Whoops
whoo.ps · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Whoops is a personal blog on product design, apps, and tech business, with opinions on design trends and the app market.
What HN saysHN commenters use it in debates about whether new products are dismissed as trivial and about when SMS suits an interface. They give no firm verdict on the blog.
22HN people shared it
2linked it in comments
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
Detrus · 2015-09-25
Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.
I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.
The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done.
For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it.
And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens.
More detailed read http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.html
Instead of a simple standard interface for users to access various services we have http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200… which kills discoverability and creates a constant drag on people to learn a million UIs. And then we hope to fix all that with another layer of AI…
libovness · 2015-08-17
A lot of people who read this post a few months latched too tightly onto the idea that SMS is somehow always a better interaction model than a UI. It's not. But there's a time and place where SMS is just the right way to notify someone or communicate with someone about something: http://whoo.ps/2015/05/27/what-sms-is-good-for