Now that www.trymehere.com is live in early beta form, we have no doubt that the requested feedback will be interesting to read and evaluate!
Some will like it; some will not. I’ve spent a few hours recently looking at blog comments about social networks and their associated services and I am amazed by just how polarised views are. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Indeed, we were very cognizant of some of these views when we took considerable care to create an easy-to-use and easy-to-access Delete Profile capability. This is still a missing capability with many, if not most, web-based services.
One of the key issues for us is the question of privacy. Indeed, it might even be an issue that could prove to be make or break for trymehere. It’s not a question of whether trymehere has been lax in this area; rather the opposite could be said to be the case. Could the degree of privacy we have implemented possibly “stall the service in the market” as one ‘feedbacker’ put it?
So what is this conundrum we are talking about? It’s to do with maximising subscriber uptake while maintaining privacy.
Achieving maximum subscriber uptake.
Significant uptake of a new internet service, such as a social network, has much to do with what has been called ‘reduction of friction’. This simply means that you do not put anything in the way of the service being easily evaluated and used. This is a key factor in building a large member base which should lead to hockey stick growth and success (hopefully!).
Last week, I was listening to a ‘how we became successful’ talk by Peter Ward, co-founder of Where Are You Now, a travel-orientated social network whose raison d’être is to enable their members to meet people on their travels. They have gone through numerous travails to reach 11 million members. He stated quite strongly that “the days of using invites are over. Any service using them will fail” (not a word perfect quote).
I take this as a view that if a service is to achieve maximum success it should be as open as possible with a minimum number of barriers getting in the way between users posting information and users reading it - blogs are good example of this approach. I cannot but agree with this and have given that very same advice several times in the last few years.
Location and presence services
So why have we not taken this seemingly sensible advice with the trymehere beta?
The initial version of trymehere is aimed at giving business people an ability to provide availability guidance to their colleagues. This guidance could and probably will contain privileged information about whether they wish to be contacted and how they can be contacted throughout a 24 hour day. The majority of people we have spoken to, would not wish this information to be available for anyone to see on the open Internet. If there is a particular category of information that should remain private and under the control of the individual, this is it (well, other than bank account information I guess). You only need to read the debate associated with mobile phone location-based services to get a better understanding of the strength of feeling about this issue.
We therefore took an approach whereby individuals ‘invite’ their trusted colleagues and friends to view their guidance using Connect Requests. They are then able to target their availability / non-availability guidance at different groups of people.
We believe that maintaining privacy is such a core issue that removing the Connect Request capability could severely limit the service’s capabilities. On one hand, to satisfy privacy concerns, we need to use invites, while on the other, accept that this could risk stalling the service in the marketplace.
Squaring the circle
Help is at hand however! There is a way that we can ’square the circle’, although it will involve giving up some features. This has been on our agenda for some while though it is not part of the current beta.
It is based on the ability to create a particular Member Group that can be designated to be Public and backed up by a public Routine Schedule.
This would enable a member to embed a link (or possibly and image) in an email signature or as a widget application on a public web page. This public guidance would be open for anyone to see and what they are prepared to show would be under the complete control of the Member.
More importantly, there would be no need for anyone to ’sign-in’ beforehand to trymehere before viewing the public guidance.
Members should then be able to decide about going ‘public’ or remaining ‘private’ as they may wish!
Comments are always welcome!
