identities
In real life, you have one identity. Well, that might not be true but at least you’re identified by your person – by your name, face, voice, social security # etc. On internet life’s different.
Up until quite recently you actually created a new identity each and every time you signed up for a new service. Which is quite absurd, since you’re still the same person. It’s like every time you met a new person you had to come up with a new name and identifiers, maybe you would change your voice.
Imagine keeping track of all those identities you created for every person you knew. How bizarre. So what has happened lately is that new sites are using an already ready existing identity of you to create a new user in the system. That’s a big step forward. Either the site decide which identity to use, or you do. Today, Mashable asked, which identities are we using online? It’s an interesting study.
Hello, I am …
A new person is approaching you and you have to decide, which voice and name should I go with this time, since you can chose from a few different ones you’ve already built up. Nice, you picked one and the conversation’s up running and you’re all cool. Time passes and next time you meet up you’re thinking: which identity did I use last time? Oops. You think you remember, and you start talking in the voice you think you did last time. You realize quickly, from the look of her face that she can’t recognize you. She can’t remember that voice, and the things you talk about sounds nonsense to her.
That’s the same problem you have online when you get to chose from existing identities. “Did I use, Facebook Connect, Twitter Connect, Open ID, Yahoo ID, Email or have I never been to this site before?” How do you get around these problems?
We’ve decided to go with Facebook Connect for a reason. 400.000.000+ reasons actually. It’s simply the identity with the biggest bottleneck. We know that using it will exclude some people from using our service. It’s between that, and having you to create another online identity.
Forgot Username?
No more usernames & passwords. That’s our mantra. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even count the times I’ve clicked that forgot password button then wondered what email did I use to register on this site.
One idea that’s been floating around is that you could use any item you added to your profile + a password to sign in. But let’s go back to Facebook Connect, and what the pros of using that over other identities.
Social Graph
Facebook is most likely where you have most of friends already. The moment you log in to ambadoo for the first time you can directly see which of your friends that’s already using ambadoo and then connect with them. The really good thing is that as soon as any of your friend signs up to ambadoo you get notified so that you can add him or her.
Activity
Have you ever thought about how static your address book looks like. It’s a list of names and when you click on them, you get to chose what action to do: call, email, sms etc. How about already in the list of names see what’s going on and what’s the latest news from your friends. Integrating with Facebook makes this a breeze. So when you decide that you want to contact a friend you can see if she just boarded a flight, or she’s in a meeting, or having dinner and you can chose best way to communicate with her, avoiding wonders why people don’t respond.
Sharing
We assume that you want as many friends as possible taking care of their own contact info, so that you don’t have to. We’d want it to be as easy as possible for you to share that you’re using ambadoo, and inviting your friends to use it too so that you can connect. That’s being made easier with Facebook integration than anything else. One thing we don’t want though is to spam our users, and our users friends.
It’s been seen over and over again new application that’s integrating Facebook in their social layer and all of a sudden everybody’s walls are filled with ‘Look at Me, I’m Your Cool New App’ but there’s better ways to reach out. It’s up to you if you want to share, and what you want to share of course.
Easy
We want it to be easy for you to start & keep using ambadoo, to the point where it can’t become easier. We’ve opened many doors on the way, closed them, opened them again, and I’m sure this isn’t the last time we close this door, for now, and some time ahead this way will help us move forward.
day -29: it’s taking shape
daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
It’s been an amazing week. Very intense & awesome fun. For the first time in a very long while (nearly a year) things start to shape really well. From having the developers scattered around the world, to having no developers we’re now sitting everyone together in the same room, working vertically & tight. Vertical in this case means taking a User Story, a scenario basically that shall work across the system, back-end & iPhone App together.
We’ve started to work with sprints (scrum lingo), and this weeks sprint was split in two scenarios: meet & keep in touch & log in with Facebook Connect. Check on both! We’ve had a Facebook Login all the time but it was never built for production and at best a really good joke. Now there’s actual authentication through Facebook, which is a very liberating feeling.
The Scenario meet & keep in touch is pretty much the equivalent of exchanging business cards, like people did in the old way. It’s about quick and easy connect to each other, an everyday scenario when you meet new people. Now, instead of dealing with paper, it’s a one-click-operation. You might say but “what about bump”, and indeed it’s just that action (without the goofy move) but the exchange is not of static information but to information that’s always up-to-date.
mockup view.
We hope this will make life a little easier in all the scenarios when you meet new great people that you want to stay in touch with, without the hassle of manually typing in, and keeping track of peoples contact info.
You have no idea how great it feels that things are moving again. It’s been a bumpy ride but we’re on it, and we’ve gone from nearly not moving, to be moving fast, thanks to the great dev team from jayway.