Monday, March 27, 2006

Nifty idea #4279

A nifty idea came to me in the shower just a few moments ago, and I felt the need to blog it before going to work.

How would you sell the first telephone?

I mean, you could give a really kickass demo.. but when your first customer takes one home, how is she going to use it? Who is she going to call?

We face a similar problem with Ping. Actually, all software with social networking aspects to it faces this problem. People have come up with pretty crafty solutions.

What's special about social software that runs on the phone? It has direct access to a fully loaded PIM (personal information manager):



So, what I'm thinking, is that as soon as you create an account with Ping on your phone, we immediately cross-reference the phone numbers and email addresses already stored on your phone with those of other Ping users, then show you a list of people you already know that use Ping, and all you to quickly/easily add them to your list of friends (and you could subsequently revisit this functionality if so desired).

Jill probably won't let me actually build this until we've built everything else in the mockups (about halfway there, btw). But nonetheless, I was thinking it'd be cool to have a feature like this by launch time.

Thoughts?

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Milestone!

Since we basically code when we want, and don't stick to any particular schedule, milestones are a cause for celebration on our little team of programmer hobbyists.

And today.. we hit a milestone!

The Ping client has finally successfully mated with the Mates server.

Okay, it's a baby step. But it's a special one. Our baby's first step, even.

In other recent news, Mates got a little bit of press in the Michigan Daily back at UofM (liveUGLI.com is another project building on Mates).

I've gotta give major credit to Jeff. He's been a rockstar lately. The dude has spent his entire spring break staying in Ann Arbor spending significant time on getting the Mates server ready for prime time. Rockin'!

Anyhow, I had better get back to coding (15-20 hours is my weekend goal, much of which is being done at my favorite coffee shop in Capitol Hill).