Hi, we made an app called Tinygram (http://tiny.by) that I think is more Instagramm-y (uggh!) than this.
Its not done yet (missing a few big features) but it has a smaller canvas 10x10 and a unique way of choosing color shades and doing animation. It already has a sizeable community and sputtering of new content (pixel art is hard for most people we discovered.)
It is an interesting community building experience so far.
Anyhow in case you are curious on how closer it is to Insatgram, its free at http://bit.ly/tinygramming .
It will coerce/force a % of users to use the 1st party apps. It will also allow them to focus on media platform features without the distraction of pleasing 3rd party devs (at the moment). I am pretty sure they will improve that side AFTER they have finished being a destination platform.
This removes their duality of being a media / service play. This is highly beneficial to Twitter itself as well as to a new service/platform aiming to be a pure microblogging piping service. The only loser here are the Twitter app developers and startups which are faced with a now limited channel to promote their apps.
At least list out the 50 countries. After reading the blog post and hunting on their site for 10 minutes, i still cannot find the countries Plivo is compatible with.
I have joined and paid $100 but my biggest concern is they are VC funded which is a more insidious position for someone to pressure them to do something not in line with the current vision. Also, there is a long line of startups that hate advertising at first then acquiesced when the only budget big enough to cover their burn rate are the ones advertisers have. This includes Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
The tone of the blog post seemed to suggest that the author already had launched a few startups and nailed how its done. The bravado maybe even implied he has successfully pitched his company to PG. But it was weird to find out that he has done none of this.
Kevin Systrom interned at a couple of high profile startup pre-Burbn too. Pinterest had a product called Tote before Pinterest so theres a not insignificant time of preconditioning there too.
I use this > http://testico.net/ then i test it on my device (iphone 4S) where i relocate it in a couple of pages. I also put it inside a folder too to check if the icon is 'readable' there. Then i ask a few people if it stands out. Then sometimes, i sleep then check it first thing in the morning where i am groggy. If it passes all those then its a good icon. I may have to add a check when I am in a bad mood or hungry for my method to be ultra comprehensive.
If you have budget to spare, A/B test a few different variants on the Facebook ad platform.
But in this case, the town is not 90% of the geography. Last i heard Google's town is bigger and there is also RIM Town (mass exodus happening there), a new WP7 town (lots of airport signs) and a few others around.
I also think this is a step backwards. I was excited by the looks of it but the feel is very inferior. The feel reminded me of Microsoft Word somehow and thats not a good thing.
Thanks. Theres plenty of evidence that these are popular. Reddit's Ask me Anything, poll apps (real-time) and the rest are ripe for a market leader to emerge.
Boards had a high cost/benefit in the wrong vectors. While they acquired a very low-barrier (i mean low IQ requirement) feature that has great SEO and pageviews benefits, it had a high cost of increasing noise and diluting the Q&A DNA of the product. What i didn't understand was why didn't they go into more related and deeper dimensions of Q&A like interviews, product FAQs, debate, surveys and polls. These are branches of the same tree with lesser noise penalty than a 'board that you can cram ANY kind of content'.
There is one explanation for this move though. Pinterest-envy.
They are using Moai (getmoai.com) which is a cross-platform LUA based open-source game engine. It outputs to Android, iOS and Chrome. From what i gather you can develop+test games on Mac or PC but it doesnt compile to them much more so for Linux. The Chrome part may play in linux but not so sure about that.
Its not done yet (missing a few big features) but it has a smaller canvas 10x10 and a unique way of choosing color shades and doing animation. It already has a sizeable community and sputtering of new content (pixel art is hard for most people we discovered.)
It is an interesting community building experience so far.
Anyhow in case you are curious on how closer it is to Insatgram, its free at http://bit.ly/tinygramming .