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Introducing Whrrl 3
March 11th, 2010This is a big day for me.
I founded Pelago in 2006 with the vision of helping people escape their social ruts, of bringing people together in a new and interesting way to inspire each other to do new things and to experience new social opportunities in the real world.
Since I founded the company, sadly, the problem has gotten worse. (Doh.) The problem as we understood it in 2006 took the form of people tending to go out to the same places over and over again – the classic “what do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” problem. But now, there’s a whole new way to be boring. :-) You can sit at your computer and spend countless hours throwing sheep at your friend’s Facebook wall, play Mafia Wars to level infinity and hoe someone else’s virtual garden – all substitutes for getting together with others in the real world.
Even more now than ever, we need to help people escape back into the real world, to add some spice to their lives.
With Whrrl 2, we started down the path by allowing people to inspire each other with everyday, real-world “stories.” Today, we introduce, in Whrrl 3, what we believe is the full cure for Social Rut.
We had a dream that we could enable people to vote with their feet as to the places in the real world that are important to them; that we could bring together people whose feet take them to the same kinds of places and allow them to exchange ideas – all those little bits of knowledge people have about places in the real world; and that we could put those ideas at your fingertips with unprecedented relevancy.
This dream materialized. These groups of people who share real-world patterns are called Societies.
Societies are powerful. They enable the Whrrl community to curate the world and engage in a new kind of conversation that leads over and over again to discovery — discovery that is always relevant to the Society members, because it’s from other Foodies if you’re in a Foodie Society, other gamers if you’re in the Pinball Wizard Society, other wine lovers if you’re in one of our Wine Bar Societies, and so on. You get into Societies by checking into the places you go, and believe me, it’s very obvious when you get into a Society.
We took it a step further. Societies have levels. People move up levels by getting “influence points.” People get influence points by doing things that, well, influence other people to try something. For example, if I check in somewhere, my friends can see where I am, so I might influence them to go to that place. I get some points for that. If I create a recommendation to go to Restaurant Zoe and get the (off-menu) Siren drink, I might influence them, so I get some points. If a friend or fellow Society member clicks “want to” on my recommendation or check-in, I get even more points. If they click “did it!” on my recommendation, I get even more points. If they then re-recommend my rec, I get even more points.
Lucky me! :-)
(I should mention that you can add photos to your recs in Whrrl 3. You already know a picture is worth a thousand words, and now it will probably get you quite a few extra influence points, too!)
Societies, recs and influence points are wickedly cool (we think), but we didn’t stop there. We created a way for real-world merchants to make offers to Whrrlers. Not only can they make offers at individual places of business, but directly to Societies, as well. In fact, the offers can made to members of Societies *by level*. So, a gym owner might make an offer for all Gym Rats, but they can make a super special offer for just VIP- or Trendsetter-level Gym Rats. For Whrrlers, that means that as you level up in Societies, you unlock more and more potent offers from merchants. We have lots of offers in Whrrl today, and the number grows daily.
That’s also pretty darned cool, in our collective humble opinion. But, again, we didn’t stop there. As you level up in Societies, you also unlock special privileges, which are things you can do in Whrrl. Like maybe you want to change the places in a Society. Or maybe you want to create your own Societies. There are many privileges to unlock, but I won’t spoil the fun by listing them all out here.
To make Whrrl 3 as fingertippy as possible, all of the recommendations and offers come together in one place in Whrrl 3: your Ideas list. Wherever you are, just click on the Ideas tab to see all the relevant recs and offers around you. For every Idea, we keep track of everything that happens to it “in the wild.” Who wants to do your Idea? Who has done it? Who has re-recommended it? Not only do you get points as you help people discover, you can see exactly who the people are! Oh, and you might see a few surprises on your Ideas list that go beyond offers and recs from others. Let’s just say our algorithms are constantly trying to figure out cool and interesting things for you to do based on what others are doing and have done, so check your Ideas list often.
I have to say, it makes me tingly just writing all of this. Whew!
So, in short, by participating in the Whrrl 3 community, you’re simultaneously helping your friends and others who share your interests, and you’re opening new experiences and pathways of exploration for yourself in your city.
We poured our heart and soul into Whrrl 3, and we feel like we’ve created something special and powerful for all of you, and something that will definitely enhance your life. We look forward to being surprised by how you use it and to your as-always super valuable feedback.
May your life be spicy.
You can read the press release about the Whrrl 3 launch here.
Footstreaming with Whrrl v2.3
December 10th, 2009
With the latest Whrrl release for the iPhone (v2.3) that launched today, we’ve introduced a term that I’ve talked about since 2006: ”footstream.” It’s a term we coined to describe something a tad geeky, but which we believe will have profound positive consequences on the way people live their lives.
A footstream is simply a digital record of the places a person goes in the real world. To be clear, “place” is different from “location,” by which people usually mean a point on the planet specified by latitude and longitude. “Place,” as we’re using the term, means a named entity, one that generally has an address in the real world, like the Starbucks at the corner of Spring and Third in Seattle. We like latitudes and longitudes, but we’re fanatical about place, because it is so much more semantically rich than location.
My footstream, then, contains the specific restaurants, parks, bars, movie theaters, hotels, ferry terminals, grocery stores, clothing stores, cleaners, coffee shops, auto repair shops, amusement parks, museums, golf courses, gyms, book stores, campus buildings, department stores, and so on that I have visited. In other words, it’s a collection of the places I care enough about to physically go there. There is a lot of information in my footstream; in fact, it’s a powerful expression of my identity.
I gave a talk at the Where 2.0 conference earlier this year in which I attempted to explain why footstreams are so important. I drew an analogy to clickstreams on the Web, sharing several examples of how massive value has been created leveraging clickstreams, from Google’s relevancy ranking algorithms and cost-per-click advertising to Amazon.com’s and StumbleUpon’s personalization technologies.
Similarly, we believe we can unleash vast new value propositions built upon footstreams. Our promise to you: with footstreams, we can unlock discovery and social opportunities in the physical world of a kind never seen before. Our mission with Whrrl is to increase the possibility of adventure and human connection in our real-world lives, and to us this means helping people to break out of their standard social patterns, e.g. going to the same five or six restaurants, and introducing them to remarkably relevant places to go and experiences to have that they otherwise would not have discovered. Imagine having visibility into others’ footstreams — others who you care about, e.g. your friends or people who share some passion with you. What places would pop up on your radar screen that you would never have thought to look for? What kinds of new experiences within places would you discover?
What makes this difficult is that while clickstreams are intrinsic to the Web — by nature of the fact that the Web is already a fully digital experience, every click is already digitized — the places people go is as analog as it gets. How can we capture the places people “click on” in the physical world?
If you haven’t heard the term “check in” (outside of the hotel context), it is the mechanism Whrrl uses for a person to say “I’m here” wherever they are (perhaps in a hotel!) When you arrive at your favorite coffee house, you check in. When you get to the office, you check in. When you go out for happy hour, you check in. The nice thing about checking in, beyond the fact of adding the place to your footstream, is that you completely control when you’re “on the grid” and who can see your current location.
Whrrl v2.3 – You, As Your Footstream
Up through v2.2, Whrrl has been primarily about “storytelling.” This was a step toward our vision, though most of the Whrrl “iceberg” has remained below the surface of the water. While capturing the place where a story happened was an extra in Whrrl v2.2, you’ll see that checking in takes a very central role in Whrrl v2.3, and you’ll find some cool new benefits for doing so (beyond having the place context associated with stories).
In Whrrl v2.3, you express yourself through the places you go and the people you spend time with in the real world. You’ll see this come through loud and clear with this release, particularly on your Whrrl profile page.
Note: Some of the new features I talk about below, like Whrrl Societies, tidbits about your social relationship with places and most of the website changes will turn on in the next couple of weeks. Honestly, we thought Apple was going to take longer to approve our app, given it’s the holidays, but they did it in 6 days! Rest assured that all of your check-ins will count toward Societies and be reflected in your footstream.
By checking in everywhere you go, you’ll establish patterns. Are you a Starbucks person or do you eschew the big chains in favor of independent coffee houses? Fast food or foodie? Do you seek out brewpubs and microbreweries, or is PBR your beverage of choice? Whatever your patterns, you’ll find yourself being accepted into Societies of the real world, an entirely new concept in Whrrl.
Every Society is a mini-community of people who share similar patterns. Since footstreaming patterns are, literally, voting with your feet about the places that are important to you, therein lie expressions of passions. Are you a diner person? How about dive bars? Value shopper or is quality the only thing that matters? Which comic book stores are the real deal and which are posers? At which places are you a “regular?”
We can’t wait to see where the Whrrl community takes Societies, and we have some very cool surprises in store that will make Societies super powerful and fun.
You’ll also see ongoing feedback about your social relationship with places. When you check in somewhere, you might learn which of your other friends have been there, discover that you’re the 2nd most frequent visitor or learn that someone you know is there right now. The more of your friends who Whrrl, the more interesting and fun these little tidbits become.
Of course, as with previous Whrrl versions, you’ll be able to fully capture your experiences at places as photos and notes. Also as before, you can check in with other people and collaborate on your story. And you can share whatever you’re doing in Whrrl with your existing Facebook and Twitter networks. We’ve made improvements to these areas of Whrrl, e.g. the ability to “like” slides (which enables real-time polling, too!) and share individual slides to Facebook and Twitter. We hope you love these new capabilities!
We’re incredibly excited about this release, but know that there is much, much more to come: we’re already hard at work planning the next release. We’d love to hear your feedback, positive or otherwise, about Whrrl v2.3 (especially when all the features are turned on! J). Don’t hesitate to shake the phone for feedback or just send a note to feedback@whrrl.com. (Just so you know, I read every single one of these.)
Jeff Holden is the CEO and Founder of Pelago, makers of Whrrl. You can read more about Jeff here, or find him on Whrrl here.
Adventures at Where 2.0
May 29th, 2009I had the honor of speaking at Where 2.0 this year about a topic that I am passionate about: footstreams™. You can see a video of the talk here.
In short, my talk was about footstreams™, a digital record of the places people visit — a physical-world analog of clickstreams on the Web, and how capturing and analyzing footstreams is going to emerge as a fundamental value driver for location-based services. Location (latitude/longitude) is critical, but the semantic value and associated analytical richness lives with place, not location.
I was also on a panel with three other CEOs of location-based social networking product companies: Martin May from Brightkite, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare and Nihal Mehta from Buzzd. Before the panel, we had an engaging lunch discussion where we compared notes on a variety of topics. Dennis shared a bit of what his Google experience was like when he was creating Dodgeball, and you can get the gist of that story here. As a fellow entrepreneur, I could really feel his pain, but the upside is that he’s back in the game with a very cool product in Foursquare.
What really struck me from spending time with these excellent guys was that we’re all trying different experiments in the location-based social networking space. Foursquare is experimenting with a gaming / egoboo (http://bit.ly/tuz0T) concept, Brightkite is trying to create real-time communities around places, Buzzd is about social discovery of places and events, and Whrrl is about storytelling and enabling you to capture and share your life story, one moment at a time. Which of these will ultimately play out? Perhaps all of them.
Heather and I also had the opportunity to spend time with two other stellar folks. The first was Marissa Louie, CEO of AD-Village and Business Week blogger. We met over lunch and swapped stories about entrepreneurialism, raising capital, social media communities in different cities, our two companies and more.
We also had the opportunity to spend an hour or so with John Battelle (http://battellemedia.com/) at the Waterbar in San Francisco. I loved our conversation, which ranged from real-time search, to kids and family life, to where Twitter is going, to our vision for Whrrl. You can see the story from our time with John here.
Again, it was a great trip — I’m always amazed at how much I learn from a couple days investment in an event like Where 2.0. Thanks to the O’Reilly folks for putting together a great program once again.
Customer Service Shocker
March 31st, 2009A few days ago, I tried out a new product that I won’t name here. The experience was pretty mind-blowing for me, and not just because it was a poor customer experience, but because it seemed to be by design.
The Build-Up
This product that I tried is supposed to help you stay organized — it’s basically a note-taking tool that syncs between the iPhone and desktop. “Cool,” I thought, on first discovering it. I quickly learned that there are two versions, free and paid, with the paid version offering more features. I went ahead and downloaded the free version to check it out. I was legitimately excited about the product and was ready to pay for it if it seemed to fit my needs.
The first thing I needed to do was create an account. I went ahead and entered all my info and pressed the “go” button. I immediately hit a snag: apparently, my email address was already in use. Had I created an account before? I couldn’t remember, and after trying a few different candidate passwords, I went ahead and reset my password, using the requisite website feature. When I was finally able to login, I learned that someone else had created an account with my email address accidentally. They hadn’t used the account at all; the only artifact of that historical hiccup, in fact, was that my username was someone else’s name. I figured that somewhere buried in account settings, I would be able to change this. So spelunking I went.
After some time, I concluded that the feature to change one’s username does not exist in the product. I was left with no choice but to reach out to the company’s customer service folks and ask for help. Or I could just live with it. But I really didn’t want to just live with it — after all, if this thing worked for me, I might have used it for a long time and put insane amounts of personal content into it. It just wouldn’t do to have someone else’s name on my account. So, resolved, I sent email to customer service, and I waited for a response. And waited. And waited.
The Shocker
After a few days, it came. This is what it said:
Hi Jeff,
We are unable to change the username of free account holders, it is too time consuming for us.
You can close this account and open another. Please perform the following steps to close your [company-that-shall-remain-nameless] account:
1) Delete ALL your notes online and then Empty the Trash. We have to be sure that this request comes from the actual content owner.
2) Reply to this email to confirm that you want your account closed.
Thanks,
[Company-that-shall-remain-nameless] Support
“What the flagnog!?” I exclaimed, borrowing from Gallaxhar in “Monsters vs. Aliens.” “It is too time consuming for us?” Really? Wouldn’t it have taken about as long to change my username as it did to send me the email telling me it’s too time consuming to change my username? I could even get past the irritating first line if their suggested work-around of opening another account would actually solve my problem. But, of course, it won’t unless I am willing to use a different email address, which I am not for approximately 37 reasons. Was this perhaps some sort of reverse psychology trick they were playing on me? Like, if they treat me poorly, I’ll feel motivated by deflated self esteem to upgrade to the paid version so they’ll like me? If so, it didn’t seem to work.
Could This Really Be By Design?
In the end, what really affected me from this experience was the stark contrast between Pelago’s customer-centric philosophy and what I assume is the philosophy behind company-that-shall-remain-nameless’. I have a lot of trouble getting my head around their thinking, in fact. Doesn’t everybody know that a bad customer experience like this is much more damaging than the loss of a single customer (which is already very bad)? Obviously, I’m never going to use the product, but I’m also going to tell my story to others who will silently avoid the product, so the damage is multiplied. Also, if you offer a free product as an onramp to the paid product, don’t you necessarily have to entice people to pay for the upgrade? All joking about reverse psychology aside, it seems like when someone is new to the free product, that’s the critical window for convincing them that they want to commit. Instead, it appears that they model their free customers as freeloaders.
Pelago’s Customer Service Philosophy
Maybe in some parallel universe, that model can work, but at Pelago, we have a very different approach. And it starts with customer obsession (in the non-freaky sense of that term). We always start with the customer, solve their problem, and then build the business around the solution. Our customer service principles are simple:
1. Build the product so the customer almost never needs help from a human. If someone actually wants to talk to us, we’re thrilled, but usually, customer service contacts arise from something going awry, and that’s just an irritating waste of time for our customers.
2. Failing that, help 100% of customers in a timely fashion and completely resolve their problem on the first attempt.
3. Learn all we can from customer contacts and feed back the learnings into the product to bolster #1.
Often, the first question we hear after presenting the above is “is it cost-effective to run a company this way?” From our point of view, that’s the beginning of the line of thinking that leads you down the path to the Dark Side. Rather, we believe that we must endure any cost that comes with serving our customers at the very high level we aspire to. That service level is a constraint for us. Within that constraint, we continually optimize our product and our business processes to make living to our goal cost effective.
Not only will serving customers in this fashion be cost effective, but we believe deeply that it is at the core of growing Pelago’s business over time. Great customer service leads to trust, and trust leads to strong long-term relationships with our customers. And customers who feel a strong connection with a company will also encourage others to become customers. This is our formula, and our deep conviction about it enables us to endure and overcome significant challenges that appear on the road from time to time.
In my experience, there is an unfortunate dearth of companies who are truly customer-centric. I’m curious: which companies have really impressed you with their customer service?
Whrrl v2.0 Has Arrived
March 14th, 2009
Pelago has been on an absolutely incredible journey, and today we reached a momentous milestone with the launch of Whrrl v2.0. Our adventure has spanned the design and development of our first major product (the original Whrrl); the successful negotiation of multiple carrier deals; raising two rounds of funding; the appearance and rise of the iPhone and, later, the App Store; a challenging but ultimately successful struggle to hit our stride as a company; the decision to build an entirely new product in Whrrl v2.0; and a simultaneously intense and fabulously rewarding sprint to build and go to market with the new product.
I won’t try to expand on all of that in one blog post. Today, I’ll just talk about the transition from the original Whrrl to Whrrl v2.0 .
While the new product is very different from the original Whrrl, the vision and mission upon which both products are based has remained the same. Pelago has been around for a little over 3 years. When we founded the company, Facebook was still not open to the general public, Twitter was unknown and the iPhone was a year and a half away from its unveiling. That is a very different landscape from what we see today. The advent of the iPhone and App Store completely changed the way applications are built and distributed in the mobile industry. Facebook’s platform created a highly engaged and accessible social ecosystem. Twitter introduced the world to microblogging. Thanks largely to Facebook and Twitter, a significant percentage of the world interacts in a very new and much more immersive fashion.
Amazingly, none of this seismic change motivated Whrrl v2.0 or affected our direction in other than tactical ways. In fact, we built Whrrl with the expectation that the world would move in the direction it has (luckily or otherwise), with a desire to play a role in taking it even further. Back in 2006, we developed Pelago’s vision based on the convergence of some powerful trends that we predicted (in short, perfect information, people are media and pervasiveness of location-awareness — read more here). The true motivation for reinventing Whrrl was the learning that Whrrl’s users provided through their use of the product and their feedback.
Whrrl 1.0, a Valuable Experiment
Whrrl was a “social discovery” application for the real world. Our goal was to create an entirely new kind of discovery experience that went beyond helping people find, to actually introduce highly relevant new places and events to try – truly a serendipitous discovery experience for the physical world. Our approach was to create an ecosystem in which people capture (through Whrrl) where they go as they live their lives in the real world (something we call a “footstream”™). And then we organized all of the footstream™ history to enable discovery. The map showed the aggregated history of the activity and opinions of yourself and your friends. A person’s profile showed that person’s history to allow others to follow in his/her footsteps and be inspired by their activities. Whrrl’s personalization algorithms transformed user behavior patterns into recommendations. Whrrl essentially turned your friends into a personal team of discovery agents busily unearthing interesting things for you by simply living their lives.
Whrrl was a very worthy experiment, but we learned a couple of important things that led us to conclude we should build a different product.
First, people don’t really like writing reviews very much. Only a very small percentage of users actually wanted to take the time to write a review. When we talked to our users, they told us that reviews are too impersonal and they’re just not very engaging. They told us that what they really wanted to share was their stories. The second big learning was that gratification in Whrrl came too slowly — before a new user would start seeing social discovery benefit, they had to contribute quite a bit. This really had its root in the first point: since sharing reviews wasn’t very motivating for people, they needed a greater reward to do it. And truly getting to the discovery benefit was a bridge too far.
Enter Whrrl v2.0
We conceived of Whrrl v2.0 around idea of storytelling, and from the first concept tests we conducted with potential users, we received extremely positive feedback. The reason is pretty straightforward: storytelling is natural for people – everyone does it. And Whrrl v2.0 enables people to improve the human storytelling experience in two fundamental ways. First, they can share their stories in real-time, as they are occurring. This changes the entire social dynamic of a story, because it allows people who are not physically present to participate. And second, the stories are durable. A person’s real-world adventures are safely stored away to be remembered and shared with anyone at any time in the future. We believe this currency of stories will inspire people to go places and interact with people they otherwise would not have, and we see that as a fundamental improvement of human life.
In my own life, Whrrl v2.0 has been amazing. (Keep in mind, I’ve had Whrrl v2.0 since the alpha launch in January.) My wife and I have shared our kids’ experiences with each other in real time so we could both participate in two physically separate activities (a birthday party for Lucas and a basketball game for Taitum, for example). I’ve participated in numerous hilarious banter sessions that just would never have happened if not for the real-world experience at the center. I’ve gotten to know more of my friends more deeply through their stories. I’ve used Whrrl v2.0 to start a living history of my kids. It’s hard to imagine going back to a pre-Whrrl v2.0 life now.
The entire Pelago team is thrilled to bring Whrrl v2.0 to the world. Today is the day, and we’re eager for your feedback.
