Why Nike will win the battle of personal data devices.
Nike’s FuelBand locks together three of the biggest gamechangers in product development today - gamification, socialisation and personal data - but adds one killer refinement that will make it stand out from the market.
FuelBand heralds the advent of the Quantified Self into the mainstream. For years athletes and the keener ones amongst us have used personal data to improve their regimes. From pedometers to Polar chestbands and watches that allow you to monitor and maintain your optimal heart rate, accessing personal data has played a key role in fitness. But pedometers and heartrate monitors deliver only one dataset each. Recent fitness accessories have started to deliver a lot more wellbeing information that doesn’t just focus on exercise. Jawbone’s UP will measure your sleep activity and let you track what you eat. (Though product flaws from its inability to wirelessly communicate with the app, through to bricking have stifled sales.) Meanwhile Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, which started in 2005, signposted an interest in personal data stretching beyond exercise oriented data (subsequently inspiring Facebook to employ Felton leading to the development of Timeline). People love to discover their personal data.
Add gamification to personal data, and exercise becomes more compelling. FuelBand users can set targets to beat and earn awards for activities a la Foursquare. (Cyclists should take note of the Strava Cycling app to earn similar rewards.) But setting targets for yourself is not nearly as compelling as competing with friends. This third tier of socialisation is really where FuelBand will succeed. As Opower’s comparative utility bills have shown, and behavioural scientists/economists have argued for some time, social competition is a big incentive to changing habits. Nike has integrated this social element heavily into FuelBand.
But Nike’s real victory comes not in folding together data, social and gaming, but the addition of one killer refinement…
FuelBand will let you count steps and calories, but more importantly, it simplifies and refines your data into an overarching score. This means that, unlike the original Nike+ which limits users to running, converting movement into one score to rule them all means users can compete against friends despite taking part in different activities. It’s not about number of steps or calories burned; you don’t need to run quicker or further than your friends; you just need to beat their score via any activity that gets you moving. By refining data to a simple cross-sport score Nike’s message “Life is a sport” truly comes to life. This refinement is where Nike will win.
—- Whereas this message was best delivered via an award-winning advert ten years ago, Nike has evolved to deliver the same message via hardware and software. Kudos.
The same message today.
Does Path 2 undermine the social network’s allure?
Path released an update yesterday that allows you to post your ‘thoughts’, what you’re listening to and whether you are awake or asleep on top of previous functionality - location and who you are with as part of a photo. There is also a complete design overhaul. It’s a big update for Path who have been suspiciously quiet for quite some time. But does widening its product offering and positioning itself as a “Private Personal Journal” help the niche social network?
Disclaimer: I’m a big fan and advocate of Path. I’ve converted a number of friend to the niche social network, one of whom refuses to join Facebook, so I’m keen to see Path succeed. My online world is no different to anyone else’s - it is split into two spheres:
- friends and family I know and love
- friends and family and work colleagues and twitter followers I don’t know very well or love. (We have Facebook to blame for allowing us to categorise some people we don’t know or love as friends).
For me the latter class sit across a number of social network but most importantly, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Foursquare. Meanwhile the former class, sit across all of these but also Path. In short, Path is just for my close family and friends. You can have up to 150 connections on Path (formerly 50). I only have 14. I curate my Path viciously. I don’t connect with anyone whose updates I don’t want to see. This, combined with the fact that Path only lets you post photos - real life occurrences - means whenever I get a Path notification I get excited. I look forward to seeing a photo someone I love has posted - seeing what they’re up to. I cannot say the same for any other social network. This is the power of Path. Excitement through relevance.
Path 2 introduces a fistful of new features. And I’m concerned that the diversity of these features are exactly the sort of thing that turns off many Facebook users and will have the same impact on Pathers.
Instagram’s success has been simplicity and single-mindedness. Its phenomenal recent growth (10m users in the last year) is testament to its proposition - photographs and only photographs. When users enter a niche social network they know they’ll only be exposed to one genre of content. Whether it is Instagram, Pinterest, turntable.fm, Miso, Foodspotting they are choosing to see one thing they know and love.
Path 2 has moved into territory that emulates other major social networks (your new timeline even looks like Facebook’s Timeline). The introduction of text status updates, location checkins (combined with Foursquare checkins), music checkins (with the ability to play the track in-app), companionship updates (previously launched as niche network With), and what I can only describe as state-of-consciousness updates, all show that Path is following its original remit of being the intimate social network by getting more diverse updates from your closest friends.
But even your closest friends can be boring when you give them the ability to tell you they are now asleep. “It’s about staying in someone’s life every single day,” says [Path founder] Morin. “That’s love.” That may be true for my wife. But for everyone else, that’s annoying.
If my connections on Path start telling me where they are, or that they are awake, will I remain excited whenever I get a notification from Path? I doubt it. And if Path holds no allure, then it’s just a Facebook group or G+ circle made up of my closest friends. And that could make it redundant.
Dragging Location Kicking & Screaming Into Our Lives
Rovio recently announced Angry Birds Magic which uses NFC and Angry Bird Magic Places which uses location data. If you play Angry Birds in a specific ‘place’, you can unlock features such as the Mighty Eagle - an even angrier bird. Undeniably, this will lead to brand partnerships (- play in your local Starbucks and unlock a power up?) But what interests me is not that Rovio has managed to create another revenue stream beyond their current partnerships, but that location-based products continue to be invested in despite the overwhelming lack of mainstream support. I’m an advocate of location-based games, a self-confessed one time Super Mayor, however I admit that geo-location just hasn’t managed to attracted the early majority… yet. There seems to be a clear reluctance and skepticism of its advantages. The key seems to be relevance. Is my location relevant to my activity ? How does it benefit me, let alone my friends? Proximity can deliver this (as discussed previously). I only hope that the partnerships Rovio forges to reward gamers for visiting Magic Places add enough value to the experience to get the majority to reappraise location-based applications. But I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where playing the game will enrich my time at a rewarding location such as a theme park / bird sanctuary. Much more likely will be the scenario in which my visit to a mundane location such as a train station is enriched by giving me a new game feature. But can the game ever act as an incentive to visit a location? Can the reward of the Mighty Eagle incentivise me enough to go to one location over a competitor? I would love Rovio to create a location-based experience that makes geo-skeptics turn their heads. Building the category isn’t their goal, but when an application as popular as Angry Birds makes this sort of move, it becomes a category influencer and spokesperson. I hope these partnerships serve to clarify the benefits of geo-location to the majorities. I want location-based experiences to grow. I want the mainstream to embrace them. But I’m not sure Angry Birds Magic Places helps. I pray the partnerships it announces soon catalyse rather than confuse the category.
Watch Rovio product managers talk about Angry Birds Magic & Magic Places.
I love Path, I’m an advocate of it, but why wouldn’t you build this functionality into the Path app?
At Path, above all we believe in empowering simple design, quality craftsmanship, and creative freedom.
To that tune we host hackathons once a month where we hack on anything we want. The only rule is: don’t work on what you normally work on. This practice was pioneered at Facebook. We borrowed…
It easy to be a DJ. But it just got even easier. This wahwah.fm app lets you make a playlist then listen to it and broadcast it to listeners simultaneously. And get live feedback. Genius.
HT @neilperkin
The Rise Of Proximity
Geo-location has been a buzz word since Foursquare’s launch at SXSW in 2009. But despite healthy growth and even with the advent of Facebook Places last year, it’s never really become mainstream. Most people still don’t see a value in it. Proximity however is the evolution of geo-location. It’s the marriage of location data and relevance. We’re seeing new manifestations of geo-located data that tie users into a locale that means something to them. Two examples have caught my eye recently - Color & Home Elephant (video intro’s below). Both of these iPhone apps tap us into our location but also connect us with users nearby… in realtime. Color does it through photos (- imagine seeing what the view is like courtside) whilst Home Elephant does it via simple neighbourhood updates (though hopefully not always catch-the-thief style updates). Proximity apps don’t tell us that a friend has checked into an airport on the other side of the world, they only tell us what is relevant nearby. So whilst I’m not sure that Color will be the next Twitter, I’ll stick my neck out and say that Proximity will overtake geo-location as the next buzzword and could well bring location into the mainstream. Thanks to @BrainPicker for pointing out Home Elephant
From Windows 1.0 to 7
On my current theme of tech nostalgia is this excellent video charting Windows OS upgrades from 1.0 to the present 7. I completely forgot that programs like Doom 2 and Monkey Island were originally launched from DOS. It’s like taking a trip back to my childhood.
