Another Short Riff on Simplicity: FriendFeed, Taptu Signups and Geek Nights

by Vero on May 7

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.

5b552c0dd4bd4699833dc8d4de483bee6c18457aThis 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!

geeknights-1

[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?]

Music Cube Game: Also available in Facebook flavah!

by Vero on Jan 18

On Wednesday, I mentioned that we launched our music game, which tests your music knowledge of the past three decades.

To further spread the fun, we’ve created a Facebook version of The Music Cube, which you can install and play directly within your profile.

Go on, it’s Friday afternoon, have a play you skivvies!

Facebook Music Wall: The bubbles

by Vero on Dec 11

Yesterday, the team thought the bottles of bubbly were to celebrate 100,000 users for our Music Wall Facebook application…

But little did they know, we were only just beginning our own Ballmer Peak experiment…

Original xkcd cartoon: http://xkcd.com/323/

Facebook Music Wall: We’ve hit the 100,000 users milestone!

by Vero on Dec 10

Yesterday, our Music Wall application on Facebook hit a new milestone – There are now over 100,000 people currently using the app.

When the idea cropped up that we should use our search engine to create a music app on Facebook, we didn’t know whether it would really fly since there are so many apps out there. It’s exciting to see how users quickly adopted us and started sharing music with their friends, allowing us to hit that milestone. So this is a big thank you to all our users for making this such a fun project!

Taptu Music Wall - Proof that I have rubbish taste in music

Go on, what are you listening to these days? Why not share it?

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