RealTidbits in the Wild

February 17, 2012 //
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Photo of a Cardinal a user uploaded

 

 

Comments
You’re going to laugh at this site, but it’s a really great example of a community that’s obsessed with content.

It’s a live deer cam that shows a feeding station. Users are checking in daily and leaving tons of comments. They’re also taking screenshots of special moments they see on the deer camp and posting them for posterity. To date, they have over 5000 comments. Each post averages 4 or 5 replies and the same number of likes. I’d say a quarter of the posts have images in them too, which is well above the overall average. Fascinating community.

DowJones Local Media Group pushed us live on a few of their sites and this one is a good example. They don’t get a ton of traffic, but they’re really excited to be pulling tweets into their comments stream which was honestly what sold them on the product. Seems simple, but when you can demonstrate how much user generated commentary there really is around one’s content, you’ve done a great service.

Learn more about our realtime comments product here.

Forums
ESPN is our largest customer. We’ve been live for almost a year now and as we head into March Madness, one of their peaks periods of traffic. Our forums will feature prominently in their strategy to get users to spend more time on ESPN.com.

The sheer complexity of how they’ve deployed the forums is too much to describe in this post but we are excited to be deploying our newest feature – user generated polls – just before March Madness. JetJaw provides the polls to us so we have them to thank for supporting us there.

Learn more about our realtime forums product here.

Galleries
We’ve revamped the Galleries product to be a little more engaging. Thanks to Arktan and StreamSentiment, we were able to put together the following demos of the Super Bowl, Grammy’s and the upcoming Oscars. By combining our Galleries product with our Comments product and feeding social media photos into the gallery, we’re able to create a pretty neat “before, during and after” experience of a large social media presence designed entirely around engaging photos.

Learn more about our realtime galleries product here.

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Categories our products

The Grammy's Most Popular Photos

February 13, 2012 //
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If you love pop music and pop culture, you probably made an effort to tune into the Grammy Awards last night. If you’re a fan of social media too then you probably found a way to follow the event on Twitter. This year’s Grammy’s went beyond all-access with backstage exclusives, interviews and extra, live video feeds. This year, the Grammy’s embraced the panorama that social media provides, embracing Twitter and Instagram to feed its audience photos for sharing.

We captured the images over at our Grammy’s photo gallery (which is still streaming live shares) throughout the week and, of course, last night during the show. You can see a rough cut of the image gallery in action here.

What are the lessons learned?

  • Photos tell a story that can get repeated endlessly.
  • Fans love backstage, behind-the-scenes access.
  • Fans will help you promote your wares.
  • Fashion loves fans and fans love fashion.
  • Bring your own photographer (like Lady Gaga did).
  • Very few of the “Official” photos shared actually came from the Grammy’s web site (they came from Twitter and Instagram).
  • Get your photo taken with cute kids.
  • and win.

Below are some of the top photos shared on social media. Enjoy.

Grammy’s Official Photos

Here’s the official Grammy’s Twitter feed photo grid. And here are the top most shared photos:

Final Touches to the Red Carpet

Where your favorite stars are sitting

Fergie Backstage Walkby

Fan's photo from the seats

Image from the rafters at the Staples Center

Taylor Swift Backstage with Her Two Grammy's

Foo Fighters

Ryan Tedder (one of Adele's producers) Backstage

Lady Gaga

Have a look at @gagadaily’s photo grid to get her official press photos, such as they are

Gaga with Neil Patrick Harris

Gaga with Katy Perry

Gaga with Paul McCartney

Gaga with Kelly Rowland

The following photos are getting shared a lot, but we don’t know who took them originally. FYI.

Gaga with Tony Bennett

Gaga with Neil Patrick Harris (this time with smooches)

Gaga in Versace

 

Rhianna

Rhianna and Katy Perry

Rhianna Red Carpet Sexy Pose

Adele

Adele's Seat Reserved

Adele in Burberry

Before the Grammy’s 

@davidguetta's MIX.R "promo" with Chris Brown during rehearsals

Kelly Osborne with Ellen's Kids

 

Categories our products, the internet as we see it

Join us for a Realtime #grammys Viewing Party

February 12, 2012 //
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Realtime Social Media Photo Gallery Following #Grammys Tagged Photos

We’re repeating our Super Bowl party with a realtime photo gallery experience for the 54th Grammy Awards on Sunday night. Here’s a link to see what photos have the social web abuzz before, during and after the Grammy’s:

http://realtidbits.com/demo/grammys/

Showtime is at 5:00 PM PST on Sunday.

What’s in the Gallery?

We designed it for live events where the world is watching. Watch as photos and videos stream in. Participate by adding your own commentary. It’s a side-by-side gallery with comments, both in realtime.

What’s new in this version?

We widened the net: we’re no longer limiting our feed to the photos on location. We take photos from everywhere.

We have flexible layouts: if you have a small screen, you’ll see just 4 columns. If you have a wide screen, you’ll see as many as 6. The screen adjusts smartly.

What’s next?

The Oscars!

Big thanks!

We couldn’t do this without Arktan or Echo.

Zoomed in View of a #Grammys Tagged Photo

Social Sign-on

Photo Stream Side by Side with Realtime Chat

The #Grammys Gallery

Categories Uncategorized

Join Us for a Realtime #SuperBowl Party

February 4, 2012 //
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Super Bowl Image Gallery

Realtime Super Bowl Image Gallery

We’re hosting a super bowl party of sorts. One of our products from Realtidbits is on display during the Super Bowl. It’s a live streaming photo gallery of photos from Indianapolis. We’ve been running the stream since Wednesday and have captured 972 images so far. We predict another 2,000 images might come in on Sunday as festivities ramp up.

We welcome you to visit the demo on Sunday during the game to see the Super Bowl’s realtime photo gallery in action. Below I’ve posted a little screencast I did to show how to interact with it. But the real fun is going to be in visiting the gallery on Sunday during the game.

In addition to our demo, you might also visit the Realtime Forums over at ESPN.com also powered by Realtidbits. The NFL forum is the most popular forum on the site (with over half a million posts). It’s often a vibrant forum with lots of off-topic conversation, but it’s a great example how a realtime experience can inject life into a static paradigm.

NFL Forum on ESPN.com

NFL Forum on ESPN.com

I’d like to mention that we’re able to do this because of our partnership with Arktan who provided the stream filter for us. We are also doing streaming analytics courtesy of Stream Sentiment. More to come!

Categories our products

It just works (and it's better).

January 30, 2012 //
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Apple's Retina Display

One of the lessons I’ve learned from Apple is that being better is just better. In every day parlance, Apple’s promotions are little more than getting their customers to say to friends and family “the proof is in the pudding.” The ways that Apple proves itself apart from its mainstream advertising efforts are too numerous to state in a single post. Each of their products and even their retail locations are studies in a better product experience. However, Apple knows the value of images more than any other company. That’s why you pay more for their photo books and why the retina displays are necessary for a company like them to keep their edge. I’m constantly impressed with how high the quality of photos are from my iPhone. And I just love showing off our family albums we have printed by Apple. Whenever someone looks at the quality of images in both, they assume I’m a good photographer. Not at all. I’m just letting Apple make me and my images look good.

If you’re trying to compete with Apple, you could might try aiming at the retina display. Giving consumers pretty pictures – in all their manifestations – is a high-value touchpoint. Literally.

This New OLED Display Blows the Retina Away.

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Categories lessons learned in the trenches, product development

Making a Case For Change

January 27, 2012 //
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Where do I start?

You could say one of our super powers @3ones is in dot-com turnarounds. When you revamp a dot-com, you end up touching so many parts of a product that the new version is almost a completely different product. We’ve done this in the dating space and we’ve done it in B2B software space. But regardless of the market for these products, the methodology for measuring success is the same. First you must state a case for change. The opinions of the exec team don’t matter. Your case for change will come from the voice of customer or the data you cull from actual usage and subscriptions. Once you set out to change, it’s important to save your study and then measure the results of your changes using the same criteria you used for assessing that need. I wrote in detail about the need to have empirical data guide your decision-making process over on Quora. But here’s a quick cheat sheet:

  1. Come up with a hypothesis.
  2. Test the hypothesis.
  3. Make a change to your product.
  4. Re-test.
  5. Did you move the needle in the right direction? If so, keep the change and go back to step 1. If not, revert and go back to step 3.

For obvious reasons, it’s best if you do this frequently and not save up a whole bunch of changes and release at once. That’s not always the possible in a pivot though. That’s why they pay us the big bucks. We specialize is big turnarounds.

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Categories lessons learned in the trenches, product development

Extremely Fun and Incredibly Cheap

January 25, 2012 //
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One of the great things about working in product development is that you get to dink around with other products all the time. On a whim, I bought “The Numberlys” which is an animated book recently on various top lists over in the Apple App Store. It’s a book, a video game and a movie all wrapped into an app. It’s luminous, happy, educational (if you’re my 4 year old) and inspirational. It has all the great qualities of a work of art: it’s literary, magical, and inspirational. It makes you smile and it makes you think. I gave it to D, my aforementioned 4-year-old, and he has read it once through each of the last 4 days. Getting him to sit still for 30 minutes is feat enough worthy of praise. We both have had fun playing the app together.

If you should need such a thing, the synopsis is as follows: the Numberlys are a society of beings where the conventions of the day are ruled by numbers. The society is monochromatic, dull and filled with the dust, smoke and debris of industry gone amok. A small band of Numberlys, not fit to be satisfied with status quo, start inventing letters. With the user as helper, those numbers get “built” and named. And with their arrival, a new world comes to be.

The app is not expensive. $5.99. It’s iPhone and iPad compatible. You may only play it once end to end, but I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. If you linger long enough on each screen, some of the details are thoroughly remarkable. It’s worth cycling through more times to pick up on those nuances. Don’t let the simplicity of the game deceive you. The music, copywriting and art direction are all worth the price of admission.

When you’re done, cruise on over to the Numberlies Web site and have a look at some of the making of videos. Here’s a trailer in tell-tale portrait format.

The Numberlys App Teaser from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Or follow Moonbot studios on Twitter. I await their next app with glee.

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Categories product reviews
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