Selfish apps: it's about me, not you

2011 was my first time at South By South-West. Before I left I'd been given a range of advice, from drinking my year's quota of tequila in 5 days to avoiding most of the panel based sessions harder than I'd be avoiding healthy eating. It's passed in a whirl, with each day blending into the other until now that it's all over it feels like one helluva long day has just ended, not a whole week.

So did it meet my expectations?  Yes it did, and more. It was an incredibly stimulating, vibrant and inspiring experience which has left my brain spinning. But, because there has to be a but, my only issue was that it did take me a day or two to perfect picking out the good sessions to attend. I'd been warned to expect more breadth than depth, and to stay away from sessions that were too close to my day to day work, but I was initially tripped up by sessions which sold their topic very well in the programme and then turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in selling the speaker and his/her start-up/book/app during the session. If I'd wanted to listen to a marketing pitch, I didn't need to fly  10 hours across the Atlantic to find it. A good talk should put sharing value first, and self-promotion second.

This got me thinking about another thing which has been bugging me lately: selfish apps. I'm sure you know the kind, the ones which put their own needs and interests before providing you with real utility. Let me give a couple of examples.

Beluga is a group messaging service that uses WiFi/3G. As the best way to keep track of 10 sociable MxMers with divergent interests and short attention spans, it was definitely app of the moment at SXSW.  But it has one really irritating feature. If you haven't got any friends using the service yet, it invites you to tell friends about Beluga. As it's a Facebook owned app, the first option is to tell friends via Facebook. And here's where it falls down, instead of being able to message friends individually it prompts you to post to your wall and tell everyone you know that you're using Beluga. It might seem like a subtle difference but it's not insignificant. I don't want every single person I know on Facebook to try and connect with me on Beluga, I want to choose a select group of friends to connect with. I do have the option to email friends, but maybe I can't remember their email off hand. The end result of making it less easy for me to find specific friends is that I will connect with fewer people on Beluga and it's less likely to become a must use app once SXSW has worn off.

Foursquare is a veteran app-spammer, tweeting your location indiscriminately once you've hooked it up to Twitter, even though it's unlikely that most of your followers give a crap about where you go for your morning coffee. Even Eightbit.me, a fun web app I'm enjoing playing with, will automatically change your Twitter avatar to the eight bit version unless you notice the pre-checked box.  As it so happens I didn't mind having my avatar changed, but if I did it would have put me off using the app again. On the web, Quora bypassed the sweet spot of providing me with relevant and interesting content in a timely way by choking my inbox with its relentless email notifications. The result? I've switched off all email notifications and now mostly forget to use it.

So what's my problem here?  Essentially, these apps are putting ways to promote themselves to you and your friends before providing you with a good service. Compare this to my current favourite app, Instagram, which is continuously delightful to use. In an interview with the Guardian at SXSW co-founder Mike Krieger talked about how over-sharing can be unproductive and that they don't expect every Instagram user to share photos every few minutes. For a service whose very heart is shareability, Instagram gives you tremendous control over how shared your photos are. The choice to share with other social networks is down to a flick of a switch for each photo you take, and is always automatically set to off. You can even go one step further and make your photos private so that only your followers can see them. Having this level of control makes me much more likely to share particular photos with my wider networks. It's the difference between earned shareability and forced shareability.  Instagram realised that over-sharing was not just unproductive for its users, it would also end up being unproductive for the app.

For me, taking a user-centred approach to the service is the kernel of what makes a good app. Selfish apps prioritise feeding their own ecosystem but this behaviour is ultimately counter-productive. I'm more likely to continue to use an app that puts my needs first and I'm also more likely to talk about that app to other people (unless I'm having a whinge, as in this case ;)

So back to SXSW, the best sessions I attended offered the audience something of real value, whether that be  innovative thinking, new ideas or behind the scenes insight into work processes. Luckily I found myself in many sessions like this and have more blog posts to follow on the thoughts and ideas they sparked off.  And I'll be sharing who inspired me, and by extension helping spread the word about what they do. A far better and more lasting form of promotion than was achieved by those who took half an hour of my attention to sell me their pitch.