Mike DiBenedetto dot com

Note: This is a cross-post from my tumblog – mikedibenedetto.tumblr.com – that I wrote for my Social Media and Entrepreneurship class.

Perry Chen, CEO and founder of Kickstarter, and Scott Heffernan, CEO and founder of Meetup, visited our Social Media & Entrepreneurship class last week.  They were quite an inspiring pair; they urged us and all entrepreneurs to create companies that enabled behaviors and actions that were not previously possible (or were sufficiently difficult in the past) but have profound positive impacts on users’ lives.

Hearing about Kickstarter got me thinking.  Its service strikes me as very much akin to Groupon‘s model. While these two companies are using the same core idea – group buying triggered by a critical mass very successfully in their own right, it occurs to me that two related opportunities still exist in this space. Think about these services in terms of who initiates the opportunity and whether or not the product exists yet.  In Kickstarter’s case, a seller/creator solicits support for something that does not yet exist and with Groupon,  a seller seeks buyers for something that does.  Why not let buyers indicate intent to purchase something (discounted or not) if and only if other users join them?  [This idea is not mine, rather it was inspired by a very cool project from the brains of my fellow students Shehab Hamad and Mike Podwal.]   This would probably work best for groups of friends planning movie nights, book clubs, vacations, etc. But perhaps there are use cases for strangers buying together at their own instigation.  The other potential critical mass purchasing opportunity would involve a user indicating interest in buying/supporting something that doesn’t yet exist. Suppose I am not a developer but I really want an Android app that does this one really cool thing that no one has thought of yet. I could indicate a willingness to pay five bucks for it and encourage others to pledge money for it as well. A developer could come along and build it and, upon verification, collect the money. This is just one use case and many more can be imagined: I want a Vietnamese restaurant in my town and would commit to spending $100 in one in its first month in existence; I want an ipod dock that does X and would pay $50 for one; etc.  You would have to work out some hairy logistics but I think these two opportunities are real and would love to see a promising entrepreneur run with them.

Image via CrunchBase

My friend Mason Sexton is the co-founder of Moonit, a social app/service that predicts the strength of your relationships based on its own private algorithm.  While I may not understand how they come up with the predictions, I know that reading them is absolutely addictive.  It’s hard to resist seeing an analysis of your chemistry with friends, love interests and family members.  But you don’t have to take it from me, Techcrunch thinks so too.  The service was pretty great as a web site but I have seen the designs of their upcoming iPhone app and it is going to be amazing.  If you have an iPhone, head over to  Moonit’s early adopter signup page and leave your email address so they can ping you when they launch the app.

I have been playing around with 8tracks.com today and I am really digging it.  8tracks.com is a site where you can arrange mixes of 8 or more songs and then share them with friends.

It’s a bit hard to write reviews of legal music services on the web because they are so often hamstrung by their licensing deals from the music labels.  When you think about the hoops that services like Last.fm, Lala.com and 8tracks.com have to jump through to give users a legal and free music experience on the web, it is amazing that any of them can even exist.

While I have often made clear my love of Lala.com (mostly on Twitter but also on this blog), I think I’ll start using 8tracks.com a lot more in the coming days.  But for a very different purpose than I use Lala.   Like most people, I don’t have access to my full music collection at the office.  Lala has helped me get a good portion of it into the cloud for remote listening.  However,  I often find myself streaming music from places like Pandora and Last.fm.  Those sites are pretty good at playing similar music to what I listen to at home.  And they can give you a fairly uninterrupted listening experience for hours on end.   That is fantastic.  Since the mixes on 8tracks.com are often only eight songs long, you typically need to find a new set of songs every half hour.  That might make it hard for 8tracks.com to compete with some of the aforementioned services when it comes to getting people to listen to hours of music at a time.

Where 8tracks blows those competing services out of the water is in social music sharing.  People in my generation grew up making and listening to mixes.  And while we’re somewhat out of the habit, as soon as I started making mixes on the site, I began to love the experience of mix-arranging like a 17 year old in 1998 who just discovered Modest Mouse.  (Yeah, that was me.)  And now that I am creating mixes, I want my friends to listen to them.  8tracks has made mix-making so easy that I want to make a mix for every person I have ever known.  One for my girlfriend.  One for my college roommate.  One for my co-worker.  And since I made the mixes, they are going to listen to them.  Because knowing that I made it for them will make the experience more meaningful than listening to songs picked by a computer program.

Think about this: you have an hour left in the day.  Do you fire up Last.fm or Pandora and type in Pixies to listen to some Pixies-ish rock?  Or do you open the mix I made you and attached with a note saying: “Hey man, remember when we used to jam out to these songs?”  Yeah, thought so.

With that clearly powerful and emotional use-case in mind, I’d plan for it directly if I was in charge.  I would create an option to “Make someone a mix” and make it stand out as distinct from making a general mix.  Furthermore, I’d add a final step to the mix making process in which a user is prompted for the recipient’s email address.  When making a mix is positioned like that, it feels more meaningful than making a mix for the general population who probably don’t care about how I put Pavement right next to a song from my old band.  I’d even make adding a password to these personal mixes optional.  This would make the whole experience more intimate.  I’d focus on intimacy as one of the core values the service delivers.   Along the same line, I’d make it easy for me as a recipient to purchase the whole mix with one click.  While I am hesitant to buy music online in general, I just might spend ten dollars to own every song that my cousin picked out for me on this rainy Wednesday.

Here’s a mix I made of the type of smooth summer sounds that I am slightly embarrassed to like:

Amazon Brilliantly Leverages Other Users Behavior to Affect Yours

Attempting to draw insight from the titans of user interface design, I have been thinking about how to use technology to motivate the people we love to take better care of themselves.  If Amazon can convince us to buy books that readers with similar tastes have purchased, there must be a way to use that sort of social pressure to encourage us to listen to the warning signs of dangerous diseases.  Facebook made the process of spreading apps so intuitive and fast that many users inexplicably found themselves adding silly applications without deriving any real enjoyment out of the experience.  Can’t we similarly make taking care of ourselves viral?

The same incentive that drives app adoption on Facebook and sales on Amazon would also be effective for a health service.  It’s called peer pressure.  It made you drink beer in high school, stage zombie attacks on Facebook, buy just one more book on Amazon and, if leveraged properly, can lead you to check yourself out.  You may not be willing to take care of yourself at the expense of everything else in your busy schedule, but knowing that your mother or child is worrying about your health could be enough to drive you to get that recurring headache checked out.

The key, as always, with social apps is to make them action focused and keep the minimum amount of action required, i.e. the barrier to entry, extremely low.   With that in mind, here are a few very rough ideas of web services and apps that might help us to pay more attention to the silent screams of our bodies.

1. E-Cards – A very simple old concept revitalized for a new purpose.  We could send our loved ones cards asking them to check out specific ailments that we know bother them.  Incorporating celebrity PSA-type videos could drive the message home further.  Even more effective would be allowing users to record their pleas via their webcams.  That could go a long way to convince their mothers/daughters to check themselves out, especially if the footage was combined in Flash with other uploaded photos, graphics and text to create a simple multimedia presentation.
2. A web quiz app could question you about your own symptoms, give you a list of possible causes in a printable PDF format (that you’d bring to your next doctor visit) and ask you to forward it to your loved ones to remind them to take care of themselves.  iVillage does something similar with their symptom solver.
3. A DonorsChoose type site that lets you create a page with your case why your mom should treat herself better – stop smoking, exercise more, get more regular mammograms, etc.  Your page would be anonymous and visitors to the site could submit advice and stories about similar experiences.  You’d then forward the interesting bits of wisdom and advice you get from the crowd to your mother.  This concept has the benefit of allowing good Samaritans to wander around the site and taking a few seconds to give a bit of wisdom that might prove convincing.   You’d obviously get a ton of bad advice that you’d have to filter out.  But bad or harmful advice and other trollish behavior would be flagged and thus reflected in some sort of reputation rank for that user.  And when you did send along someone’s thoughts to your loved one, the good Samaritan would get reputation points which would show up next time they offered a suggestion to someone else.   People love giving advice, building good reputations and doing small but helpful tasks that make them feel good about themselves so I think there would be no shortage of advice givers.  As for the intended recipient of all of this unwanted feedback from strangers, they might be turned off and angered but if cleverly constructed and designed, the site would show them just how much their daughter/son/mother/father/brother/sister loved them and worried about them.  And if they got any insight from the crowd on how to get healthier without too much effort, so much the better.

These are merely kernels of ideas and there are obvious and quite major hurdles to services like the ones I’ve outlined above.

• Privacy is the biggest.  We want to protect our medical info from companies and from each other’s prying eyes.
• Fear is another.  People are often afraid to confront their symptoms because doing so makes them more real.  It also means they need to spend money on addressing the problems.

Kiva.org Enables Users to Engage in Micro-Finance

However, with further thought and development, I’m confident that it is possible to leverage social pressure online to encourage our loved ones to pay close attention to their health.  Organizations like Kiva and DonorsChoose have unlocked massive social potential by making it easy, visible and social to do small, granular acts of giving and micro-lending.  The same can be done to address a whole host of humanity’s other problems – like taking care of our bodies.  Kiva and DonorsChoose opened a giant door by pairing the social activities of the web with the social consciousness inside us all.  It’s up to tomorrow’s great social entrepreneurs to walk through that door.