In the past 24 hours, I’ve had a flurry of new followers on FriendFeed, a network that focuses on aggregating all of your feeds from across the web. I wondered where the sudden influx had come from, and Paul Kane quickly pointed me to FriendFeed’s announcement.

This is their new signup: Three icons recognised universally by anyone who’s ever wasted time on the web. Simple, isn’t it?

While FriendFeed still isn’t a very active part of my daily diet, I can see that it’s gaining more of an audience with every day that goes past. By making both the signup process and the addition of new feeds mindblowingly easy, a new user can feel “at home” in the new network within minutes of joining.

On mobile, stabbing at a small mobile device, using the small gaps of time between getting from location A to B, the importance of the simple signup process is even more significant. For this reason, on the soon-to-be released Taptu iPhone application, we’ve done away with much signup. We ask for the bare minimum information, only when it’s strictly necessary, even though sometimes, there’s a part of us that would love to know more about you.

In a similar attempt to keep it super simple, in creating the signup page for Cambridge Geek Nights – a small local gathering of geeks and geekettes – I chose to have a single, retro-looking text field. In a world of more, More, MORE, it can be difficult to take a few steps back and remember that sometimes, we don’t need to make you type your name and email address!

[Geek Nights were founded in Oxford and, with the help of David, another Taptu team member, I'll be launching the first Cambridge one in June in my spare time. If you're in the area, why not join us?]

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.