Lists

The pattern I've seen over the years is that a bookmarking site will arise, based on some fairly specific idea of what managing bookmarks should look like. As it catches on, the owners will discover that people have distinct and curious ways they like to manage their bookmarks. In an effort to grow the site, they will add features that try to please these different constituencies, and eventually end up with a kind of insipid and aggressively social product that no longer appeals to the initial audience, and resembles a lot of other sites.

At that point people move on to something else, and the cycle begins again. Sites that break out of it (like Instapaper or Pinterest) seem to succeed by picking a very specific vision of bookmarking and sticking to it.

I think of this as "abstraction syndrome", where you are tempted at every step to build a more abstract version of the product because of the diversity of uses people put it to. But that very process makes the project generic, boring, and less useful than the original niche idea.

I believe a similar dynamic explains why no one has "solved lists". It's like "solving social" or "solving writing". The details are where the fun is.

> When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065....

Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).

Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean, seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines, and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful. I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines (Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).

* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]

* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]

* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]

* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]

* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool

[1] http://la.eater.com/maps/best-los-angeles-restaurants-38

[2] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/special-gifts-for-your-favo...

[3] https://www.producthunt.com/@callmeed/collections/startup-na...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to...

I mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub project.

I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am reading / planning on reading [1]).

[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

[1] https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/notes/blob/master/00...

For the network use case, I think there are "levels" to it- some of which Keep solves.

For my wife and I, we share lists for groceries, errands, restaurants to try, etc. Keep is absolutely fantastic for sharing with only a few people.

I think there may be a level at which point Keep wouldn't handle a lot of people- though I'm not sure exactly what the level would be- but I haven't really tried it beyond a handful (4-6) people.

Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...

Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...

But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.

* Cadence (how often the lists changes)

* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)

* Sort (how the content is sorted)

If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.

Google came along and won the game because it's better in the world than anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It's so good that it can actually sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn't even dream of, with better results all the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the world.

Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what/who you're interested in, and help you out a bit.

Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are publishing right now.

HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff falls down over time, keeping them fresh.

Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it's a vertical ascending/descending list (unless you're on a mobile device), is in actuality a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their various collections.

The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.

In other words, the reason you're not seeing lists is because you're thinking of "lists" as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening in several ways, there's just often a lot more nuance and color than someone coming through to create their own collection.

At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is made of lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate that data and how you sort it. If you define "list-making" as the accumulation and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the list-making business.

One thing I've noticed, is that some lists are better served via different mediums than others; this might be the difference of putting something into apple Notes versus apple Todos. Sometimes you just need a list for reference, and other times you need each to represent something actionable.

Other times, the lists are directly associated with a service provider: amazon wishlists or netflix watchlist (note both have 'list' in their name) and are both geared towards furthering your investment in their platform. They aren't a core aspect of their business plan, but they are helpful to users.

Lists have also been around for quite a while! a chapter could be said to be a list of pages (if you consider a list a collection and a collection a list); and the index is certainly a list of chapters.

Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those aren't so much lists as bait technique.

Just think of possibility if you were starting with the Yahoo! Directory, making it mobile friendly, location aware, and providing users the ability to favorite, specific entry, add to the directory, comment on entries and directories.

Majority of businesses today have online presence. Starting from scratch is difficult. Getting users to build a list from scratch is difficult. Offer them a pre-built list/entries based on location and let them refine it.

http://listography.com/

But then think about the lists which are a single person's hardwork or maybe a group of people being paid to do so. A list need not necessarily be objective and can also provide the curator's views. This can be good or bad dependent on breadth of the curators knowledge. Lists(like really well written articles) are often the result of extensive data analysis which is why lists like those provided by WSJ and WGSN[3] are paid/exclusive services.

[1]:https://github.com/wasabeef/awesome-android-ui [2]:https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios [3]:http://www.wgsn.com/en/

W3C, MIT Decentralized Information Group, Web Annotation Protocol, Oracle, and IBM (amongst others) are working on it. http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/REC-ldp-20150226/

[edit: grammar]

But seriously, lists are useful because of their content. What a list does is condense information--an artifact of curation and maybe prioritization. So the value of the list correlates with its author.

Some lists are popular because they are curated by experts (newspaper restaurant reviews). Others are popular because they are curated by crowds, and thus express a collective social signal about what's valuable (Reddit, HN).

So, I'd have to say that lists are a horizontal thing. Lists will succeed or fail based on their utility and relevance, which to me says that lists don't really compete across verticals, except to the extent that everything competes for mindshare in general.

Basically the reason is that these are the tool our generation has grew up with and we find it hard to tell people to use anything else...

Why am I mentioning those companies? Because they help you make lists from data that isn't necessarily available with an interface - I'd keep an eye on those guys

Started as a way to make lists for yourself, turned into shared lists.

Heck, reddit's original idea was pitched as Delicious with voting, so you could say reddit fits this group too.

I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to change, and not an indicator of potential success.

I have bought one item off it and am paused at the (no credit card, Romanian payment page) of another. But really the FSF could become the consumer guide for the net and I would happily read all their lists.

as the url implies, it's still in alpha stage

- can extract todos from my code - can be very very context aware (location, time, am I in code base or out on street or on a phone call?)

To be fair that last one is the list problem - it's an Embodiment of intelligence - a list is a marker for a agent, that jogs my memory at one point in time

I can start a list on the phone while I'm out and about and continue when I get to a desktop machine. Nice way to organize different contexts/subjects.

I’m still fairly-well convinced that list-based sites are superior to google for discovery, and a combined list-site/discovery-engine could be a huge boon for finding new and relevant content on the internet. (Google might be fast, but it is far from pleasant and isn’t great for a “wandering” mindset).

Pinterest is the obvious standout here IMO. They nailed the individual use case (I speak to designers and females all the time who use it for vision/inspiration boards), and they leveraged their connected content into what I believe is the best discovery engine for visual-based content online — to put it in a “Facebooky” way, they have structured data, which is immensely valuable. Suffice to say, humans can process and navigate bulk-imagery better than a page full of text, so Pinterest was well-poised to have this effect on the previously non-visual search landscape at the time.

Some points I think about:

* BIG PICTURE: We’re missing a “site map” of the internet, and a horizontal list site has the potential to provide the navigation experience that we need.

* As an experience, the “related” search on google is pitiful; the internet deserves better. (e.g. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...). I think the search experience on a list-based tool will mimic this action pretty closely, but will give a way better result.

* Form factor is an issue for content creation. Generating lists from URLs isn’t pleasant on mobile (I haven’t found a satisfying way around this yet), so I suspect the power-users will come from a web-first generation — unless a novel approach to the mobile piece is created and adopted.

* Horizontal list sites require a bootstrapping mindset. They’re inherently unprofitable in the early days unless you’re going after product-focused lists, in which case it’s difficult to break out from being nichy/materialist. My prediction is that we’ll keep seeing product-focused lists while in a boom-cycle (Wanelo, canopy.co, kit, etc.), however they will have a hard time breaking out of the consumerist space if those are the origins.

* The process of list-building is extremely similar from one vertical to another (bookmarks, music and fashion, for example), so despite the lack of a horizontal product that is a clear winner, I still expect one site will dominate in the long run due to network effects, similar to how Reddit effectively dominated the forum space.

* We’re in the midst of a boom-cycle, so the ideas I’m seeing around me all seem to be very money-focused (nothing wrong with that, there’s just a different focus), however I expect a true horizontal list-building site will take a patient long-term approach that will emerge in thriftier times when rent and talent is cheaper and entrepreneurs are freer to try wild ideas.

* The technology behind creating and leveraging connected graphs is more approachable than ever (Neo4j & GraphQL come to mind). Powerful “woven” experiences with overlapping content are possible with a fraction of the engineering talent of, say, 5 years ago. I personally think this is an interesting variable to watch, as it could be the bridge between the individual and social use-case that you mention. (Put mildly, we can extract more utility from less content creation).

* Community is the key. Slightly contrarian but I see the injection of too much capital as a potential killer of list-based ideas. “Easy money” (if there is such a thing) and not-enough focus on fanaticizing an early user base will be the death knell of all who enter this space.

* What is the correct balance between altruism (wikipedia) and narcissism (social products)?

- What are the lessons from Delicious? By all accounts, it should have “won” but lost its way somewhere (the acquisition?). Social bookmarking still deserves a better solution.

- I think the original list spaces of a horizontal winner will come from an area that is extremely nichy, extremely nerdy, text-heavy and unprofitable (or not obviously profitable). Maybe it’ll start out with poets and researchers and spread from there? The smaller the community, the better, because there’s greater recognition for contribution when everyone knows each other.