OkTrend pipes up…

I Hate It

3 Years later, Ok trends (OKCupid’s blog about trends across the Okcupid service) pipes up with a new entry, titled We experiment on human beings. In a cynical  move to get in on the facebook controversy. Maybe they are feeling the heat from Facebook and its enviable rise to take over online dating.  So threaten, they decided to let everyone know they are still around and relevant ? Maybe I’m being too skeptical?

However there are some interesting parts… to this rare and burst of information.

A while ago, we had the genius idea of an app that set up blind dates; we spent a year and a half on it, and it was gone from the app store in six months.

Of course, being geniuses, we chose to celebrate the app’s release by removing all the pictures from OkCupid on launch day. “Love Is Blind Day” on OkCupid—January 15, 2013.

All our site metrics were way down during the “celebration”, for example:

But by comparing Love Is Blind Day to a normal Tuesday, we learned some very interesting things. In those 7 hours without photos:

And it wasn’t that “looks weren’t important” to the users who’d chosen to stick around. When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in the middle of conversations that had started “blind”.

Those conversations melted away. The goodness was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.

Basically, people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.

I think OKCupid is right on this. The technology drives the way people decide to use it. This is why its critical not to drive people into a gamified  model or cognitively overload them with information.

I also wondered what happened with OKcupid’s blind date app? Not so frank this time about the lack of take up! I’m pretty sure it received a flurry of activity but now no ones actually using it at all. Nice idea OKCupid but your own results prove it, no ones using it and its time it was retired me thinks…

I’ll be interested to see if more stats will be coming out of oktrends in the near future. They took away the paid for dating one and who knows what else they are going to do to

 

Mindmapping… collaboration, mobile, presentation and more

Business Analyist, User Experience, Front-End Architecture Practice MindMap

I looked at my design work from my college days and noticed a serious amounts of Mindmaps. The mindmaps are not as big or as connected as I tend to make them now but I have been mindmapping for decades. For a short while I use to use Outlining tools which can be pretty straight forward but lacks the dimension.

Mindmapping seems synonymous with dyslexic. Maybe something to do with  the leaps of topic?

As I’m a open source and collaborative kind of guy, I looked into something which I can run in Ubuntu and run across over multiple platforms. Collaboration is a nicety which I wanted but thought might not be possible.

Well I found something. Its called Mindmup.

I was using Freemind which is open source and runs every platform and seems to become the defacto open standard for mindmaps. Mindmup is also open source supports import and export freemind *.mm files without any noticeable differences . It also supports similar keyboard mappings and runs completely in a modern browser. It seems to support CSS and SVG too.

The killer features for me is the collaboration. The ability to share and have people add to your mindmap seems to be a killer feature. Because all you need is a browser. I haven’t really used this feature much but I find a few times when it would be so very handy! Collaboration! FTW!

I’m also loving the idea of using mindmaps for project management! You can save locally, Github, Dropbox, Google Drive and even to their own proprietary storage server.

I also spotted something which I have always wanted to see. A prezi killer? Rather than creating a mindmap for the sake of a presentation, imagine if you could just step through parts in a narrative form? Well I have yet to test it but look out soon, I may do it and see how people react.

My only issue is having to use another tool to create mindmaps on my Nexus 7 tablet.  I’m using SimpleMind mindmapping which has its own desktop apps but can generate freemind files easily and also can save direct to google drive. The main reason I bought it is because its quick and easy to create maps. Which was very handy in TedXLiverpool last week. The web version isn’t quite fast enough to keep up with my thoughts unfortunately.

Ok I lied, I have another issue. Evernote doesn’t really understand Mindmaps. Yes I can import them via PDF or something else but it doesn’t natively understand them. Ideally I would find something to store all my mindmaps but would understand them enough to link them together. I know Hyperlinking maps is possible but only within certain applications and it tends to be proprietary.

I’m already imagining something like a XML DB or RDF store to hold mindmaps. Kind of reminds me of TopicMaps which seemed to die. Sure they had a way of holding them in a more native way?

Regardless… the main point is.. I certainly felt like this before.

I have loads of ideas — they’re like a bowl of tangled spaghetti in my head. But, as with many dyslexics, I have a real problem accessing those strands in an organised way. The many benefits of mind-mapping are well documented as being invaluable to both dyslexics and non-dyslexics…