I want to distill the Tribe experience down. Make it simpler, hide the complexity, make it more about one (or a few) easy-to-understand, instant-feedback, addictively productive behavior(s).
One of my earlier theses about this thing was that we were building a "lead economy." That was my clumsy way of saying that our system should be geared towards allowing people to create opportunities (leads) and promote/consume them (the economy).
To do this, I think you need a few ingredients:
- identifiable entities (people or groups of people)
- "consumable" items (content)
- communal places to for entities to view items
Those were the first things we built into Tribe. Personal profiles and social networks that let people identify themselves and bring others on. Listings, so people could express something they neede or had to offer. Tribes, profiles and member dashboards, so people could view listings from other people.
Along the way, we've built lots of features to make those three main concepts play nicely together: privacy controls, photo management, e-mail newsletters, and the like. All of these are pretty standard for any of the sites that play in this arena. But when you talk about figuring out the core experience, to get to the point of the matter, I think we have a ways to go.
Right now I'm fixated on narrowing behaviors down to 3 or 4 major classes. Something like:
- Browse/Search
- Save/Subscribe
- Publish/Promote
or:
- Find
- Save
- Tell
From a high level, that's what I think most users should be doing at Tribe. They should be finding or stumbling upon interesting content. They should be able to indicate that they'd like more of the same interesting content. They should be able to create interesting content of their own, for others to consume in the same way.
What I want to see happening is _collecting_ things that they like, so they can either see them again, or see more of the same. I can imagine people keeping a nice simple page with links to collected items ("bookmarks") and readouts of items from collected categories ("subscriptions" and "saved searches"). I imagine a page like that would be very useful, and something worth visiting over and over again -- especially if it self-tunes somehow. (Or maybe not -- maybe it's enough to allow users to tune it.) I imagine that this would work something like Amazon's "the page that you built" feature from days of yore. Except we have the power of social networking behind it, and (importantly) the "lifestyle" categories that we've got going on the site have a lower bar for tolerance than shopping categories. In other words, the stakes are higher in an Amazon experience than browsing for something to do this weekend.
This collecting/subscription idea meshes well with the concept of "selfish altruism." This was the idea that we could get people to benefit others when acting in their own interests. The feature I envision this becoming is so-called Collaborative Filtering, where people either actively or passively vote on content (this is lame/this is cool) and that determines what shows up for their friends. The assumption here is that the world is filled with lots of junk, and a group of friends can help each other sift through it all.
But the point is, I want the core experience to be very simple: you look around, click on things you like, and very quickly you'll be presented with more things you like. That's it.
One of my earlier theses about this thing was that we were building a "lead economy." That was my clumsy way of saying that our system should be geared towards allowing people to create opportunities (leads) and promote/consume them (the economy).
To do this, I think you need a few ingredients:
- identifiable entities (people or groups of people)
- "consumable" items (content)
- communal places to for entities to view items
Those were the first things we built into Tribe. Personal profiles and social networks that let people identify themselves and bring others on. Listings, so people could express something they neede or had to offer. Tribes, profiles and member dashboards, so people could view listings from other people.
Along the way, we've built lots of features to make those three main concepts play nicely together: privacy controls, photo management, e-mail newsletters, and the like. All of these are pretty standard for any of the sites that play in this arena. But when you talk about figuring out the core experience, to get to the point of the matter, I think we have a ways to go.
Right now I'm fixated on narrowing behaviors down to 3 or 4 major classes. Something like:
- Browse/Search
- Save/Subscribe
- Publish/Promote
or:
- Find
- Save
- Tell
From a high level, that's what I think most users should be doing at Tribe. They should be finding or stumbling upon interesting content. They should be able to indicate that they'd like more of the same interesting content. They should be able to create interesting content of their own, for others to consume in the same way.
What I want to see happening is _collecting_ things that they like, so they can either see them again, or see more of the same. I can imagine people keeping a nice simple page with links to collected items ("bookmarks") and readouts of items from collected categories ("subscriptions" and "saved searches"). I imagine a page like that would be very useful, and something worth visiting over and over again -- especially if it self-tunes somehow. (Or maybe not -- maybe it's enough to allow users to tune it.) I imagine that this would work something like Amazon's "the page that you built" feature from days of yore. Except we have the power of social networking behind it, and (importantly) the "lifestyle" categories that we've got going on the site have a lower bar for tolerance than shopping categories. In other words, the stakes are higher in an Amazon experience than browsing for something to do this weekend.
This collecting/subscription idea meshes well with the concept of "selfish altruism." This was the idea that we could get people to benefit others when acting in their own interests. The feature I envision this becoming is so-called Collaborative Filtering, where people either actively or passively vote on content (this is lame/this is cool) and that determines what shows up for their friends. The assumption here is that the world is filled with lots of junk, and a group of friends can help each other sift through it all.
But the point is, I want the core experience to be very simple: you look around, click on things you like, and very quickly you'll be presented with more things you like. That's it.
posted by:
|
SF Bay Area
|
