Have you tried using musing.io, the Steem blockchain Q&A app yet?

The best thing about the Steem blockchain is how many apps that are currently being developed for it. Not only do we have the common blogging platforms like Steemit, eSteem, or Busy, we also have a lot of creative apps for it like Steemmonsters, DLive, DTube, Steemhunt, and the one I’m going to be writing about today; musing.io.

What exactly is musing.io

At it’s core, Musing is StackExchange mixed with the Steem blockchain. Users can log in with their Steem profile, ask questions, or answer them. And just like we are used to here on Steem, we can use our voting power to upvote both questions or comments.

The main interface on musing.io.

The big difference between Musing and StackExchange is obviously that we can get paid Steem for participating. I think this has some big advantages, and I’m sure it will attract a lot more users compared to the websites where you can answer questions without being paid.

Right now it's just what you expect it to be; a place where you can ask and answer questions. You can ask about anything at all, and it does not have to be about Steem or blockchain. Feel free to post biology or nature questions there, and I might just pop in to give a shot at answering them. All you have to do is to log in with Steemconnect, and you're ready to go.

Testing it out

I spend a few hours testing out musing.io this morning, and I’m actually very impressed by it. Right now it all works just as we want it to, and it’s easy to post or answer a question. If you have a problem, then you just might get a good answer by posting it there!

There are of course a lot of room for improvement, but this app is a lot better than many other apps that run on the Steem blockchain. I have some suggestions for improving the app, and I have already seen that the developers are open for feedback, so hopefully they will stumble across this post.

Some of you might remember that this app used to spam your feed, but this has luckily been changed, and now all questions and answers are posted as comments, meaning that you will not see them on Steemit. This means that it’s safe to ask questions without fearing that it will show up to all your followers.

Suggestions for improving musing.io

I have a few things I would like to see musing.io add or improve in order to make it better and more user friendly. These are only some of my own suggestions, so take it for what it is.

1. Add some cool stats, such as “questions answered/asked”, “Steem earned by answering questions”. I love these, and always make my own goals on websites like this one. For example, I tell myself that I want to answer 100 questions, and work towards this goal. It serves no purpose, but I think a lot of us would be motivated to be more active with some stats like this.

2. Improve the notification system. It would be great to get a visual que that tells us when we got a new notification. I would also love to get notifications when someone replies to my answers.

3. Improve the formatting a bit. I tried to post a link using Markdown, but that didn’t properly show on the musing.io interface. I have no idea how to post a clickable link there, or if it’s even possible in the first place.

4. Make it easier to find questions within a certain category. It’s easy to find lots of questions about the field you’re interesting in on StackExchange, but not so much on Musing. There’s a big potential for improvement on this part in my opinion.

5. An easy update: show the total number of answers next to the questions like this:
   

   
   
   Beautifully photoshopped by @valth. This will make it a lot easier to find unanswered questions.

6. Change the title tag on the questions to reflect the title of the question. Right now they all just say “Musing” even if you are browsing a specific question. This makes it difficult to navigate the questions when I open several tabs at the same time, and it’s also really bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Thanks for reading

I love finding new apps that run on top of the Steem blockchain, and I’m hopeful that we will get even more of these once SMTs are finally released. I think Musing has a big potential to get people interesting in the Steem blockchain, especially if they manage to increase their SEO to make the website show up often when people are searching the web for answers to their questions. Imagine searching for a solution to a problem and ending up on a Q&A website built on top of the Steem blockchain!

So, have any of you tried it out yet? Let me know if you did, and make sure to test it if you haven't yet!