Archive for the ‘Whatever’ Category
« Older Entries |Your e-mail is getting smarter
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Lately I have the feeling that my e-mail is getting smarter. I always being unhappy with most of the clients and solutions to manage my e-mails and contacts, but things are changing fast. So far I’ve been using a combination of labels and the Multiple Inbox lab feature to organize my email, so that I won’t forget the things to do and they won’t be submerged by all the incoming ones. This is what my inbox look like:
But last night Google launched a new feature for Gmail called Priority Inbox, where more important e-mails are separated from the rest. To do the trick I suppose Google consider opening rate and frequency of replies for each specific sender. Of course the filter will get better with time, but I’m already happy for seeing a big player tackling the inbox overload problem. Here’s a video that explains the feature:
So far it seems working pretty well for me and I’m sure it will improve the more I use it. This feature combined with the right plugins, like Rapportive, definitely are making me love my inbox a little more.
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People are asking for less
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Take a look at some of the most successful applications in the last few months, even in the last few years. People are craving less. They are tired of overcrowded experiences. Strong evidence of this can be found in the success of applications such as Instapaper and Flipboard.
Instapaper, in combination with the iPad, completely changed the way I consume my daily readings. Now, whenever I see an interesting article, I instapaper it so that I can read it later, when I can give it my full attention, without annoying multiple pages, overwhelming ads, and with less distractions and noise. Even Apple recently added a similar feature to their browser with Reader, a feature that lets you visualize the article à la Instapaper. Some bloggers complained that, in doing so, Apple was penalizing the websites that make their buck from advertising, but in my opinion, when a user clicks the Reader button, this simply expresses a desire for less, for clean, for readability. I’m sorry dear blogger, I love your articles, but I’m sick of your 14 blinking banners right next to it. I’m tired of having to scroll pass your Google Adsense links in order to get to the content. I hate having to go through five two-paragraph-long pages, so that I can help you spike your page views.
Similarly, Flipboard creates a more elegant and cleaner way to consume your Twitter and Facebook stream. Thanks to big images, fewer elements per page, and an intelligent usage of the space, it helps the user focus on the actual content. I feel I’ve been getting so much more from Twitter and Facebook since I have less things to distract my attention. No more cows and gangsters in the way. No invitations to the latest time sink.
People choosing to use these applications are begging developers and designers to create experiences that are cleaner and more pleasant to use. Just listen to them.
Tags: Flipboard, Instapaper, Reader
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Where is Groupon going?
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
Andrew Mason, Groupon’s CEO, recently announced deals personalization, a feature initially available in six cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle. This move by Groupon was done for several reasons, such as the necessity to differentiate itself from several clones (which are sprouting at the same rate of Groupon’s deals, daily) and an large amount of requests from businesses to be featured on the site. Deals personalization definitely made sense to me, so much so that the announcement was made just few hours before the soft launch of one of my projects, WishADeal.com. How many times have you looked at your inbox and thought, “why am I getting e-mails for pole dancing classes and spa deals?” This is exactly why Groupon is adding some level of personalization. With Wish A Deal I go even a step further by letting you pick the category of the deals you’d like to receive, and gather them from several daily deal sites in a single e-mail.
But where is this daily deals market going? My guess: now that the market is saturated by a leader, Groupon, and multiple clones, the next natural step will be to focus on verticals. Woot spun off Wine Woot, Shirt Woot, and so on. This would be a great time to launch sites such as Daily Burger Deal or Vegan Daily Offer. At this point, people are familiar with the concept of daily deals and would definitely appreciate a really specialized and targeted service. And, I’m willing to bet that this is something that sites like Groupon and Living Social will offer in the near future.
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Interview on CloudPlumbing.com
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
This may be old news for you, but I wanted to share it anyway on my blog. A couple of weeks ago I’ve been interviewed by Ryan Parsley on CloudPlumbing.com. We mostly spoke about some of the new projects I’m starting with 39 Inc. as well as the pros in building really focused applications.
You can find the full interview on CloudPlumbing.com.
Tags: FancyDocs, Inspiration, Interview, iOS Applications, Phofolio, Web Applications
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Twitter is getting ready for the World Cup
Saturday, May 29th, 2010
Since Twitter went global, I joined the translator program, helping Twitter to translate its content (not the tweets obviously) in Italian.
Last night while I was translating, one of the strings in my queue caught my attention:
World Cup 2010 Match Report – %{team_a} versus %{team_b}
Of course, the page it pointed to isn’t active yet, so we will need to wait another week to see it. It’s definitely going to be an interesting tool to enrich the game-watching experience.
Tags: Twitter
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Face the truth
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Your ideas are worth nothing. Until you build them.
Photo by marc.thiele
Tags: Inspiration
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How to use Pikchur on Twitterrific for iPad
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
The Twitter client situation for iPad is still kinda sad. Not a lot of players and not a lot of quality, mostly because not many developers grasped the best way to visualize Twitter on this device.
While waiting for Tweetie Twitter for iPad, I decided to use Twitterrific for iPad, gorgeous design, simple and free. But there is a “but.” It doesn’t come with native support for my favorite picture sharing service: Pikchur. Luckily they offer a way to add your own custom services for media uploads, you just need the end point of the media service URL endpoint and you’ll be good to go.
If you’d like to add Pikchur as well, here is their endpoint:
http://api.pikchur.com/twitterrific
Launch the application and tap on the Compose button in the upper-right corner of the screen. In the window that appears, tap on the camera icon and select “Change Upload Service”. At the bottom of the list that’s displayed, you’ll see “Other…”. Tap that and you see a text field where you can specify the “Media Service URL Endpoint”. Enter “http://api.pikchur.com/twitterrific” and then tap outside the popover window to dismiss it. Done!
Another good thing is that this media end point already supports twitters new echo oAuth, so no need to change any settings when they switch over to oAuth only authentication.
Now I can finally share my pictures and videos on Pikchur, the only problem is that at the moment media are uploaded without a title. It would be nice if Twitterrific passed the parameter “message” so that media services could use it as caption for the picture.
Tags: API, iPad, iPad Applications, Twitter
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The Man In The Arena
Monday, March 29th, 2010
Here is a great quote by the US president Theodore Roosevelt from a speech given at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Tags: Inspiration, Quote
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Fred Wilson’s 10 golden principle for successful startups (FOWA)
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
I took some notes this year at FOWA, and I’d like to share with you some of the things I learned or found valuable at FOWA (Future of Web Apps). This first post is about what I learned from Fred Wilson‘s presentation. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a smaller ($125 million in capital under management), newly formed, New York City based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy, FeedBurner, Indeed.com, Disqus, Clickable and many others. In his presentation he highlighted ten points he finds critical for being a successful startup.
Speed: this is a critical factor for growth. Applications that aren’t fast don’t grow as fast as applications with better speed performances.
Instant Utility: your application has to be useful out of the box. Let the user see an immediate return for using your application.
Voice: you need to have a style, a personality. People need to feel like they are consuming a media. Just look at the way Wufoo communicates with their users, with very fun unusual messages.
Less is more: Your application has to be simple. Try to focus on one thing and do it very well. You can always add more features later. This helps speed as well.
Programmable: make it easy for other people to plug or build on top of your application. Your API should always be read/write. This is the reason why we integrated SquarePik with Foursquare only, and not Gowalla. Gowalla has a read-only API, making the applications built on it virtually useless.
Personal: make the experience feel personal. Even little things like avatars or personal profiles make users feel like they own part of the application. Think about how your perception of your Facebook page changed since they changed its URL from a number to your username. Now it’s not just a page in their system, it’s your personal page.
Restful: Fred used this term in a personal and incorrect way by his own admission. He thinks the entire application should have an easy URL system. You should be able to reach any page of your app via URL. That makes it easy to share and send to other people.
Discoverable: people need to be able to be find your application, via SEO or social media. At the end of the presentation, he also recommended the use of guerrilla marketing because of its cost effectiveness.
Clean: use big spaces, big fonts and don’t add too many functions on a page. It has to be very clear at any time what the user should do.
Playful: the ability to play in an application is very important. The game element can help the success of an application. Foursquare and Gowalla are really good examples of this. Even something as simple as a top contributor chart could be seen as a game.
What other things do you think are key for the success of a web application?
Tags: Business, FOWA, Web Applications
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The secret of happiness
Friday, February 19th, 2010
Brillant
Tags: Inspiration
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