July 15, 2010
A Grill’d Experience
I'm not the most prolific of Foursquare users but do make the point of checking in whenever I hit somewhere fresh, in this case the newly opened Grill'd, slap bang next to Mad Mex on Crown Street, Sydney. When the app found the venue a little "Special Offer" tag appeared in the top right corner indicating goodies for checking in: smalls fries with every burger purchase, the lucky mayor scoring a free burger every other Friday. The only real fail was the burger jockey asking me to "print out the coupon" next time. Sorry mate, last time I checked my iPhone didn't have a send to printer function. What Grill'd gave me was, besides a delicious burger, a good experience, and something for free, was probably the most important thing of all: something to share with my friends aka social currency.
April 19, 2010
Fred Wilson: The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
I'd been sitting on Kottke's link for a while and when I finally got around to watching a FOWA presentation by Fred Wilson - VC and principal of Union Square Ventures - I was pleasantly blown away. I was in need of some inspiration, something to take me back to the core of what I like and want to do. Here's what I took out of it, something which I'll be referring back to as I hit my next round of programming, innovating and just plain inventing.
1. Speed
- Speed is more than a feature.
- Power users can have a sympathetic eye, mainstream users probably not.
- Speed is not a feature, it's a requirement.
- Pingdom: When an application is getting bogged down, it doesn't grow as quickly.
2. Instant Utility
- The service needs to be instantly useful.
- No setup.
- No painful configuration.
- Useful right out of the box.
- If you’re building an information service, crawl the web to populate the service.
- Give people something right off the bat.
3. Software is Media
- Users approach software the same way they approach media.
- Media: a magazine, a newspaper or a TV show.
- Voice: have an attitude, and a style. Be unique. Be different.
- Software has to have a personality.
- Software has to have attitude.
- The "Fail Whale" gave Twitter personality. It showed there was attitude and media savvy behind the service. It created a voice.
- Voice is important in a web app.
4. Less is More
- Less is more, particularly early on when you launch.
- You can grow the utility of your service.
- Facebook was simplistic at launch.
- The best thing about Delicious was its simplicity.
- People used Delicious every single day, maybe 5 or 10 times a day.
- You do one little thing, but you do it all the time.
- It’s reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it.
5. Make it Programmable
- Make it possible that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to your web application.
- You need an API.
- If it's a read-only API, it might as well be RSS.
- When people can add value to your application, they are adding energy to the application. They bring more users, bring more data and bring more richness.
6. Make it Personal
- You want third-party developers, and users, to infuse your application with their energy.
- Ownership means advocation: turn your users into a marketing force.
- Make your application personal.
- Ownership can pose problems. The community can feel like they own the application.
- The more people care, the more they are ingrained.
7. RESTful
- REST is a software architecture.
- Resources have a URL.
- Everything in the application needs to have a clean and comprehensible URL.
- Make your URLs discoverable.
- Allow for a very deep and open kind of architecture.
8. Discoverabilty
- Understand search engine optimisation. Understand the rules.
- SEO needs to be baked in from the ground up.
- Needs to be discoverable and optimised for social media.
- Needs virality.
- Josh Kopelman: "We Just Need to Add Some Virality".
- Needs to be built from the ground up to be viral.
9. Clean
- Don't be busy on the page.
- White space or dark space: just make sure there's lots of it.
- Big fonts.
- Don't present too much functionality on the one page.
- Make it inviting.
- Be efficient with functionality.
10. Playful
- 6 words to live by: mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent. (Fred Wilson couldn't recall the last word).
- Twitter was invented in a children's slide is in South Park, San Francisco.
- The ability to play in an application is important.
- Weight Watchers is a game. You establish goals, measure, report, and are rewarded.
- Game dynamic. Ultimately, it's a game.
- LinkedIn: Relationships. Twitter: Followers. Facebook: Friends.
- Foursquare used status and badges to empower the development of (what is essentially) a local information service.
1. Speed
- Speed is more than a feature.
- Power users can have a sympathetic eye, mainstream users probably not.
- Speed is not a feature, it's a requirement.
- Pingdom: When an application is getting bogged down, it doesn't grow as quickly.
2. Instant Utility
- The service needs to be instantly useful.
- No setup.
- No painful configuration.
- Useful right out of the box.
- If you’re building an information service, crawl the web to populate the service.
- Give people something right off the bat.
3. Software is Media
- Users approach software the same way they approach media.
- Media: a magazine, a newspaper or a TV show.
- Voice: have an attitude, and a style. Be unique. Be different.
- Software has to have a personality.
- Software has to have attitude.
- The "Fail Whale" gave Twitter personality. It showed there was attitude and media savvy behind the service. It created a voice.
- Voice is important in a web app.
4. Less is More
- Less is more, particularly early on when you launch.
- You can grow the utility of your service.
- Facebook was simplistic at launch.
- The best thing about Delicious was its simplicity.
- People used Delicious every single day, maybe 5 or 10 times a day.
- You do one little thing, but you do it all the time.
- It’s reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it.
5. Make it Programmable
- Make it possible that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to your web application.
- You need an API.
- If it's a read-only API, it might as well be RSS.
- When people can add value to your application, they are adding energy to the application. They bring more users, bring more data and bring more richness.
6. Make it Personal
- You want third-party developers, and users, to infuse your application with their energy.
- Ownership means advocation: turn your users into a marketing force.
- Make your application personal.
- Ownership can pose problems. The community can feel like they own the application.
- The more people care, the more they are ingrained.
7. RESTful
- REST is a software architecture.
- Resources have a URL.
- Everything in the application needs to have a clean and comprehensible URL.
- Make your URLs discoverable.
- Allow for a very deep and open kind of architecture.
8. Discoverabilty
- Understand search engine optimisation. Understand the rules.
- SEO needs to be baked in from the ground up.
- Needs to be discoverable and optimised for social media.
- Needs virality.
- Josh Kopelman: "We Just Need to Add Some Virality".
- Needs to be built from the ground up to be viral.
9. Clean
- Don't be busy on the page.
- White space or dark space: just make sure there's lots of it.
- Big fonts.
- Don't present too much functionality on the one page.
- Make it inviting.
- Be efficient with functionality.
10. Playful
- 6 words to live by: mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent. (Fred Wilson couldn't recall the last word).
- Twitter was invented in a children's slide is in South Park, San Francisco.
- The ability to play in an application is important.
- Weight Watchers is a game. You establish goals, measure, report, and are rewarded.
- Game dynamic. Ultimately, it's a game.
- LinkedIn: Relationships. Twitter: Followers. Facebook: Friends.
- Foursquare used status and badges to empower the development of (what is essentially) a local information service.
March 25, 2010
Foursquare: Stalk Much?
"Celebrity Mode is a modified version of the standard Foursquare model which allows users to 'follow' a celebrity and lets high-profile users to choose whether check-ins are sent to inner-circle friends or to both friends and followers," a release explained. "Foursquare users can also view tips that the celebrities they are following have left behind at places all over the world."
CNET
CNET
February 9, 2010
Foursquare Partners With Zagat, Serves Up A Foodie Badge
"In addition to offering a special badge for Foursquare users, Zagat will begin piping tips and recommendations into the Foursquare system, which already doubles as a handy user-generated city guide. Foursquare users can submit their own suggestions for activities and dishes to order at a particular restaurant, which will pop up when their friends "check in" on Foursquare from that venue.
But the Zagat partnership will add a slightly different layer to the content by incorporating recommendations culled from the company's repository of reader reviews. For example, users who check into a Zagat-ranked restaurant will receive suggestions about great dishes or the best dessert on the menu."
The New York Times
But the Zagat partnership will add a slightly different layer to the content by incorporating recommendations culled from the company's repository of reader reviews. For example, users who check into a Zagat-ranked restaurant will receive suggestions about great dishes or the best dessert on the menu."
The New York Times
December 1, 2009
My First Thoughts On Foursquare
FourSquare via Jason McKim on Flickr, Some Rights Reserved.
Their spiel: "We're all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. We'll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people." For me it's more like metadata in a physical space: the ability to tag a physical space with data that someone else can locate and consume. (Kind of like how dogs operate but at a much lower level right? Think about it). It's really powerful stuff; I've read a few conceptual pieces in the past about metadata in the physical space but I don't think the technology was quite there. Enter the iPhone and Android, although you can use a browser-based mobile device all the way to shorthand SMS.Foursquare was born out of Dodgeball, a similar service that was bought by Google, shut down, and replaced by Latitude. So the story goes Dodgeball's creators walked out on Google for lack of support. (I'd even go as far as saying that Dodgeball was close to the first incarnation of Twitter).
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