Cool Steem Resources: Busy
Create it once, use it many times. The Steem Blockchain has many surprises in store for newer Steemians, but the biggest surprise may be that a website like Steemit does not have exclusive access to the Steem Blockchain, nor is it unique.
In fact, I'm not even writing this post on Steemit. Proof?
Here ya go!
So what's the catch? what makes Busy any different than Steemit?
Well here's the beauty of the Steem blockchain. Busy is not really much different, yet it is superior in some ways. Busy is not a visual skin or UI that someone put over Steemit.com, but rather Busy is a completely unique website.
Busy.org accesses the Steem blockchain in the same manner Steemit does. Steem is the database, and both Steemit.com and Busy.org are accessing that database. If you have a Steemit account, then you already have a Busy account. This is made possible by the fact that the Blockchain is a database that is the same no matter where you access it from. It is a distributed ledger.
While this may not seem mind-blowing to some, for many of us this is a revolutionary step to a more decentralized online experience, while retaining and even improving upon object-oriented programming and database fundamentals.
Just imagine if a competitor website to Facebook appeared out of nowhere, and had full access to Facebook's database, and you could log onto this new website with your Facebook account, and anything you do there would automatically update over on Facebook. Two websites, same database being accessed between them.
To accomplish such a feat without blockchain technology would require a lot of expense and a completely different business model, and for a site like Facebook where they are a business and do not allow public access to their database, it would make no sense to divide themselves into different yet similar websites that all do the same thing.
Not so with the Steem ecosystem. It's possible, and it's a thing. busy.org is not the only alternative site to Steemit, but we'll touch on the other sites in a different blog.
So why use Busy? Well, that's for you to decide. I'm merely presenting the option to those that did not know Busy.org existed.
But to help you along with that decision, I will showcase some of the differences between Busy and Steemit. Some of these differences are subjective, some are not.
Redundancy
Even in the past month or two, Steemit.com has gone offline on more than one occasion. Maybe it was a DDOS cyber attack, or maybe it was just a server technician that spilled their beer on a server somewhere, I don't really know. Fact is, these things happen with all websites, even Facebook.
So what do you do when Steemit.com goes offline?
Simple. Go to Busy.org. Just because the Steemit website is down, it does not mean the Steem blockchain cannot still be accessed from somewhere else. This is by design, and not just a happy coincidence.
Activity Viewer
In a similar fashion to the Steem Block Explorer we visited in a previous post, the Activity tab on Busy lets you see in real-time a chronological list of events for your account.
Notice how on the right side there are checkboxes you can use to toggle different events from being visible or not. Leave them all unchecked and you see everything. While you can access this information in other places, I find Busy's approach to be more efficient and user friendly when you just want to know something specific without a site searching through the entire blockchain.
Speed
While Steemit is not horribly laggy or sluggish, it isn't the most responsive website. This is subjective, I know. But for me Busy.org seems way more responsive. When I go to my wallet, there is no delay. Heck, the account value is accurate, and I can even expand the Steem and SBD panels to see a line chart of the historical prices.
Now to be fair, Steemit.com may be more sluggish due to the sheer volume of people that visit every day. I'm sure if Busy.org were in the top 1000 websites being used everyday in the world, you'd start seeing some hiccups there too. But hey, if that happens there will always be another website you can use to access Steem. If not, I can assure you they are being built as we speak.
But this is as far as I will go for this post. I don't want to bore anyone to death, and if you are like me than you want to explore the rest of the site without the guided tour.
I hope this post has been useful. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous day.
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