SocialStartups.com

Someone wanted to know what my thoughts on PeopleBrowsr were, so I’ve copied the email I sent to them in reply to their request for a review.

(Now that I’ve finished writing this, I realize this might come across as a bit harsh. I apologize in advance and I appreciate all the work that went into building this. It’s a lot easier to criticize than to actually go out and build something yourself.)

I’ll start with the initial set up process. The homepage itself wasn’t clear - what does PeopleBrowsr do? How will it help me? Then, if I’m ready to take the plunge, it’s not obvious that I’m supposed to click the Twitter icon - it looks like a graphic, not a “click me!” button. 37signals does a great job with their homepage. Once you do click the Twitter icon, you are presented with a login form, which is fine, although it’d be better if you explained why you need my private Twitter password and why I should trust you with it. The form submit buttons are also not very clear. First, there are two of them, and they both look like they might be video players or something. Second, clicking on them without filling in the username/password info leaves you with a javascript alert box error, which is tacky design.

So then I am presented with the following screen (which I got to by clicking the rightmost Go button - the one that I thought would give me the three column view):

Now what do I do with this page? How is it helping me? I use twitter to read people’s tweets, but this page has no text on it at all. Some of these avatars I don’t even recognize. Where is the content? At best, Twitter is a conversation. At least, it’s a stream of status messages. This grid, however, is just static. Imagine I’m at a conference or there is a major world calamity - how will this view give me “more power for twitter”?

Smaller nitpicks about this page - I don’t think the Search tip is necessary. Search boxes are so common these days that if, in your user testing, you found people were confused, then a redesign of the box should clear things up. Apple does a good job by simply including the magnifying glass icon. The icons to the left of the search box are opaque. What do they do? I should be able to have some intuition on what something is before I click on it. Otherwise, a majority of people just will ignore it. Also, the Search tip obscures the input fields when you do click on the icons.

OK, so let’s assume that I’ve managed to discover the small blue icon in the bottom right corner of the window and I’ve figured out that “Go to Stream” (the tooltip) will give me what twitter.com has always shown me: the tweets of the people I follow (that is the point of twitter, after all).

First, notice the vertical alphabetical index bar. 1) I don’t know how it got there. 2) I don’t know how to get rid of it. 3) It’s obscuring the only way I can interact with people (reply, DM, retweet, etc), because that functionality is hidden behind the click of an arrow. Second, these tweets are old. There is a 30 minute gap between the latest tweet and the one before that.

I do really like the Followers column. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s a really nice stream, especially for those of us who have more followers than people we are following. I also like that you can tag your friends, although illustrating the public/private distinction with a padlock is a little unclear.

I think I’ll stop here, as this was the point I got to yesterday when I just gave up on PeopleBrowsr and went back to TweetDeck (fast, easy to use, groups). One feature request I do have which I think would be powerful is the addition of my Facebook friends’ status messages, as a majority of them are not using Twitter. If I could have one dashboard for all of my status message needs, I’d find that very useful.

Thanks,
David

I was chatting with my friend Dan Nelson today after bumping into him at the Cornell Music Department library. He’s currently a Ph.D student at UPenn studying musical composition. He threw an idea at me and, after some collaboration, we came up with something akin to a Flickr for composed music.

It would work like this:

Everyone who registers gets a tumblog. (Side note: I love Tumblr. I thought about apologizing to everyone who keeps hearing me implement ideas with Tumblr, but I’m not going to. They deserve it for a job well done.)

Composers will use their tumblogs to publish 2 things. One, an mp3 of their composition. Two, a PDF of the score. Composers are encouraged to tag their content for improved discovery.

Everyone can use their tumblr dashboard to follow composers they like and heart music they like. Everyone can also use their tumblogs to re-blog music they particularly like and post about their experience with the music they’ve discovered.

Like Flickr, people can search for music or composers. Like Flickr, you can explore the most interesting compositions. And most importantly, like Flickr, you can pay to have a hard copy printed, bound, and mailed directly to you.

Your market is anyone who buys sheet music - basically every school and private music teacher in the country (and internationally). Sure, some people would just print out the PDFs for free, but I bet enough schools and teachers would pay for the nicely published and bound parts and score to make a profit. Like Chris Anderson has been saying since he wrote the Long Tail, you can be successful even if only a minority of your users pay.

If successful, what we will have done is broken the pre-Internet strangehold of the major publishing houses and academic elitism on composed music, similar to what Vimeo is doing for video and Etsy is doing for handmade goods. Something I thought about when I was at Etsy that applies here is, “An audience for every artist.” We can create a forum for quality composed music with a long tail. We can use social aggregation instead of editorial fiat to discovery great music. We can empower people to try their hand at composition even if they are a one-hit-wonder.

If anyone is interested in helping Dan build this company, please contact me - david.lifson at gmail - and I’ll pass your name along. It’s super simple, engineering-wise; Tumblr’s API is free and easy to use, storing the data and metadata is easy, slap a search index on the data, and you’re done. All that would be left is to set up a business partnership with a printing company like Subito Music, and the task of getting the word out and building up a community. And really, how many startups these days come with a business model, not to mention a highly targeted audience and a trove of user preference data.

This is a test post using the ScribeFire blogging plug-in for Firefox. I’ve been using Flock for years now, but it’s been eating up so much CPU that it’s rendering my poor little Macbook Air useless. On top of that, the start up and shut down times are unacceptable.

My usage of Flock has changed over the years. At first, I had the People sidebar open all the time, first showing my facebook friends updates, then later adding in Twitter and Flickr. Occasionally I’d use the Media Bar to view a stream of photos featuring my Facebook friends (something I don’t think you can do anywhere else). I always loved being able to click the “star” next to the address bar to bookmark a page and add it to del.icio.us. Finally, blogging an article was as easy as right-clicking and choosing “Blog this page”.

While the bookmarking and blogging functionality are still part of my routine (and what I think I can duplicate with firefox plug-ins), I’ve stopped using the People sidebar and the Media Bar. Why? It’s a matter of granularity. TweetDeck has become the perfect Twitter application for me (although occasionally seems to need a re-boot as well) because of the easy interactions built into the app - replying, direct messaging, looking up a profile, tracking @replies, grouping contacts. Facebook’s Live Feed shows more data; Flock seemed to just say “Profile updated” without showing what happened. Flickr’s new homepage is similar - I know what changed, not just that something happened (reminds me of Bacn). Regarding the Media Bar, this is still a neat feature, but something I didn’t use very often at all, because the images were too small to see clearly yet so big that it cramping my regular browsing experience.

If Flock can fix it’s performance issues, I’d be willing to go back. When Chrome comes out for Mac, I’m going to give that a try. In the meantime, I’m going to keep flying with Firefox.

Hi all,

Now that election fever has passed (wish I could say the same for the financial mess) I plan on getting back into the stuff I love writing about. Yahoo’s Y!OS is at the top of my list because I think it has fantastic potential and hasn’t been properly analyzed. I can’t speak for Yahoo!’s ability to stay focused and execute their strategy, so I’ll stay focused on their strategy presentation.

See you soon,
Dave

PS - I announced on Twitter / Facebook yesterday that I’m leaving Etsy. Help me find a new job! My resume is here- http://bit.ly/3DYPq5