Trigger better conversations?
After getting really good feedback and discussions from the community on ProductHunt (more details coming in future post), I first want to write here a little about on the why we started Trigger an app for topic-based messaging.
Recap: the year 2014 was maybe the big bang where users, community and networks started their migration from social network to more intimate messaging platforms. By intimate, I mean more in a personal sense rather than romantically. I use it to also infer a kind of relational privacy . Lara Mcpherson does her detailed description in “Intimacy vs Internet”:
The invisible line between intimate disclosure and inappropriate oversharing will be different for every individual. But with the loosening of these expectations, and the emergence of new platforms and opportunities to engage with others, we have much greater freedom to determine what authenticity will look like for us.
I would say we all seek forms of intimacy, and this intimacy is interdependent to the form, mode and medium we communicate. As our existing social networks grow larger and larger, some part of the communication is lost. The experience of communication has gradually evolved. A bit of authenticity is modified, what you say to whom, and feel is just different. Many social networks becomes something you have rather do and be yourself. It’s closer to a digital version of a passport ID, where you are on there to be registered, but it’s not designed for spontaneous conversations that we have with in-person interaction.
Recent popular blog post by teenager blogger Andrew Watt describes views of various existing social network. He shares his own and his peer’s sentiment on the features and the structures of these networks. Andrew points out various intricacies that reflect how networks evolves socially with our structural design needs. This reflects the intimacy we seek and the difference of the way we communicate via our public self vs private self.
Intimacy can be based on the underlying sender-recipient topology. Straightforward illustration by explicit controls of intended participants with over-the-top SMS-like apps e.g. Whatsapp, Line, WeChat. I’ll probably rant on a future blog post on how limiting SMS-offsprings has inherent from their ancestors. Intimacy can also be created via modes of interaction, altering users perception along space and time, viz. Yik Yak and Snapchat respectively.
Yik Yak
Yik Yak changes the network topology temporally, by restricting space. In retrospect, they have added a layer of intimacy by removing user identities such that there is no true public or private. By removing the authenticity of identities of users, it encourages authentic speak. This amplifies the signal while suppressing the noise with the restriction of location and reduced cognition load.
Snapchat
Snapchat emphasise the ephemerality by challenging our perception of a message itself. Even though most of our messages are not revisited, and are often a pain to dig up, Snapchat further reinforces the fragility of a sent message. Andrew McLaughlin from Betaworks played around with Snapchat and had an interesting personal example of this fragility reinforcement:
I learned the hard way how Snapchat punishes procrastination: one morning, my partner Sam sent me a couple of questions about a pending deal; I quickly scanned them while out on the sidewalk across town; when I returned to the office and opened the app to compose a response, Sam’s chats had disappeared and I couldn’t remember what the questions were.
This moment is akin to distorting our usual responses to spoken vs written communication through UX design. Although we are texting “messages” on Snapchat, it feels like speaking.
The migration in the virtual realm is not necessary zero-sum. The exclusivity is more of the finite time each of us have, and how much of it we spend on communication. USV’s Fred Wilson also posits the trend towards social messengers. The migration happens when various vertical, whether use-cases were driven by design or habit formation. Dick Costolo said that Twitter’s recently introduced group private messaging was:
important because it’s both really valuable in many business situations, and also fun in context of social situations, to have private discourse about public conversation.
The twitter statement sums up: “Messaging is about bridging public and private.” Couple of friends and I, started the Trigger team where we want to introduce a new experience to our communication, where we can have conversations fluidly and be organised.
