This is facebook's core value prop though. To flip is would be fundamentally flip what facebook's good at - creating a deeper digital connection with ppl you meet in real life.
Meeting ppl on facebook became weird and creepy when they became too open. It wasn't an issue so much when they were closed to college networks. They sacrificed privacy for growth.
On the flipside, consider LinkedIn, where it's not considered creepy to reach out to a complete stranger (recruiters do it all the time). But b/c LinkedIn has a focus (careers) and has more privacy, this is acceptable in their ecosystem.
Net net, I think the only way facebook can be about meeting new ppl and do it well is if they sacrifice openness. Otherwise the creepy factor will undermine success.
I think the key question is where will the consumers go? Android is more open than iOS, but devs continue to build for iOS first b/c that's where all the users are at, especially the paying users.
I only know a little bit about the Firefox OS project, but if you give control to the OEMs, won't you run into the same problem that Android has with fragmentation?
On one hand, I don't want to be naive. Everything on the desktop has moved into the browser. That happened a lot faster than I though. Everything in mobile is moving 2x the speed of desktop, so will everything move onto a browser in mobile eventually too? The key difference between the desktop and mobile is that there isn't hardware ubiquity. Every computer has a keyboard and a mouse. But the hardware buttons aren't standardized across Apple and Android. The home button is crucial on the iPhone and same with Android. Would either of those platforms ever cede control over that button to a browser? Otherwise, you've got to put that functionality on the screen which takes up space.
People use apps on their phones, not the web. Mobile web is a subpar experience. LTE will fix some of the speed issues. HTML5...well that's going to take a lot longer than people think. Cool technology but ANY lag with a gesture makes the touch interaction feel broken.
I've been thinking on this problem for the past 4 months. Seems like you're pretty passionate about it too. It's a big problem for users, and companies are sitting back and ignoring it. I have lots of theories as to why. Would love to meet up in person and share thoughts.
Hrm, that is weird, we got a lot of other sign ups on Launchrock. Pls email us at [email protected]. Can you give some details on your browser too. I'll report to Launchrock. Sorry for the inconvenience.
"No messy onboarding required" - it means that your testers don't have to signup or login to send feedback. Their interface is purely email. You pose questions from our dashboard, they get sent an email secretly on the backend. When they reply to that email, it comes back into their feed (which is the third benefit).
Think of it as if you wanted each user to use Posterous to send feedback, except their blog is already private, and they just reply to an email prompt from you to post to it.
Does that make more sense and seem valuable? How might you rephrase the last 2 benefits to make it more clear?
Hi there. Yes you could. But in my experience in the past, that gets messy real fast. Can you imagine sending email blasts to even 30 people and getting feedback from those people and then wanting to dive deeper with a few of them? Not to mention you also need to BCC everyone to protect ppl's privacy. Then all the feedback is all mixed together with the rest of your email. Yes, there's lots of workarounds like using Mail Chimp and setting up email filters and folders. But it gets old really fast. And that's only the data gathering aspect.
The other half of it is to organize the data automatically so that each user's personal story comes through. One way to do that is to get people to register for some blog like tumblr and post to that, but that's a lot of responsibility on your tester and will likely reduce their response rate.
We aim to fix this tradeoff. And we free up your time to actually act on the feedback and insights.
Also, we've got a bunch of ideas to make it richer beyond just emails--lean startup MVP...maybe we were too minimum here?
Hrm, just tested it on Chrome on my Mac and it worked. We're using Launchrock to collect signups. Maybe they were down temporarily? Try again or email us directly at [email protected]. Thanks for your interest!
Thanks for the feedback. Seems like we're missing the mark a bit with our story telling. Maybe the audio might have helped. The demo showed a study where the reseracher wanted understand the user behavior of rescue dog owners, maybe to launch a community website for these owners.
The target right now is for people who want to collect a lot of qualitative feedback over time from a select user group. Use cases include beta tests or a screened users from a particular segment (new users, freelancers vs. enterprise, etc.). The goal is to understand user behavior so you can solve real pain points or tweak your value prop to reach them better. One powerful reserach technique is user diary studies (which is where we got our namesake).
We think that user diary studies can be pretty powerful, but they take a lot of time and effort to run. All methods out there are a trade off between ease of use or high maintenance. We want there to be free communication (more qualitative data) yet preserve organization (each user gets their own feed). That way, over time, you get a rich story about Jane, the freelance designer in the midwest, versus John, the cupcake shop owner in Manhattan. Then you can really understand what's driving user behavior for each, and you can take those insights and focus your product accordingly.
Hi there. UserDiary was conceived about a month ago at the Box.com hackathon. We won the Parse API prize. That was the initial encouragement to keep pushing forward.
Our mission at UserDiary is to break down barriers between product people and their users. Our goal is to make the process of qualitative user studies painless for the researcher and the participants, so that feedback can be shared freely and data is organized to yeild the clearest insights. The end result, we hope, are better designed products and happier users.
Right now we're in closed alpha with a very raw MVP. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks HN community!
This is facebook's core value prop though. To flip is would be fundamentally flip what facebook's good at - creating a deeper digital connection with ppl you meet in real life.
Meeting ppl on facebook became weird and creepy when they became too open. It wasn't an issue so much when they were closed to college networks. They sacrificed privacy for growth.
On the flipside, consider LinkedIn, where it's not considered creepy to reach out to a complete stranger (recruiters do it all the time). But b/c LinkedIn has a focus (careers) and has more privacy, this is acceptable in their ecosystem.
Net net, I think the only way facebook can be about meeting new ppl and do it well is if they sacrifice openness. Otherwise the creepy factor will undermine success.