T36: The news crowd-sourcing revolution that almost was

Two years ago many become aware that Twitter had transformed the very concept of breaking news. If something was happening right now, it was on Twitter before it was on TV. In fact, many TV stations started the practice of pulling media from Twitter and using them to support their breaking news reports.

So we embarked in a mission to make news reporting a crowd-sourced activity. The idea was simple, build a location aware app that anyone can download and use and organize information by time and location.

The app was elegantly simple, an infinite time line scrolling downwards back in time with prominent attention to picture taking. All you had to do to snap a picture of what was happening around you is simply scrolled to the top.

The top of the time line was always “now” and as such it showed the camera, sort of a permanent view finder. A tap on the camera image and the app would take a shot and post it immediately.

An example of seamless “news reporting”, one of our users sharing new year’s eve firework as they happened.

The app was location aware so it could filter the information restricting the stream to what was around you. Simple. Intuitive. Brilliant.

An example of location and privacy based filtering: the top image was a user posting a photo on a spare of the moment. The gallery underneath is a privately shared collection from an office party nearby that the user attended.

Except very few people were posting. This is typical of any content platform, most of your users will not post, they will just consume. We believed that offering an intuitive UI that made it virtually seamless to post photos would encourage more of our users to become content creator and the history proved us wrong. Lesson learned!

Still, T36 introduced some interesting ideas and ultimately lead us down a different path as we picked up on the early sign of the paradigm shift into messaging. In fact as we added the ability to comment around what was posted, the traffic increased and it become clear that we needed to focus on that interaction. At the same time it was also clear that T36 wold have required an editorial team with a span and reach that was not realistic, or in Silicon Valley terminology, we knew it would not scale. It is really a shame, it was a nifty little app!