Didn't realise that I'd uploaded over 30 tracks to Soundcloud so far. Here's a selection of the best bits. I really need to get a better sound recording device. But for now, the old iPhone will suffice.
it's for posterity
Didn't realise that I'd uploaded over 30 tracks to Soundcloud so far. Here's a selection of the best bits. I really need to get a better sound recording device. But for now, the old iPhone will suffice.
Round about the New Year I was thinking about resolutions, as you do. I'd let my banjo playing slip, which was bugging me, and I was going to set myself a target of practicing an hour every other day. I needed to get back into the habit again.
It got me thinking though, that I wouldn't mind a gentle mental nudge when it came to practicing. Maybe there was an app like the excellent Push Up Fu to keep me motivated to practice. I looked around online for a place where I could track progress on an activity over time, but all the web apps I found were either too complicated, or a pain in the ass to use.
So I built this instead - Put the Hours In. It's a simple service that allows me to set weekly and monthly practice goals, and track how much time I've put in. It'll tell me when I'm slipping, and I can add some notes about what I'm working on at the moment.
I was keeping it just on my dev box, but thought I might as well release it into the wild in case there are other folk out there who'd appreciate it. Probably a slim few, but anyway hope somebody else finds it handy.
I've got some future features lined up for it, like sending email nudges when you've let it slip for longer than a week, and downloading a monthly/yearly PDF of your progress charts. No plans yet to make it social; it's more of a personal utility anyway. But let me know if you'd like to see anything included in the next release.
Whilst Answers claims to be social-focused, it only skims the surface of what truly impels people to take part in these kinds of communities. That other great people-powered answer machine, Wikipedia, has similar goals to Quora. But where the former is subject-focused the latter is primarily question-and-people-focused. Both Wikipedia and Quora are produced and governed by a community that takes pride in the accuracy of its content (I'm not sure I would say the same for Yahoo!'s offering), and aim to be definitive references for the topics represented in their "pages".
Quora meets much more nuanced goals for its user base; it moves far beyond the mere altruism of maintaining a page for the common good. It percolates its users' latest activities everywhere you look; attributions are something that you have to dig around for in Wikipedia. That Quora's contributors are front and centre keeps it honest and is what makes it a real market-changer.
It's not just narcissism and ego-stroking here. Yes, you have "followers" and get "voted up", but there's none of the overtly game-like gimmickry that you find on a lot of other sites trying to do similar things (Stack Overflow, to name just one).
I outline a few ways I think the UX on the site does a good job of meeting its users' goals, and something I think they could look to improve on below. Finally, there are a couple speculations on how Quora might make money in the medium term (please God don't say ads.)
Using real names
Quora isn't the first site to take this seriously, but it's one of the first to take it seriously right from the beginning. Amazon of course implemented their "real names" reviews late in the game, but it did much to boost the credibility and trust of the reviews. On Quora, this prevents flaming, obviously, but it also ensures people take the time to think about what they're about to write.
Another benefit of using real names is that it means the UX can be tidied up to no end. The reason? You don't have to go around "proving" someone's trustworthiness by displaying a bunch of noisy stats like "Time spent on the site" or "450 posts" or "Member since 1999". The name is enough.
Light touch rewards without gimmicks
To pointsify or not to pointsify. I suppose it's a question that the majority of social sites are wrestling with these days. Everywhere you turn, there's a points ladder or levels to attain, or badges to be worn as flair wherever your profile takes you online. Personally, I'm a bit exhausted by it all.
The delightful thing about Quora given that trend is that it has largely ignored the "collecting" mentality of modern web users and decided that their users will gain much more simply by the real world kudos that comes with getting "thanked" and "voted" for by a community which includes experts in one's field. In fact, there's not a whiff of collecting on the site.
I have a personal example, so I know it works. For one answer that I wrote in the User Experience topic, for a question titled "Is The Concept of Needing Website Content Above the Fold Obsolete?", Jared Spool, one of the world's best UI developers, "thanked" me for my answer, and voted it up. To me, that simple acknowledgement is worth more than a hundred "Scholar" badges on Stackoverflow. You don't need to show your "top users" like this when your reputation system is subtle, social and "de-gamed".
Quora's product team are able to pull on all the classical psychological levers - reciprocation, social proof, authority, and so on - without resorting to page-cluttering gimmicks.
Notifications
I am not going to repeat what the insightful Adam Rifkin said eloquently about Quora serving up good Bacn and toast, but suffice to say that Quora excels in the number of ways it communicates with its users, and encourages them to communicate with each other. And the key to that - though it might seem like overkill to some - is its tremendously custom-made settings page.
Creative copy
Quora employs one of the most inventive and practical ways to prevent nonsensical questions being asked that I've seen. It takes the form of a quiz in three parts, with the potential question-asker forced to - like in grade school - select the "correctly formed" question from a list of four or five. If you select the right grammar, you move on to the next stage. This sets the tone of the site tremendously well. "No Garbage Here, Thank You" is written all over the door. Nice.
[note: have you spotted other good "crap filter" copy like this, baked into web sign-up forms? If so, tell me about them in the comments below.]
Not so good: "Top Heavy Voting"
There's always going to be a problem with putting the most voted answer to a question at the top of a long heap - people are much more likely to vote up that answer (or ones just below it) because they lack the energy to read the whole lot. There must be a better solution to avoid the kind of situation like this when a good (but surely not the best) answer receives orders of magnitude more votes than the rest.
[Have you spotted a good solution to this problem? Tell me in the comments]
Where can Quora go next?
I can't resist trying to plot a future for this site. Here are a couple ideas that have been floating around my head since I started using Quora.
Surely it won't be long before they bottle this up as an internal app for companies and suddenly you've got the best-designed knowledge base ever. Either that, or it stays in the cloud, and you get private groups for your company. What Yammer should have been, basically, and Quora's product team could make a mint from monetizing the UI alone.
And of course this represents a linear evolution of the crowd-sourcing experiments run by Starbucks and Dell et al. Perhaps Quora can profit from becoming the default place to go to scrutinise new ideas with expert communities.
Another avenue they've got open to them is mining the rich, structured data that is being poured into its databases by the second. A good time to package up that combined wisdom and resell as "Trendspotting" reports and so on…
Interested in what anyone reading has to think about the site.
I went along to 2Screen last night for a couple reasons. The first was to check out Tim Morgan and Utku Can's realtime sports data projects, PickLive and LivePitch, as we're thinking about some cool things in a similar space for BBC Sport online and on IPTV. And I wasn't disappointed in those - especially PickLive which I thought meets a very real need, for more instantaneous Fantasy Football action, which I myself have felt in recent weeks. I will be joining PickLive shortly now that I've seen it in action. But the real point I wanted to make here..
I'm also deeply curious about Starling.tv, Kevin Slavin's 'second screen' brainchild and something I picked up on about 6 months ago when I was doing another trawl for the descendents of Test Tube Telly. Kevin's got amazing creds, so I had high hopes for this TV viewing companion app that Kevin hopes is going to replace the void that's gone from our telly-watching hearts now that the laugh track is being phased out. Basically, it's an app bringing an added dimension to the shared but remote experience of watching TV alone and with millions at the same time. Starling's going to be a newcomer in a shark-infested market of TV watching-check-in-and-express-yourself engines such as Miso, GetGlue and so on. So it's got to differentiate itself big time. Problem is, whilst the differentiating factor seems to be there, I'm not convinced that it's going to meet a latent need in the 2 screen audience. We saw some screenshots of the app in action, and it centres on pithy badges which users sign up to during a live programme to say stuff like 'OMG what a loser' or 'He is so hot!'. The badges are nicely crafted graphically. They then float around and pick up other users who feel the same way you do. So there's elements of collecting, light-touch elements of expression, and a whole lot of instant wow. However, there are a few things that I'm not sure about here. The first is a simple one really: it doesn't scale easily. Those nice graphics would have to be applied in the same cool, different way to all the popular programmes, and in this multichannel world we live in, that's going to be a big overhead. Second is whether the vast majority of people who want a second screen companion to a TV show will opt for curtailing their expressiveness to a 40 character badge (which seems a bit like Jennifer Anniston's 37 pieces of flair in Office Space). Third, that shared experience doesn't cut the mustard in the on demand world, and these apps need to take into account time shifting these days. That said, I know the broadcasters are going to gobble it up, and create some great content for it I'm sure. And anyway, it was only a few screengrabs, so I'm heavily judging it without having experienced it fully yet. But I've got some doubts so far. Big hill to climb. Fortunately they've got the right guy heading up the vision.Great display of perfectly real-time location and biometric data. Follow each of the riders of the HTC Tour De France team - their heart rates, their speeds, everything. It's like you're riding tandem with them :)
