Fwd: New! HARVARD 100% COTTON SWEATERS AND VESTS

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Words 0 Comment

I thought you guys who read me on the internet should see this. The offending email first, followed by my response. (Thanks, Manu, for the tip.)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: store@thecoop.com <mailer@thecoop.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 3:40 PM
Subject: New! HARVARD 100% COTTON SWEATERS AND VESTS
To: m******@gmail.com

coop email

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Josh Petersel <peterselj@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: New! HARVARD 100% COTTON SWEATERS AND VESTS
To: Manu Lakkur <m******@gmail.com>

There’s a lot to love here.

  1. It’s 2013 and somehow it’s still going to take 7-10 days to deliver something
  2. I definitely wouldn’t consider late August to be “just in time” for cool autumn. Though then again, shipping is going to take 12-64 weeks so maybe this part is okay
  3. AWWWWWW YEAH ALL CAPS
  4. I especially like that the email header just bucks all norms and has “New!” in normal caps and the rest in ALL CAPS
  5. I’m counting 8 different caps/boldness/font size/color treatments here. (By line, 1: red caps, 2: all caps, 3: normal, 4-6: bold caps, 9: bold normal, 10 and 12: normal in smaller font, 11: Every Word Caps, 13: all-hyperlink)
  6. “Buy one get one 20% off” is pretty much the most worthless sale initiative ever
  7. They mention a 10% discount that’s not valid with other offers or discounts. Meanwhile, the whole point of the email is there’s this other new offer or discount
  8. These pictures are doing a really awesome job of letting me see how the sweaters look with a harvard logo that’s like three pixels wide. After browsing a bit, this is the biggest image I could find for the red vest. I have no idea what that logo could say
  9. It’s absolutely not clear how to order online. In fact, the only instructions they give for ordering are to call a phone number…which they say just a few lines after saying “Online purchases only”
  10. What the hell could I possibly want to inquire via fax? Who talks like this?
  11. But still, after all that. My favorite thing, without a doubt, is #HASHTAG #discountcode. (Speaking of which, I wouldn’t be surprised if the code was supposed to be #SWEAT20 instead of #SWEAT 20 and they screwed up here, too.)

Bonus points to me for coming up with a list that’s 11 items long.

Re: Netflix

By JoshPetersel in Times I Was Right, Words 0 Comment

Two and a half years ago, I wrote what was probably my most efficient post ever (in terms of quality-to-wordcount ratio). Netflix, I claimed in 90 words, was a really obvious destination for relatively basic social integration, with use cases for sharing that already mirror or enhance real life media-consuming behavior.

I’m amazed that “Netflix Friends,” and being able to find mutually interesting movies, haven’t come to pass yet.

Instead, the company recently unveiled Netflix Profiles. On the plus side, I guess this means the product team has a pulse. But really, if you ask me, this idea is almost entirely backwards.

Per this new feature, you can now add up to five different profiles to a single Netflix account so that the movies one “member of your household” watches don’t get conflated with the recommendations for another member. That’s fantasy. In reality: The “members” of my current “household” are me and Kevin, my former roommate who presently lives in a different timezone. I wouldn’t be surprised if our family even had a handful of other “members.” With Profiles, it’s now even less painful for me to leech off Kevin’s account. One of the very few reasons I’d ever consider starting my own account (aside from the feeble complaints aired by my moral compass) was for the benefit of having my own personal recommendations surface.

Why would Netflix create a free feature that works as a direct substitute to the company’s primary source of revenue? Isn’t that completely insane?

Furthermore: Almost all of the imagery Netflix uses looks like this:

Fetflix Namily

A family, or group, sitting around to watch something together. That seems to be the primary, ideal use case. Why would you build a feature designed to support doing the exact opposite?

If they’d had their hearts set on multiple profiles per account, then fine. What they should have done, though, is set up the mutual recommendation algorithms first. Not just because this is far more in-line with the primary depicted use case. But also because once that’s in place, there becomes much more concrete, discernible value in having five individual profiles — you’d thus be empowered to surface great, discrete movie suggestions for the entire family, or for just Mom & Dad, or for just Dad & son, and so on. That’s really powerful stuff. And instead of being a feature that’s given away for free, I’d argue that you’re now sitting on a paid premium feature which might even drive an extra $1-$10 (or, roughly, an extra 10%-120%) per month per account to your bottom line revenue.

Songza’s Next Killer App

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Words 0 Comment

Congza Soncierge

Songza is a music discovery app for desktop, mobile, and tablet — though I mostly use it on my phone.

Its killer app is the Concierge, pictured above. Instead of predominantly surfacing recommendations based on my past listening history, or my friends, or my blogs, or whatever, Songza lets me find music I want to listen to based on the mood and temporal setting I’m currently in. It’s a brilliant human answer to the real human question of “how do I find music I want to play next?”

I’m not the only one who thinks this is great. Lots of people are copying the idea. Like Martha Stewart, for example. (Obviously!)

There’s another real human problem which I think Songza, Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, and the rest of the gang of mobile music apps brush up against: They all generally rely on a steady internet connection to stream music. Which is fine when I’m at my home or workplace, but a nightmare when I’m mobile, and invariably I have to walk into a stairwell, elevator, tunnel, subway, tauntaun carcas…you get it.

How do you solve this?

Rdio & Spotify handle this with their unlimited and premium plans, respectively, which each cost $10/mo and let you sync or download playlists you want directly to your device so no internet connection is required.

You could also buy an album, and upload that to your device. But jeez, it’s 2013. That’d be embarrassing.

There’s little nuanced things which I don’t like about the solutions above.

  1. You’ve got to consciously decide which specific songs you want. And consciously curate a new album/playlist every time you want something new.
  2. At some point, you’ll have to delete things.

The two things above really don’t amount to much more than little chores. You wouldn’t break a sweat doing them. They’re really stupid human problems. But we might as well fix them.

Here’s what I’d build if I were Songza: the ability to proactively pre-load/buffer a playlist to my device for a while before heading off. I hit “pre-load” five minutes before setting off on my run, tie my shoes or something, and then after five minutes I’m out the door — with a five minute buffer to spare for that one annoying forest-y part of my run where I always seem to lose signal.

You’ve already employed this practice a million times before. Consider the last time you tried watching a YouTube video somewhere with a really poor internet connection. You’d hit pause, let it load a few minutes while you did something else, and came back once the grey bar progressed enough that you wouldn’t be continually interrupted by the “Buffering” spinner.

Monetization seems natural:

  • A 30 second buffer is free and makes the experience better for everyone.
  • A $5 monthly subscription allows me up to a 30-minute buffer, which I can use on my commute.
  • Maybe a $10 monthly subscription nets me something way longer (up to my device’s spare storage capacity) so I can use this on a flight.

And of course, my stream deletes itself automatically as I listen to it, or once I’ve closed the app (same way you’d need to reload your YouTube video if you close the window). No more chores on my part.

I can’t imagine legality to be a real issue here, because of the fact that you can already engage in this sort of behavior with YouTube. And because at this point, a sophisticated & motivated computer user can probably steal any music they want at any point, anyway. Maybe there’s a technical/logistical/legal issue with buffer speeds…perhaps you’re only allowed to buffer songs in real time (so, if you want a 15-minute buffer, you’d need to start the pre-load a full 15-minutes beforehand instead of just loading as fast as your internet speed allows). But I don’t see this being a real barrier to usage. I could arguably quite easily get into the habit of queuing up my Songza as I set my alarm clock the night before my run.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some small amount of buffer like this was already invisibly built in to the Songza app. I can understand why the app might not have a progress bar like YouTube does — it’s clutter, considering the mobile app has less screen real estate and considering you can’t really scroll through a radio stream the same way you’d scroll through a YouTube video.  But build this in as an explicit feature, and you’ve got a unique (patentable?) distinction from the rest of the pack. It also might be nice to veer away from advertising/no-advertising as the only track for revenue.

Linking to the Google Results Page

By JoshPetersel in Josh surfs the Internet 0 Comment

Internet ProTip:

Sometimes on this blog I’ll need to link to an image. From the archives in 2008, for example, a list of my 10 Favorite Video Games. Many of the linked images are broken at this point – the source was taken down, or moved, or who knows what.

Here’s a thing I learned to do: If I need to share a link to a specific piece of media, rather than hinging my hopes on the server status of an individual blog, I’ll use a link to the relevant Google Results page. So, for example, if I wanted to share an image of Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice, I’d link you to here instead of here. Check back here in 5 years and see which link is still relevant.

This idea was validated when XKCD’s What If? series applied the technique to help visualize attaching a car to a plane via grappling hook. The author had a specific video game clip in mind, but rather than linking to any particular video which might get pulled down for copyright/whatever reasons, the corresponding YouTube results page will stay relevant though its specific menu of video options fluctuates.