Animoto: Instant Music Videos
Posted by peter on August 06, 2007
Some good ol’ friends of mine are about to go live with a project they’ve been working ridiculously hard on. It’s turning out to be really quite incredible. Hat’s off to Stevie, Tom and Brad, you’re guys are doing great!
An early review from ReadWriteWeb explains a lot. They even made this video to showcase the technology:
Waggle Labs and The Name Inspector
Posted by peter on April 26, 2007
We’re excited to have had our names Pathable and Waggle Labs analyzed by The Name Inspector! Chris Johnson, PhD. applies his considerable experience to analyzing the how and why behind the names of many great organizations, including some of our favorites such as 37Signals, Apple, Pandora, Twitter and many others.
Check out Chris’ other project Phrase Train where he’s tackling some seriously tough human computing problems by developing “natural language technology that grows and improves as it collects simple human judgments about language.”
Thanks Chris!
Just In Time Registration
Posted by peter on February 23, 2007
It’s great when your requirements as an application designer are subservient to the requirements of your users. A spot oft writ with conflict is user registration…
An approach we’ve been taking lately I call Just In Time Registration or JITR for short. (No, this does not stand for Jesus Is The Reason) When a site “has the JITR’s” (so to speak) it means that you can do a lot of stuff that other, non JITR’d sites, require you to sign-up for. We think this is great. It means that when you visit a site, you can start posting comments after providing ONLY a user name. At some other point in the user flow, say when the user wants to add someone to her network, perhaps a little more is required and requested, like an email or password.
The common practice of requiring an email AND requiring verification of that email before anything useful can happen is lame. Better to ask for the email, grant full access, but then take that access away if the email isn’t verified within a few days.
We think giving users what they want as quickly as possible will make them more loyal.
