Justin Smith co-founded Standpoint in September 2005. He grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina and attended college at Stanford University. Visit his Standpoint page here.

What is Standpoint and why would a person use it?

Standpoint is a tool for sharing your beliefs. We give you a tool for explaining your opinions and beliefs in a logical and visual way. When you share your beliefs, others can respond with reasons they agree or disagree. It's fun to see what your friends believe and why. Some people use Standpoint as their "blog", while other people use Standpoint mini-profiles or feeds on their other websites to show their friends and visitors what they believe.

What were its beginnings like, and what technologies have you employed?

We decided to start Standpoint because we wanted to see more effective discussion around complex, controversial questions online. Currently, discussion and debate takes place in forums and blog comments; however, they are often inflammatory and poorly reasoned. Standpoint allows for a more constructive conversation to occur. You can see the most popular reasons people believe any given claim, or you can filter reasons by group to have a more private dialogue.

What technologies are behind the service, and why did you choose them?

Standpoint is built on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack with Ajax and Flash on the front end. Like many web startups, we chose LAMP because it was free and easy to set up. On the front end, we used the Prototype ajax toolkit to build many of our interactive UI elements. We used Flash to build the graph visualization tools, which we think are pretty novel. In addition, we made a few little hacks to allow the Flash application to interact with the rest of the DOM elements in true ajax style.