What is Glitch?

A year ago, we launched Glitch to the world. Since then, over a million people have become part of the community, creating amazing apps, bots, websites, art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

But we wanted to take a moment to clearly explain what Glitch is about, and why we think it’s a place that everybody on the web will find valuable. This is Glitch:

• A community where you can find cool apps and websites you can’t find anywhere else. Think of it as being like YouTube or SoundCloud, but for apps or bots or VR experiences instead of videos or songs.
• **The most innovative, powerful collaborative platform for creating, remixing and hosting apps. **We’re evolving “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools that people of any skill level can use to create the web.
• **An effort to make the web into a creative medium where **We’re an independent company that cares deeply about making tech more accessible, more inclusive, and more empowering, and Glitch is how we’re doing that. Now, those ideas can mean a lot of different things, whether you’re a person looking for cool VR experiences to check out, an artist who wants to use the web as another outlet to express an idea, an educator who wants to teach a room full of students how to create an app, an experienced coder who wants to launch a new startup without dealing with the drudgery, or an activist who needs to share essential information that others can quickly reuse.

All of those people, and more, are who we’re making Glitch for—and we’re just getting started.

Just as important as the technology that enables Glitch are the principles that make Glitch special. We hope you’ll take a look and offer your feedback on how we can put them to work as we build Glitch with you.

Much of what we’ve captured in the Glitch principles are things we’ve learned from some of the core ideas that have made the Internet so powerful, principles like Postel’s Law (“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”), the Principle of Least Surprise (“In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.”), and key insights from the Unix philosophy.

But just as much as we reference any technical precedents, we look at everything from urban design to artistic movements to efforts to advance justice or equity, and we see those as influences on how Glitch will grow and evolve.

Most of all, we find our inspiration in our community, from the new and surprising things you create, and the ways you push us to bring Glitch to even more creative people. We can’t wait to see what you create!