Tag: startups

The Pitch For My Vision of A Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@shetgarner

They key thing to remember is there is a window of opportunity for a startup to come up with a replacement for Twitter that embraces and extends its existing UX. I propose that a startup cherrypicks the best UX elements of Usenet so you give users what they don’t even realize what they want.

One issue is, instead of little banner ads, you could have very specific full-page ads woven into a thread on a subject where users could buy goods and services without going to a new Website. That’s where you would make your money and that’s what would make the whole thing worthwhile.

A use case would be that a user creates a very-specific Group devoted to, say their favorite TV show — maybe The Last of Us.

It would be one of many other similar Groups devoted to the show. But through data mining, you would know what people in that Group were interested in and you would place a full page ad in such a way that it would be unavoidable as people were going through the thread.

Remember, because the basic building block of this proposed service would be full page Posts with in-lining editing, that really expands what you could do with ads.

A Newspaper Suggestion For Mike Bloomberg

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s my Christmas gift for plutocrat Mike Bloomberg who apparently craves buying a major newspaper like The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal — I suggest he disrupt the newspaper business instead.

Why buy one newspaper for a few billion dollars when you could totally transform the way people get their news? What I would do is take the concept of Twitter –or, more specifically the my personal idea that involves cherrying picking the best elements of Usenet and fusing them with Twitter — and give the concept a paid editorial staff.

If I had a few billion dollars to play with, here’s what I would do — I would have a common brand domain name, but each major city across the country would have their own subdomain — nyc.domain.domain and so forth. If you used my idea of the Post being the central element of a new social media startup, that would give you all the space you needed to write a traditional length newspaper story. (I have written a lot about this idea on this blog, so if you’re really all that interested in the UX of my social media daydream just look under “startup” or maybe “Usenet.”)

Anyway, wanting to buy a major America newspaper — when none of them are for sale — seems like a fool’s errand. Now, obviously, if Bloomberg did as I suggested, the entire newspaper industry would fucking hate his guts because the plan would…work.

If you could transition the entire newspaper industry away from print with an app that allowed for long-form newspaper articles in the context of threaded discussions…well, you’ve built a better mouse trap.

‘Twitter Killer’ Use Case: Brands

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is how I imagine brands might use my “Twitter Killer” on a practical basis. The key issue to remember is Brands, like everyone else, would have a far more feature rich experience to use than they would on Twitter.

Instead of just a 280 character tweet, they would have an entire webpage to work with — that would be threaded! So, say you were a Widget Company and you were releasing a new Widget. You could create new Groups devoted to different elements of this Widget.

And because you would have control over who could Post to each of these groups — they would, essentially be read-only to most people — you could all but eliminate trolls and other people who might attack your brand just because they could. They could still attack your Brand elsewhere, of course. Just not in your Groups.

What’s more, people could buy your Widget straight from a Post — with our Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

If you were a content provider, meanwhile, you could push content from your own site –original formatting included — into the Twitter Killer itself. Then authorized users could inline edit your content inside a Group that was threaded.

All that sounds pretty cool to me, at least. Too bad this is all just the ranting of a broke writer who should be working on one of six novels he wants to write before he crokes.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Fixes An Existential Problem With Existing Social Media Platforms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key flaw in social media is it’s very “flat” in the sense that the different sides of your life are mashed together into one circle. There have been efforts to manage this in the past — most notably Google’s failed G+ with it’s “Circles” concept, but I’ve come up with a far more simple concept that fixes this problem once and for all.

The solution is what I call Groups. As part of the onboarding process for this proposed service, you create as amy public or personal groups as you like. Using a drag-and-drop feature, you put your Friends within different groups, depending on how you know them. Within these Groups, you would have Posts that were threaded, just like the good old days of Usenet.

Meanwhile, people you didn’t know could join different Public groups that you had created — this would be ideal if you were some sort of public content creator like a journalist or celebrity. You would be given the ability to restrict who could post in the group as necessary.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — I’ve come up with fixes for the existential flaws in the Usenet UX that caused it die in the first place. But all of this is a big lulz. No one cares and I’m wasting my time. I would be far better served to shut up and continue to throw all my energy in finishing my first novel.

Imagining A New ‘Video Gawker’ #startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When I was in Seoul, there was this nebulous little group of creative-types who were doing Broad City-like videos with their phones 15 years ahead of their time. It just occurred to me that it would be cool if you did something like that today. Or, put another way, I think there’s both an audience and a marketplace for something of a micro-video version of Gawker.

If I lived in New York City (which I don’t) and if I had money (which I don’t) I would found a Website devoted to combining the best of The Daily Show and Broad City. Instead of fictional little adventures around New York City, I would find really funny young people to do field pieces about “real” street news.

These field pieces would be no more than two or three minutes long and would have a blog post associated with them that would flesh out the story for nerds who would actually like to, like, read and stuff. The trick is, of course, to find really funny young people who are so young that they aren’t already going the YouTube star route out of UCB.

Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me and I’m just letting off steam while I charge my batteries to get back to writing my novel.

Here’s the video where I gradually came up with this idea.

Of Newspapers & A Better Mouse Trap

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It seems to me, the newspaper industry has finally reached a level of crisis and contraction that it might be willing to entertain a hail Mary pass strategy for its continued existence. Now, as I say repeatedly, I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. As such, absolutely no one, but no one, listens to me.

And, really, maybe they shouldn’t.

I’m just a crank who likes to write at this point and the thing I’ve learned since I came back from Seoul is pretty much to be successful you have to be stable, have money and have some inkling of what your career is. To have such a career involves a complex series of metrics that I, alas, will never be able to attain in any traditional manner.

Having said all that, let’s waste some time and mull how one might save the newspaper industry at this late date. To me, this is a technological problem. So, as such, you need to build a new service from the ground up that not only would “save” newspapers via a rebirth online, but also address the existing issues associated with Twitter and Reddit. This may seem like a tall order, but it’s not really if you give it some thought.

What I would do, if I had enough money, is build an entirely new social media service whose whole reason for existence was to facilitate civil discussion. As such, I would look back to that most ancient of social media services, Usenet, for inspiration. The service would use the Usenet experience as a stepping off point. While Reddit is much like Usenet to some extent, I feel it’s such a ham-handed implementation as to be useless for my needs. It seems to me if you did as I proposed, you would have the following features.

Here are, going from basic to less basic the core features of the service I propose.

Posts
At the center of this service would be Posts. They would be a full page, multimedia and have a rich WYSIWYG editor people could use to write them with. It would be intuitive and robust and would make writing a post a joy to do. Now, in my imagination there would be two aspects to a Post in this service that would make them different — one is a video conference feature and the other is a minimum word count. You would almost be pressured into throwing in a video recorded video chat as part of any Post you wrote. Also, the service would demand you write, say, at least 300 words in a Post before you could put it into the system. This would prevent someone from simply say, “Meh” in a post, or using a post as a tweet-like thing. You might make some specific exceptions, for say, a politician not known for his long, cogent social media activity.

In-line Editing
One critical aspect to all of this would be in-line editing. If you had the write to contribute to the system — more on that later — you would have the ability to in-line edit someone else’s post in the context of a thread. Again, you would have to write a minimum amount in each edit, you couldn’t just say “You suck.” This might take some getting used to for people who are used to Twitter, but it would likely grow on people.

IRC-type discussions
I would study IRC and figure out ways to incorporate public text chat into the system in a big way. I think that might be really addictive if you did it right and would help with engagement on the service in general.

Threads
Now, the thread would also be crucial to this service. Only specific users would be allowed to start a new thread in a Group and this would hopefully significantly increase usability for everyone involved. Only Verified Account holders could start a thread at all. These would be people who the system trusted not to be abusive or go nuts for no reason.

Groups
In my imagination, there would be thousands and thousands of redundant Groups that would be created by people called System admins. These people would be in charge of naming the Groups and it would keep some order to the whole thing. Of all the people in the service, these people would be the most likely to be, well, paid. They would have the most rights within the system and as such the most responsibility as well.

Having said all that, how do newspapers fit into this? Well, it seems to me newspapers as we currently think of them are well on their way out and if you completely re-imagined how the public would interact with online content via the type of service I just proposed, I think that’s how you save newspapers. I could go on at great lengths about my specific vision for newspapers in this context, but no one listens to me and I’m feeling sad that I’ve come up with this great concept and yet nothing will ever be done with it.

Oh well.

=

The Fate Of SnapChat & A Social Media #Startup Based On Usenet Concepts

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I may have talked about this before, but I have nothing else to talk about right now, so we’re going to talk about it again. You see, of all the existing social media networks, SnapChat has the most to lose right now. Instagram is eating its lunch and maybe if SnapChat did something out-of-the-box dramatic it might be able to innovate itself out of certain doom.

I’m thinking, of course, of the social media startup concept I have based on the old Usenet. What if SnapChat took the basic concepts of the platform I’ve talked about at great length and use it to save itself from being eaten by Instagram? I have no clue how exactly they would do it, but right now SnapChat has the means, motive and opportunity to save itself by doing something crazy like completely re-imagining the entire service. What if public snaps were threaded in such way that you could have an intelligent convertation using them? Throw in a new desktop app for the service and all kinds of cool stuff might happen.

But, really, I can’t help but keep thinking about the startup concept I have. It’s just so cool. It’s too bad that I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. It’s weird that we’ve actually gone backward in the last 20 years when it comes the functionality that Usenet once provided. Throw into the mix some IRC functionality and you have the makings of a killer app for sure.

One issue, of course, is would Facebook either co-op the service or buy it out the gate? I think if you made it clear that it was Twitter now Facebook the service was gunning for, then maybe they’d settle for an investment, just like Microsoft did with Facebook many moons ago.

I just really like the idea of bringing back the concepts of Usenet, which were so addictive to me 20 years ago, to modern social media users. But, alas, no one listens to me and if they do they’re just frustrated with me for not being willing to code. This has a lot more to do with me just needed something to talk about than anything else.

Mulling How To Share Posts In A Usenet Concept-Based Twitter Killer

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

One thing people have come to expect is the ability to share information they like within a social media environment. With Facebook it’s Sharing, with Twitter it’s Retweeting. With Reddit you can “vote up” content you like.

So, the question is, how would you do this with a Usenet concept-based service. This is an interesting, and crucial, question. You can’t have people vote up posts because that’s a direct rip-off of Reddit and people would see it as such. Meanwhile, Sharing like on Facebook is problematic. The best I can think of right now is some combination of “Starring” and Sharing. You might Star a post you liked, and Share it on your “Wall.” Or something. You would have to think of some way whereby people would feel like they were interacting with the content.

This gets into the whole concept of how you would represent Trending Topics. You would have to do in a dramatically different manner than Twitter and I think you could figure out something. I was thinking a pull-down menu that would be feature rich and give you all kinds of different options that either Twitter already has or are unavailable with Twitter.

Anyway, all of this is moot because I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn. But it is interesting to dwell on.

Use Case: The New York Times & A Social Media Platform Based On Usenet Concepts

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m bored, so here’s another use case for my social media platform concept that is just my personal daydream. Imagine there’s some breaking news about the Trump Administration. The New York Times writes a story about it and if my concept were real, they could shoot the entire story into the platform.

Here’s where the cool stuff happens. The game changing stuff.

See, not only could they keep the formatting and advertising of the original article, but users would be able to inline edit the content (in other words quote the article directly and write within it) in such a way that people would be engaging with both the content and the advertising in manner that could be profitable for both The New York Times and the service that enabled the whole thing to begin with.

I would say, at least from a content producer’s standpoint, that’s the most compelling use case of this proposed service. It’s really cool. It’s a completely different way of using content. Too bad no one listens to me and this just me daydreaming in a public manner.

Some More Mulling Of This Service As A ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have written at length — and talked at length on Instagram — about this concept, so I’m only writing this because I’m bored and don’t want to go to bed just yet. But this concept is really, really compelling. And, yes, I know: I should just shut up and learn to code.

I am not going to do that. Fuck you.

Anyway, here are some interesting observations about this proposed service in the context of existing discussion options online.

I use Twitter a lot now after years of disinterest and I think that’s probably why I keep thinking about this concept. I keep looking at Twitter and thinking to myself, “There has go to be a better way. In fact, there is and it’s name is Usenet. And let’s throw in IRC for good measure.”

The issue for me is Twitter is like a raging, uncontrolled river of information but not a lot of knowledge. It seems to me that if you leaned on thought leaders more, gave them goodies because they were verified account holders, that that would draw them in big time and they would really, really love this service as I have dreamed it up.

I like how this service aims to do the same thing Twitter does but in a much more controlled fashion. You would have the same huge amount of information pouring, but it would be controlled. It would be controlled because you would have a stream of live chat in the context of a Group that you would interact with, then should the owner of the Group decide to begin a thread with a post, you would have the option of interacting with that post in a threaded manner as well as having the option of inline editing what the thought leader had written originally.

All of this is all thought out already because I’m simply using what I remember from Usenet and updating it about 20 years. There isn’t a lot new in what I’m proposing, but the way I want to implement it I think is pretty cool. There are just so many different aspects to this that I really like.

I like how you self-select by joining a Group. I like how you have the quick reaction time of a live chat as well as the option of interacting with a post by a thought leader. I’m sure there are quirks here and there on a social level that I’ve not thought through as well as maybe I should, but I think the general concept is exceptionally strong.

I really like it, if nothing else.