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Sharing Lives As Stories On the Web
blackbearnh writes "Jeff Holden spent a decade at Amazon, where he was involved as Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites with the recommendation engine, Amazon Prime, and the product review system. He's left now, and has started Pelago, a company that wants to help mobile users turn their lives into stories they can share on the web. Among the interesting effects he discusses in this interview for O'Reilly Radar is that users of their product, Whrrl, have talked about changing their lives to make more interesting stories. Holden also talks about some of the work he did at Amazon, privacy issues that arise when social networking starts to become ubiquitous, and why he thinks the Apple App Store review system is seriously broken. 'One of the things that happens with an iPhone is when you uninstall an app, it asks you to rate it. And it defaults to one-star. ... The problem is ... there's no kind of qualification. Anybody just downloads it and checks it out or doesn't check it out, right? And I think a number of people run it and they see that you have to sign in and they just delete it. And you get a one-star rating out of those experiences.'"
Does he own an iPhone/iTouch?
When you uninstall the application, there's a large button right below the stars that says 'NO THANKS'.
It's very clear, and .. oh, useful -- when you uninstall an application but don't feel like rating it.
Maybe his eyes are broken.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Yes, because there isn't any service out there that lets people share the pointlessness of their lives. Otherwise, so many of its users would see marked improvements over "Going to take the dog to the vet" and spreading this banality to everyone stupid enough to click 'yes' and be added as a friend.
The Internet is generally stupid
The next step may be something that reads your GPS tracking info, evaluates how interesting your life is, and feeds this into your social networking profile.
Actually, it sounds like you don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch.
To uninstall an app on the device, you hold down icons until they get wiggly, then you touch the 'x'. The OS asks you two questions:
* do you really want to remove the app, and
* do you want to rate it
It's unobtrusive. Really.
This is a prime example of why direct experience trumps mental models/thought experiments. In real life, it's not a big deal. In the abstract world, it sounds like an unbelievably unwieldy thing. UI designers (and armchair quarterbacks) take note.
I was very confused when I read the summary. The first half and second half seem to deal with totally different topics.
Life, stories and stories of lives are only interesting if they have good content. Content, content, content. Meet interesting people, visit interesting places, do interesting things.
If technology helps you improving your life/story content: nice. We could have an interesting discussion about how that could come about.
The second half of the story is about this dude's work at Amazon and boring technical details. When I glanced through TFA I saw that it is mostly about that, and the dude doing his best to distinguish his product from all those other web 2.0 products. This has nada nothing zero to do with an interesting life story.
Of course the blame is on the story submitter. The title fitting TFA should be something onionesque like 'area man stares at navel and creates his own special unique superior web2.0 niche'.
(And bad summaries are getting sort of the standard here on /., I should know better not be fooled by them anymore, maybe I am getting too old for this place.)