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What we’ll lose in a new era of fragmentation
For the past several years, Facebook and Twitter have captured the VAST majority of social content I care about. I’ve been able to keep in touch with nearly everyone I know and care about via just these two services.
Things are changing.
It’s clear that my friends’ attention is being splintered across countless new services and their content is scattered accordingly. Because I can’t check so many services (and don’t even know which services people are using), I’m seeing less content. I’m less connected with my friends.
Facebook kept ahead of this trend by allowing apps to pump their content back into my News Feed. Even as my friends have adopted new services, I’ve still been able to consume everything in the same familiar place. This no longer feels true. There are a few potential causes, I’m not sure which is valid:
- Facebook has largely abandoned passive sharing to the Open Graph in favor of explicit sharing. Perhaps people are explicitly publishing to Facebook less. Or perhaps they always explicitly shared less and I’m just not seeing what had been shared passively.
- Perhaps developers are investing less in the Open Graph for distribution (I doubt this).
- Perhaps 3rd party apps are reaching critical mass and are focused on their own social networks over sharing to Facebook for growth
- Perhaps Facebook’s algo is showing less of my friends’ content in my News Feed. (More ads?)
Who knows, the point is that my News Feed feels much less interesting and comprehensive than it has for the past several years. There’s just less content from my friends.
It doesn’t feel like Twitter has this same problem. Perhaps people are sharing less as well, but I treat Twitter differently than Facebook. I have a defined set of friends on Facebook and rely on them to produce content. The list of people and organizations I follow on Twitter is much more fluid. I’m constantly following new accounts and the content I see better follows my interests over time.
I’m excited that everyone is using so many new services. But, if content does splinter across many services, I will certainly miss this time period when I’ve been so easily able to keep up with the people I care about.
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This talk by Jeff Seibert really resonates with me. I talked about this exact issue just last week on a panel for Andover at YC.
Building for mobile enables amazing experiences, but it’s frustrating and hard as hell. We have every ability at Spindle to build beautiful products for iOS thanks to Keh-Li and Alex Jenkins, but we’re constantly limited by the time it takes to ship client code. We’re forced into a less agile process. Just as Jeff describes, it can take weeks and even months to go from idea to public feedback.
A slow iteration time is harmful for apps, but it’s even more difficult for apps + services like Spindle. Our product relies on an entirely new search technology that we’re constantly developing. Because apps pull platforms, the speed of our ideation and the development of our search technologies are limited by the speed with which we can build, test, release, monitor, validate, and improve new features through our app.
Big companies can work toward longer development schedules because they’re not worried about funding. In startups, where resources are scarce, the number of iterations you have remaining is even more important than your runway expressed in remaining weeks or months. More iterations means more opportunities to succeed.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to take advantage of the more complex ideas Jeff describes (multiple features in development concurrently by many teams), but we’re making huge strides thanks to work by Alex Lambert to automate our deployments and Simon Yun to automate testing of our service and client.
This shit is important.
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No real surprises here.
(via felixsalmon)
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Personalized Results
We took a big step toward personalized results in Spindle 2.2. We’re now boosting results from your favorite places & allowing you to hide all updates from places you don’t like. This change means that we’re considering each user’s preferences with each query, the foundation for personalized results. More soon :)
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Spindle is now live in 12 regions throughout the US. We’re finally hitting our stride and just brought 5 new regions online in a few short weeks. What originally took months now takes days. Such great work by the team. Read more.
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Beer delivery!! Props to @andyhannon and @DrizlyInc (at Spindle)
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at The Esplanade
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Spindle Blog: Spindle Expands to Los Angeles →
TweetFew cities offer the diverse possibilities of Los Angeles: You can surf in the morning, check out unique shops during the day, have dinner at a world-class restaurant, and catch an amazing band at night. But in a city as dynamic as LA, it’s sometimes hard to discover the best stuff happening….
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I pity the fool that’s not getting @spindle Alerts for “beer tasting”
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Spindle in bright lights on the App Store
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