Who would you expect to receive a message from? Presumably this happens more often than you think, and the company protocol is to get legal to deal with it. I think you've misinterpreted this as in any way "aggressive" - this is just a company trying to tie things up as efficiently as possible. Sure, you'd like an informal response, but when a company is operating at the scale of Mailchimp, that doesn't seem realistic.
I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.
This is an issue of direct relevance to many of those that work at Google. I think it's fine for corporations to take a stand on social issues that directly affect their employees.
I'm not sure "honest mistake" is really acceptable. This is a multi-million-dollar Triple A game. I think it's reasonable to expect their legal team should have double- and triple-check the rights to all arts assets. Ye, there are a lot of assets used in a game of TLoU's magnitude, but the subway map is so prominent I can't understand how it would have been skipped over. If they had time to include the asset, they should have had time to secure rights.
The screencap used to demonstrate the theft constitutes fair use, by the way. Cameron's using it to make a point to support his argument, which is totally legal.
I explored the possibility of using a bank safe as a replacement symbol in the original piece. A bank safe is very difficult to represent symbolically, particularly at the scale of a small icon, so I think we can probably rule that out. A folder symbol is an even worse candidate, as folders are already used to symbolically represent levels in a hierarchical file structure.
Any replacement for the floppy would need to be immediately recognisable and not already tied symbolically to another concept. My argument, simply, is that I don't think there's anything better. The floppy is a unique shape and conceptually tied only to "saving". The effort required to move away from a commonly-used symbol isn't trivial and I just don't think there's much to be gained.
I'd agree with that. But why couldn't the abstraction for "save" be the floppy disk symbol?
Just pretend the floppy disk never existed, and that the floppy-save symbol is just a completely abstract symbol. Doesn't it still work? As long as a symbol is unique, easy to identify, and easy to reproduce, it does its job. I'd argue that floppy symbol has stuck around because, on a purely visual level, it's hard to beat.
I'd argue that "better designed" is subjective here. Hacker News is optimised for high content density. Designer News has lower content density, but there's more space between posts (and visual signposts in the form of "badges") which makes the front-page easier to scan. I appreciate both approaches.
This seems to have a huge chicken-or-the-egg problem: the site is only valuable to consumers if they know their requests could have some influence, but companies will only listen to requests from Pvsh users if there's a critical mass (say, thousands or millions of votes for one feature).
Is there some way to re-jig the concept to get around this? Perhaps by focusing more directly on one particular product category and expanding outwards? Or by working with particular companies that are actively soliciting feature requests (in which case I'd know I'd be listened to)?
From the stats Kickstarter have released previously, situations like this (in which a project just barely doesn't reach its target) seem extremely rare. Kickstarter works because the model is simple: a hard deadline, a hard target, and go. It sucks that they were so close, but I don't think it would be in Kickstarter's interests to tweak the system to assist almost-made-it edge cases like this.
Agreed in general, though I'd dispute your point that hacking can't do permanent good. Sure, in fifty years, you likely won't care about the web app you built, but maybe that app helped somebody achieve their goals or inspired somebody else in some way, and that is what you'll remember. The work itself is never important in the long run... it's how that work helped others in some way.
I can see your point, but, taking a longer-term view, what happens when we hit hard limits to global growth?
In a world in which every country is developed and wealthy... where in the world does that material wealth come from? I can't conceive of how such a world could exist without some kind of significant technological breakthrough or massive social change.
I find it hard to get from, "Food, water, and energy shortages, exacerbated by climate change, could lead to instability and violence and the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people in the future" to, “Yet the probability of a more peaceful world is increasing." Food and water (and to some extent, now, energy) are base needs, and if those end up in short supply, it doesn't matter if we're "winning" or "gaining" in other areas. Fundamentally, a sustainable supply of food and water trumps everything else on that list, and if we end up losing at that, we've lost at everything... just worth keeping in mind.
37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.
It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.
Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...
Would there be any reason to use this over, say, a Mailchimp auto-responder? I don't mean that at all in a snarky way, just curious. I'd be interested to give this a go, but can't quite justify shifting my auto-reponders from Mailchimp just yet...
Could it be worth including a few stories or "case studies"? For example, "John has just moved to Melbourne and he'd like to know what hidden gems exist on the way to his new job, so..." If you've already had beta testers, I'm sure a few have compelling stories about how the app has led them to hidden gems - if I can understand how the app has "changed their lives", I'd be compelled to give it a go.
I think this is an interesting concept. I have a few questions, though, which I suspect could be commonly asked:
- What's the incentive for me to use this? Why not simply switch my phone off? It seems as though the core benefit is to answer the question, "Why isn't X answering their call?", but there's no clear incentive for X to share this. In fact, if X is busy, it's unlikely they will have the time to update their status.
- How do you explain to a non-technical user how this differs from Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare? How do you respond to a user telling you "I don't have time for another social network"?
- Have you thought about how to prevent "feature creep"? I see simplicity as the core selling point of this app, but I can also see strong pressure from investors to build this out until it turns into a generic social network.
Anyway, it looks visually stunning and I'm excited to see where you take it.
I presume one reason (as suggested in the video) is that Maily wants to promote "kid-friendly" email replies. I imagine kids (particularly the very young) would find it more fun to receive a visual reply than a standard email reply.
Well, yeah, noreply emails are useful for the business, and I understand that. They're not very useful for the customer, though.
Customers want to feel as though there's a real person they can contact directly. They don't want to feel as though they'll simply be shunted endlessly from department from department. My opinion is that the customer shouldn't need to learn how your company is structured simply to make a one-off complaint or ask a question. The onus should be on the company to receive the support query and then pass it along to somebody who can answer it.
I'm aware this a less obviously scaleable approach to support. For some companies, it's not really tenable. In many cases, the value of a single customer may be so low that providing good support isn't worth it... it may be more valuable to simply ignore that customer until they leave. But for companies in which every customer is valuable, or could be valuable (Mailchimp, for example, or Zendesk), this kind of "inefficient" customer-centric support makes sense.
I tentatively disagree. If the service isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, I think this could be a huge flop. However, if they can actually deliver, I can imagine this generating a huge amount of interest. "The return of MySpace" is a fairly compelling story, after all - if they pull it off.
Let's wait and see. Keep in mind, the video is pretty frenetically cut. The video is designed to provoke awe, but I suspect the interface is less "out there" in practice.
I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.