions like any other website you would log into. You join it through facebook or google. This account allows you to earn it's token. Once you have enough of the token you can open a full STEEM account for free or purchase one through STEEM ninja instantly.

More than likely you will never look at steemit.com or steempeak. You will just be active on that site with it's wallet for both STEEM and Scorum tokens. There will be no need as the content there won't be relevant to a sports person it's will be more of a back-end for developers and people building projects on the STEEM blockchain.

The main page has blog posts. It has dtube videos. 3speak live streams. TokenBB forums for discussing matches and results. Everything in the one place that you need to follow sporting events while earning crypto. There will be some sports related ads and merchandise for the users and maybe a store to spend your Scorum for this merchandise.

Everything with upvotes which allows your activity to earn Scorum tokens and also a small amount of underlying STEEM which at that point will be very small amounts with all the various apps and tribes drawing from the reward pool. STEEM will be the backing token rather than the one which you use for operating on the tribe and should have gained a lot of value from being used in this way to stake all of the other tokens. It will represent the overall value of the eco-system rather than being a utility.

Speculation

Now all of this is my opinion and in no way to be taken as the direction in which we are going but from what I have seen and read over the past few months, I would guess that I am not too far off the mark. I haven't seen much from Steemit.inc on these subjects and their SMT project as they have been building the base technology to run the chain instead. If they can keep running the chain as a fast, free and capable blockchain it would tie in with what our other groups are building very nicely.

I hope that I am right in my predictions as I think it is the way forward for us as a group. We have seen that using steemit as a blogging site doesn't work in it's current form and this would be a great solution for having thousands of more niche sites rather than a one for all solution.

Development is flying at a massive rate and every new project has built one the ones gone before it. At last we are starting to see all of these separate tools joining together and I for one am very excited about where it leads to. The doubters have left, the believers have built and now are we about to see that vision realized?

It's going to be a very exciting year ahead and hopefully we can get it right.