It's articles like this that make me realize how fortunate we are to be having Spotify in Europe. Streaming my music from the cloud for quite some time now, I actually wondered for a second whether the blogpost was a few years old!
764 karma · joined February 17, 2010
Hm, that thought should have crossed my mind as well when first using Color. Guess I'm even less clever than the reviewer.
Anyway, version 1.0.2 just hit the market. It has "Welcome flow fixes", so at least they're working to improve it.
So this is the android-part of something that got 41 million in funding? Pretty interesting.
It took me a little longer to notice the list just kept on growing as I progressed.
Take online dating for example. Why do (most of) these guys spend insane amounts of money on marketing? I think it is because word-of-mouth for a good datingsite is held back by the social stigma that still surrounds online dating.
So you have a product, and people would rather not tell others they're using it. How would you raise awareness about it without resorting to traditional marketing?
It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never ever pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.
The fact that this subsequently results in missed SMS messages is inexcusable IMO.
Our site, in a nutshell, basically doesn't allow members to seek out other members and message them to see if there's mutual interest. It's only possible to talk to people you've been matched to by our system. In order to increase the chances of interaction between the matched members we artifically limit the frequency at which one receives new matches. Also, we give very little information about the match. The system has good reasons to introduce the members to each other, they will have to find out for themselves what those reasons might be. This approach helps mitigate the issue of 'Hypergamy', as the matching system ensures the match works both ways. Furthermore it prevents spamming (it's just not possible) and deincentivizes fakers.
We can only get away with not allowing people to search for themselves because we have a great matching system. Adam talked about eHarmony's love-science-PhD's and noted a statistical approach would probably work better. That's exactly what we thought, and put into practice. By combining the information we have of our members (answers to questions, attractiveness scores, etc) with a feedback loop that tells us which matches actually work out (or don't), we can constantly improve our algorithm (think machine learning) to make better matches. We actually have spend years optimizing the crap out of this.
Now, for us to be able to have a fighting chance in the US, we need to also somehow solve the fabled chicken and egg problem. We managed to pull it off in the Netherlands (word-of-mouth mostly, a big plus of actually having a good product), but will have to do more to succesfully launch in a foreign market. If anyone here has thoughts about this and is willing to share, I would be very grateful.
Distinguishing between for example work and personal contacts seems pretty hard, I'd say even for google.
So, with the voice of the dude from WP7's commercial:
"Really?"
For people without 'Apple products and stuff', try http://www.blurrypeople.com instead.
Just a little later the CEO of TweetDeck (@iaindodsworth) tweets this: "Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."
Help me out, is this a typical case of 'FUD'?
Thanks for the notification suggestion, will think about that!
Let me know what you think!
Here's to hoping they fix the version for the Galaxy S soon.
[Edit: hm wait, this might be my provider limiting VOIP bandwidth :S]
Btw, 'successfull login :)' should be spelled without the double 'll'.
Edit: on second thought, I'd really like to be able to see the amount of comments in the overview. And perhaps even a small visual difference between opened-before and never seen yet articles...
In the meantime we're catching quite a few of former CR users on http://www.blurrypeople.com . Which, ofcourse, is a little more extensive compared to CR 1.0.
(Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626783 )
[Edit: grammar]
We'll think some more about how we can communicate the concept better. Furthermore, we might have to delay the request for mic/camera access as it could scare people away (other have pointed this out as well).
I'm not too fond of changing the tagline to something referencing chatroulette, we're kinda hoping people will not directly associate our site with nude guys ;) But rethinking the tagline might be wise still.
Also, I think you're correct in pointing out a non-video way of getting the site explained is necessary. Perhaps just in words, or otherwise using graphics/drawings etc.
And indeed, we figured this will probably be used for dating-purposes a lot; so we'll try to make sure that is possible on BP.
Once more, thanks for your feedback!
Anyway, thanks a lot for your advice!
So here is our approach to something that will, hopefully, work better:
- it has a feedback system that allows you to indicate why you don't like someone (too old, too male, too boring etc)
- video starts out blurry, and becomes sharper with time (hence the name! ;))
- you can 'like' people, allowing the other to see when you're online and request to connect with you
Could this work? Comments, suggestions?