February 21, 2007

Passionate Users Jumpstart Creativity

Michael Arrington

21 comments »

We’ve all seen this before. Passionate users want more or different functionality for a given product, and they build it themselves rather than wait. Sometimes it is done purely for passion, other times there’s a profit motive. But the result is often a kick in the pants to the original startup. How the company responds says a lot about their commitment to their users.

A good example from 2006 was a user-created mashup (a hack really) of Pandora and Last.fm that was quickly embraced and supported by both companies. The product is still alive and doing well.

Two examples we’ve seen this year are LinkedInABox and WootAgent.

WootAgent

WootAgent is still in private beta. It’s a small download (for Windows machines only at the moment) that hardcore Woot junkies will want to use

If you don’t know what Woot is: It’s an ecommerce site that launched in 2004, that has a single thing for sale every day. There is a limited quantity for sale, and when that’s been bought, nothing is for sale until the next day. Shipping is always $5, and occasionally they sell “Random Crap” that can be a useless item or something incredible like a new LCD display for $20. The Random Crap sales often sell out within minutes.

The problem with Woot is that people often forget to check the site, and they miss good deals. WootAgent sits in the system tray and automatically pops up when a new Woot is available, a Woot is running out, and a Woot is sold out (see screen shot). For anyone other than loyal Woot users it will be annoying, but for those that care, it’s awesome.

LinkedInABox

LinkedInABox is a javascript widget that users can place on a website (See TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon’s personal blog to view the widget, located in the right sidebar). The widget shows the basic information included in your LinkedIn profile, and is a really nice addition to a professional blog or other website. Frankly, this is something LinkedIn should have done themselves, and I hope that they embrace this product.

I’ll be looking for other examples of user generated products and features that enhance a much loved core product, and profiling good examples here.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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...some Drifter

February 21st, 2007 at 5:48 pm

this is one of the dryer articles

a generic pro-creativity/entrepreneur prep rally
Ryan

February 21st, 2007 at 5:57 pm

One of the most creative instances I’ve seen of this is Xfire plus…adds cross-IM functionality, music detection, and custom miniprofiles to the Xfire service…all created by users..
Bill Minton

February 21st, 2007 at 6:07 pm

I like this article, in part because it relates to something I’ve been working on myself.

I’m a big fan of ACDSee, and also of Fotki. The trouble is, there’s no easy or automated way of transferring my ACDSee categorizing (tagging) work to Fotki…until now.

I’ve been working on making this possible, and actually had a successful go of it earlier today with over 500 images and tags successfully transferred. I’ve written a little about it on a blog I started at http://frozenpixels.wordpress......with-tags/
Michael

February 21st, 2007 at 6:29 pm

There is also a last.fm Firefox extension that allows your Pandora radio to talk to last.fm found here. It is much much less bulky than the one you mention above and doesn’t require you to send your log-in info to anyone else.
Zoli Erdos

February 21st, 2007 at 6:29 pm

The LinkedIn widget is an interesting idea, certainly a good one to post on a resume-blog…. but for most other blogs it takes up too much space. I’m staying with a simple (and small) LinkedIn button on my blog.
Jonathan

February 21st, 2007 at 6:45 pm

There are tons of Woot widgets out there for both mac and pc.

OSX Dashboard Widget:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/D.....dget.shtml

Another windows plugin:
http://pertelian.com/index.php.....;Itemid=49

And there are some other OSX pluins / widgets as well as some for Windows.
Ashish Mohta

February 21st, 2007 at 6:46 pm

linked…looks like a great idea but it will depend how extensively u use it.Just to get signed coz you have read here wont work.Thats what happens most of the time.Before i say i would like to try i say if i can continue i will try for sure.
Tom

February 21st, 2007 at 7:03 pm

Linked in a box….. not to be confused with dick in a box.
How to start a clothing line from scratch

February 21st, 2007 at 7:10 pm

I like the aootagent idea!
Ray/ MillionReturn.com

February 21st, 2007 at 7:25 pm

I think the best passionate user’s DIY product is CS for Half life

—————————
http://www.MillionReturn.Com — Return $1m from 1 page! How?
manfmnantucket

February 21st, 2007 at 8:10 pm

there seems to be quite a proliferation in this category… other fun ones

you can find lots of homebrew mashups on programmableweb.com

have you seen plotornot (flikr + trulia)
http://www.plotornot.com/

grüvr - myspace + googmaps (black site)
http://www.gruvr.com/

what’s the diff between a “passionate” user trying to fix a problem or make something better and a hobbyist experimenting with mashing their favorite services to make something new?

I suppose this also overlaps the user-made firefox extension category too, and things like pandora’s box… broad topic!
cbriggs

February 22nd, 2007 at 4:09 am

To add a little bit of history/context to this phenomenon, check out Eric Von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation (http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm), where he goes into some more depth on why he thinks that passionate users - what he terms “lead users” innovate like this.

Interesting fact: according to a study he did in 1998, he found that %80 of the most important scientific instrument innovations were developed by the users, not the manufacturer.
manitou

February 22nd, 2007 at 10:02 am

great piece of software!
Hornswaggled

February 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm

Hey Mike,

Speaking of creativity it would be nice if you could incorporate some sort of comment voting like Digg (don’t forget to duck) or even Engadget.

I used to read the comments just as much as the posts but lately the comments have been lacking a bit. I’m not saying my comments have been good but if you incorporated something like that then people would think twice before submitting a crap comment just to be first or whatever they decide to do it for.

I understand that if the comment actually gets bumped up or down based on the votes it could cause some issues with people commenting on other comments, however I would rather read the comments that the reader base have voted as the best and not waist time reading through the rubbish.

As your blog gets more and more popular I’m sure the comments will increase and this is a great thing, however I think some sort of accountability is in order.

Hey if i’m way off base here, sorry. Ill still read your blog
David Mackey

February 24th, 2007 at 9:05 pm

I like the Woot widget.
Wooter

March 2nd, 2007 at 11:02 am

It’s unfortunate that some of the more inventive Woot Off Trackers were not included in this as opposed to Woot Alert. These trackers were spawned as a way to get through Woot Offs and actually do an ENORMOUS amount of good in diverting non-revenue traffic from the overloaded Woot servers by caching the data. Essentially, it takes 80,000 people who would be spamming F5 every 5 seconds and has them all looking at an offsite page that only hits Woot once every 15-30 seconds. Woot Alert doesn’t do this. If any of you are interested in following Woot, I would HIGHLY recommend using a web-based tracker such as the ones found at http://woot.wikia.com
sam

March 2nd, 2007 at 2:26 pm

Wooter, WootAgent is an awesome program, have you even tested it? The point of the program is to alert users of changes on woot. If users aren’t even using a browser when a wootoff begins, then they won’t know about it.
Curt

March 2nd, 2007 at 4:39 pm

wootSnoop has a better interface, more features, and is proven! Check it out!
wootSnoop
andy

March 5th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Please disregard Curt’s comment. I’ve seen him on the Woot forums doing the same thing in WootAgent’s thread. It’s cute.
Curt

March 20th, 2007 at 6:29 am

Hey, I’m just trying to inform people about other options like wootSnoop, which has been around nearly a year - well before Woot Agent arrived. And, what I say about it is true in my opinion. That doesn’t mean Woot Agent isn’t also a good little program with its own set of positives.

It also doesn’t benefit me one bit if you decide to use it or not as wootSnoop is a completely free program. I’m just trying to let people know that Woot Agent isn’t the only program out there for this and I don’t see why that would be a problem for you. I know I like being informed to all the options so I can make my own judgment about which I like better.