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.
Does the world need another twitter client?
it certainly is not about being the first out there
When we pitch our little project, we often get the same reply: “Isn’t that what Plaxo does?” I often think the answer to that question is “no”, “not really”, or maybe even “partly”, depending on how deep into the industry the guy we’re talking with is. But lately I’ve been thinking of answering “maybe”, or even “yes”. So what?
Twitter has been around for some years now (and the fact that despite being one of the greatest things ever they still don’t have a business model that the people we eventually pitch to would like to hear, but that would be the suject of another post) and since the beginning there have been many ways to interact with it, specially desktop clients. And I mean many.
Well, it turns out despite having endless ways to interact with twitter, there were these guys who thought there weren’t enough ways already and came up with the wonderful Tweetie. And guess what, it turns out that after a couple of months, Tweetie is the third most popular way of interacting with Twitter on the desktop (the second if we don’t count their own web), that is according to twitsats. According to the people around me, it’s just the Twitter client many people had been waiting for.
I don’t want to mean that we’re going to be the same thing on the personal information management arena (sure as hell we’re trying to), but I just can’t help but picture these guys pitching their product:
“What? Another twitter client? And you have to pay for it? Go home, kids”
So… did the world need another twitter client? It looks like it did. Plaxo or LinkedIn have been around way longer than Twitter, and the real truth is that everybody signed up but nobody actually uses them, or at least no more than eventually. Maybe the world just needs another contact manager.