It goes without saying!
Exploring the interesting things that make our world work, and the people that make them happen.
Blog Archive • Questions?People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.
“Most valuable” is an over-exaggeration, but good experience is imperative. For any company, delivering that experience isn’t just a matter of hiring designers who can nail down a sexy UI. It’s about rallying everyone behind something they can be proud of.
Then, ship it and figure out how to make it better.
via cdixon.org
The Facebook + Instagram deal was a big because it melded two very different companies: one that’s hugely loved, one that’s generally hated.
The whole affair isn’t just juicy because the tech community is up in arms over another huge acquisition. Users know about it, too, and they seem to care.
New York Magazine does a great job of spelling out the drama involved, while elegantly summarizing one clear motivation behind the deal:
Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.
What’s more, the article carefully takes you through the complicated history of “what is an application? a web app? a website?”
So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.
In comparison to Facebook:
Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.
The article is a great read, providing valuable insight into two companies that have been major players in defining what social media is, how it works, and what we think of it.
Everyone loves a free cup of really good coffee. Even if it’s a really small cup of really good coffee, everyone loves free coffee.
What if, right after drinking that really small cup of really delicious coffee, I offered you a bigger cup of delicious coffee with your choice of cream and/or sugar for $1?
That’s how I think of the “freemium” model for stuff like software. You make something really awesome, give away a small-but-complete version for free, and then offer a biggerbetterawesomer premium version for a price. This lets people have a complete first experience (finish that delicious yet really small cup of coffee) with the option to get more (plus extra!) if they shell out some cash.
What kind of coffee are you selling?
I’m fascinated by the way we discover “stuff on the internet.” With an increasing number of input channels feeding us all the data all the time, it’s is hard to know where you first heard about something, or where you found it originally.
A few weeks back, like many other days, I found something cool on the internet. I realized that I have a complete history in head of not only how I found it, but how I recognized, and suddenly trusted it. This is an extended look into the signals that led me to recognize one app out of many.
Last year, I came across a blog called ISO50. I don’t know how. Since it was pretty cool, I created a bookmark:
When had I originally saved the site, I saved a link to one of the specific blogs posts that was timestamped June 2010.
Going through some older bookmarks the other day, I visited the site again and assumed it hadn’t been updated in over a year. I was actually just looking at an old post.
I see this tweet the other day and think “huh, I thought that blog was dead.”
I favorited the tweet.
While checking the Android Market for some stuff related to work, I noticed an app called “Nosh” in the featured section:
After seeing the tweet, I remember to visit iso50.com. Sure enough, the latest post was in November 2011, meaning that I was an idiot for thinking it was dead. I scrolled through the front page. Towards the bottom, a phrase catches my eye:
I currently am working on Nosh…We had great success with the 404 page, and the Jotly project was my next move.
It’s under a post labeled “Jotly: Share Everything with Everyone.” I realize that the guy running this blog is a designer working in web, and that he’s done something that clever designers do: made a sweet 404 page.
There’s a link to this funny video, which opens again with the name “Nosh”:
The full post has this funny video:
I watch the video, then read this:
If you click almost anywhere on the Jotly website it will take you to Nosh. I was optimistic about Jotly getting at least a tiny bit of press and I wanted Nosh to be able to benefit from this, at least in a small way.
Nosh is an application for rating stuff, created by a bunch of people who appreciate high-quality, well-produced funny things. Jotly is a clever teaser campaign to drive Nosh downloads.
With all of this in mind, I go back the Android Market and download Nosh. I appreciate the effort, and my download is an indication of that small point. It’s a story that began 17 months ago. (Since writing this, Jotly is also a real app that’s available on iOS and Android).
Aside from exposing a little too much about how I use the internet, my underlying point is that our content consumption is an incredible mix of signals and noise. Each day is a constant struggle to find the most signal-y signals among all of the noise via social media-ing.
More importantly, I’m interested in Nosh because I like the people behind it. In addition to the Nosh.com 404 page, they’ve got a sense of humor and and have fun with what they’re building. This might be just another MoLoSo app, riding the “add a layer on top of the real world” wave like Yelp and Oink, but I have a “personal” reason to like it.
This mini experience shows me me that personality is really important when it comes to products. Apps are more than just services and gimmicks. They’re about connecting with a lifestyle that you’re either a part of, or aspire to join.
Downloading apps has become a thoughtless ritual for some of us that are a little too involved in consumer-mobile-tech space. I feel myself losing interest in the latest and greatest, and more interested in community, personality and curation. This little story behind how I found about Nosh shows that our discovery channels can be most satisfying if they’re organic and dripping with authenticity. Authenticity is the holy grail of marketing. Make someone feel like that thing is just for them, created by people who know what they want, and they’ll bite. Of course, the second you realize that someone is trying to fabricate that experience, the illusion of authenticity fades.
While I’m busy “noshing” the world around me, take some time to think about why you like the things you like. Why do they make you happy? How did you find them? Why do you trust them? What is it about those things that you appreciate the most? How much time do you spend looking for things to like, instead of just enjoying things you like?
A nice take on the non-premium smartphone market.
The takeaway is that the idea of Android is exciting because it gives mobile access to people who can’t/won’t pay for something like an iPhone. Sure, you don’t get that “polished” experience, but there are more situations than not where having mobile technology is more important than a cool sliding animation when you send a text message (that’s blatantly reductive, but hopefully the point is clear).
In this context, it’s important to forget about Android as “Android” and think of it as an effective mass-market mobile operating system. The Android branding is irrelevant compared to the OS’s utility.
The iPhone is heralded as the most revolutionary mobile phone in human history, but the cold and harsh truth is that for all the cheering and punditry, the iPhone’s impact on the world is negligible. Sure, it had a huge impact on the smartphone market in rich countries - but it didn’t have such an impact on the world.
For all the bad jokes directed at the company during its trying times, Nokia is the technology company that truly changed the world. Nokia put a mobile phone within every person’s reach. Even people in some of the poorest places on earth were given the ability to communicate wirelessly, thanks to Nokia making the mobile phone affordable to everyone. Personally, I see this as one of the greatest achievements of the technology world, but sadly, it’s often overlooked because “ooh Apple has pinch-to-zoom!!!1!”
What Nokia did for the mobile phone, Android is doing for the smartphone. It’s not Apple that’s going to put a smartphone in every corner of the globe - it’s not Microsoft; heck, not even Google, but Android. In ten to fifteen years’ time, we will look back and regard Android as the technology that enabled even the poorest people in this world to have access to the web (and thus, knowledge), just like we regard Nokia as the company that put the mobile phone in every corner of the globe.
When I picked up my 91 year-old grandfather last night from his apartment to bring him back to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, he had a page clipped from the NYTimes magazine in hand.
“It’s about martinis. They don’t use vermouth anymore! I want your dad to read it.”
My grandfather really likes martinis. In fact, most memories I have of martinis involve some combination of my dad and grandfather either preparing, drinking, or talking about starting on their “second half.” I wasn’t surprised that he had taken the time grab this article with my dad in mind.
When we got back to our house, Gramps gave the article to my dad telling him to read it when he got the chance. My dad said thanks, looked it over, and then started preparing martinis.
When I came downstairs this morning, the martini article was sitting on the kitchen counter.
I was suddenly struck by something very poignant. If I had found an article about martinis, it probably would have been in the online version of the NYTimes magazine (in fact, that article is here). I would have emailed it to my dad, not clipped it out.
But my grandfather, despite a successful mechanical engineering career and constant tinkering with electronics for his old cars, has no interest in the world of computers and the internet. When he reads an article, it’s in the paper version of the paper. We he wants to share something, it’s related to a topic he really cares about. And the person he shares it with is someone he knows will get a kick out of it.
Sharing, however, requires tearing out, driving over, and presenting the article to the recipent, with a verbal description of why the article is being shared: “You should read this because it’s a about martinis. They don’t use vermouth!”
This morning, the article was already buried under an emptied bowl of Goldfish, a pair of gloves, and a wooden spoon. It was just like an email that gets pushed further and further down in your inbox, gradually forgotten after the momentary thrill of entertainment.
Even though the mediums are changing, sharing is still the same deep down. It’s just about getting the good stuff to the right people and sharing they joy.
A few weeks back, Twitter announced that they’ll be making some significant changes to the their web interface by adding an “Activity” tab. This tab, which will replace the current “Retweet” tab, will show when people in your network have favorited tweets, which users they’ve followed, when they’ve edited their lists, and more.
The feature is only being rolled out to a limited numbers of users for now, but those who have used it have said that it makes their Twitter feed “come alive.”
I’m looking forward to having access for one major reason: favorites. The “favorite” button isn’t anything new, but Twitter has never given any clear indication as to how it should be used. After some quick research, it became clear that lots of different users favorite tweets for a few different reasons:
Read later: If you come across a tweet with a link and you can’t read the linked content immediately, favoring the tweet makes it easy to find later.
Sign of appreciation: If someone says something you like, favoring is like a hat-tip, or equivalent of a Facebook “Like.”
Reference/archive: Save the tweet if it’s information you know you’ll need later, or want to have saved.
Retweeting content is a great syndication method for pushing content to your followers. When you retweet something, it helps other users “organically” discover interesting sources that they don’t follow, since these tweets will show up in their home feed (as if it was a tweet by you). Retweeting is a way to “vote” for interesting tweets since it helps promote the tweet, and is a way of helping the original author gauge how popular the tweet is.
However, retweeting is public. This is why favoriting tweets is useful: it lets you “vote” for content, but out of the public stream. Whether you favorite a tweet to indicate appreciation or want to save it and read later, you’re still indicating a level of interest in the linked content, which is also useful for the original author and people in your network.
Twitter recently added a feature to send you an email when someone favorites any of your tweets. If you’re not a “thought leader” or main “content producer,” this isn’t a huge deal, but the notification is interesting. Just like seeing that someone liked or +1’ed one of your posts. (“SOMEBODY LOVES ME!”)
The main problem with favorited tweets right now is that they’re buried in a user’s profile screen. For many, there’s also no clear value to how favorites tweets might be useful, who sees them, or how they can find them later.
By showing that other people are favoriting tweets in the Activity tab, it will hopefully demonstrate that the feature’s main utility is to show appreciation — a hat-tip to easily acknowledge something you like. This acknowledgement is personal but not secret; the action isn’t broadcast publicly to your followers, but will be easier to find. This will hopefully help get more people into the habit of regularly favoriting tweets that are interesting or have stuff to check out later.
As more users favorite tweets, it will help surface interesting and relevant content that you might not otherwise have found. Favoriting becomes an easy and unobtrusive way to vote for content, which will also make Twitter’s search and suggestions more powerful and accurate.
I wanted to discuss that “state” of Twitter favorites before the new activity tab is available in order to note differences when it’s rolled out to everyone. Not many people in my immediate network favorite tweets, but I would guess this is because they don’t know why they would, or don’t even know the feature is available. Once it becomes a more prominent way to discover content outside of the main Twitter stream, favoring tweets will become a lot more common.
If done right, favorites could easy become one of Twitter’s most important features.
Combined with the ability to share with individual people, Google+’s introduction of “circles” makes fine-grain sharing possible for every conceivable piece of media you could ever want to share with anyone.
But choosing who to share with takes a lot of work. First, you’ve got to decide “who cares?” Then, if you haven’t already shared with everyone, you have to scroll and click through lots of menus to select the cirlces/people to share with. It’s kind of a pain.
I was at a friend’s birthday party this weekend and took this photo:
It’s a pretty silly photo, and while I had a clear idea of who would also think it’s silly, this group of people wasn’t encapsulated in single Google+ circle. It would have been an annoying amount of work to momentarily extricate myself from the party and choose each person/circle to share with. Furthermore, in my continued attempt to avoid causing other people FOMS (Fear of Missing Something), the last thing I wanted to do was share the photo with “All Circles.”
Google has been working hard to integrate their Maps, Latitude and Places applications. Not only can you use Google Maps to “check-in” to a venue on Google Places with Google Latitude (THAT sounds confusing!), you can also get reminders to check-in when you’re at specific locations, or even be checked-in automatically.
(Google Maps, Google Places and Google Latitude are naturally intertwined since they’re all based on location. If you’re not familiar with the differences between them, here’s the basic gist:
Imagine this: when you show up at the bar for this birthday party, Google Latitude automatically checks you in (via the device in your pocket). Your friends show up, and they’re also automatically checked in. No one’s check-ins are shared with anyone else; they’re kept private and just recorded in your personal location history.
A little while later you take a photo. Your device asks if you want to share the photo with the friends who are also checked in to the bar with you. Simple, easy, quick and relevant.
Consider the assumption being made here: when you’re checked in somewhere at the same time as your friends, you’re probably hanging out with them. The photos taken are probably relevant to what you’re doing together, so why not just share them on the fly?
This isn’t a new idea; in fact, it’s very similar to what Color is trying to do. However, Color’s approach is to make every photo taken with the app public to whoever else was there with you. This is fine since it’s known from the start that everyone can see everything, but it’s not appropriate for private events.
One issue with Facebook that Google+ strives to solve is that not all “friends” are created equal. In some cases, friending someone on Facebook is nothing more than a mutual acknowledgement of existence on Planet Earth. You’re not actually planning to hang out, and you might never see each other again. But maybe it was fun talking that one time at that party at that guy’s place, and you friended each other on Facebook to “keep in touch.” (Don’t question this logic; it happens all the time, and no one knows why.)
Google+ brings the task of explicitly organizing your friends into groups to the forefront. Yet even this is an inexact representation of real-world situations, proving to be even less useful with in-the-moment photo-sharing. What if everyone in your “Best Friends” circle wasn’t there when the photo was taken? Do you still share with that circle? Is it worth making that last person feel bad that they weren’t there? I still try to avoid FOMS, but Facebook proves that most people LOVE bragging and showing the great time you didn’t have with them.
Better use of location might help solve these problems.
Being prompted with a list of nearby “friends” (in both time and space) can be dangerous. What if you weren’t supposed to know someone was there? Google actually removed a feature that would automatically notify you when friends were nearby for this very reason.
There are lots of creative ways around this, one of which is to check into an event at a location (Gowalla lets you do this, Foursquare less explicitly so). Maybe everyone gets an invitation, and if they accept and check-in, they’re automatically added to a a guest list that pops up when you take a photo. That way, if you don’t accept the invitation, you’re not on the list, even if you’re at the venue at the same time.
It’s similar to being at a wedding with disposable cameras everywhere. Everyone shares the cameras to take photos, and then everything gets developed and shared with everyone who was there.
As mentioned, Gowalla already lets you create and check into events. From a product standpoint, Gowalla is much more focused on letting you remember and collect your experiences. They’ve fully embraced the “passport” design metaphor, and let you collect stamps for venues, states, countries etc. If you use it consistently, you’re creating a timeline of what you’ve done and where you’ve gone.
Foursquare, on the other hand, is more about sharing where you are with friends. It’s designed to maximize FOMS.
Neither of these applications offers automatic check-ins or fine-grain sharing capabilities. That’s where Google Latitude stands out, even though it feels much more utilitarian right now.
My hope is that, as a whole, these location technologies tend towards smart, automated ways of sharing that minimize privacy concerns and maximize relevancy. I don’t like choosing from lists or organizing my friends. I want to take lots of photos and know that it’s easy to share the images with the people that matter the most, without anyone worrying about the “wrong” people seeing them.
Focusing on location is one solution, but it will be exciting to see what else the community comes up with to tackle this complex problem.
8tracks.com, the awesome music playlist creation and curation site, recently released a simple feature that pulls together the experience of making a mix and of making the experience more social, and I think it’s killer.
When you create a playlist, you now have the option to choose which playlist comes next. This solves a problem that I’ve found when using 8tracks, and internet radio in general: you’re listening to something that works, and then you’re listening to something that doesn’t. It turns out that a new mix was randomly selected, but it’s totally different that what had going before. That means you’ve got to find a new mix, and prepare yourself to find a NEW mix again and again.
No more. Being able to choose the next mix is just closing the loop for on the experience. The listener always has a constant stream of awesome music, and can trust that they won’t be left alone. When a DJ chooses the next mix, they’re passing the torch. They’re carefully crafting the list of songs they want, and then handing it off the next person, who’s job it is to keep you interested.
There are some really cool dynamics that emerge here:
Tighter DJ communities. Passing the listener off to another DJ is just like giving that DJ a stamp of approval, adding another node to a small network of mixes interconnected by people, rather than shuffle. It’s a human curation, rather than curation by tags or “genius.” The result is that it’s much easier for collaborations to emerge because DJ’s can plan ahead. It’s possible to set the mood and choose tracks based on what you know others can do, and how that relates to what you’ve done.
What mixes link to yours? If you have a very popular mix, then you’re likely to see lots of mixes selecting yours as the next mix. This provides an interesting way to quantifiably judge the popularity of a DJ or a mix they’ve put together.
On the contrary, something completely different might happen. Listens on the site might become more evenly distributed over a much wider range of playlists as friends collaborate offline, instead of relying on the lists of “top mixes” to see what comes next. Instead of users jumping around the 8tracks social graph, they’ll stay closer to who they know personally. This also brings up all sorts of interesting ideas about social connections online and how they collide with connection in real life, especially in the music universe.
Visualizations. A simple way to visualize the new system is to represent each playlist as a node, with showing which mix it follows or precedes. It would be interesting to see if patterns emerge among users, genres tracks or tags.
I can’t wait to delve into this feature a little more, and try to get friends to do so as well. Choosing the next mix helps to bolster the sites moniker of “handcrafted internet radio,” and is strong step towards recommendation from people, rather than random shuffle.
Check it out NOW: 8tracks.com
