a backwards (?) metric for a social app

MyFeed is a social app. Join with your phone number, make groups, invite people to events, a lot of the usual social stuff.

The big difference is one of the success metrics they’re tracking. MyFeed has a goal of five minutes a day of user engagement.

That’s five minutes maximum.

If a user spends more than five minutes a day in the app, they will treat that as a problem and make a point of fixing it. (Prosocial Design, so hot right now.)

Diana Cionoiu explained why. The business model isn’t based on delivering ads, where the longer someone stays in the app, the more ads they get. (Big Tech Wants You Confused.) Somehow Facebook’s ideal user went from Harvard undergraduate to people who spend a lot of time getting scammed or regretting their gambling habit. How did personal social software not happen, and we got surveillance-ware instead? The business model for MyFeed is different. Diana told me it’s going to be a marketplace, starting with performances, festivals, and other events. So they’ll make more money when the users are doing less doomscrolling and more going out. Fewer minutes of use is the goal, but they still need a path to get there.

The answer, it looks like, is to put lightweight task tracking into the app. That way people can be comfortable with getting fewer notifications and checking less often, because the system can tell who to notify when. Machines are good at handling tasks and calendars, and it looks like what they’re going for is just enough calendar and to-do features to save time for normal social activities. Not so much groupware stuff that the app looks too much like business software or a learning management system or something, though.

I have MyFeed now (and filed a bug report) so let me know if you want to try it out and meet up in person. If you have my phone number you should be able to connect with me on there. I don’t know if it’s going to become a daily routine tool for me, but the five minute thing sounds pretty sweet.

Bonus links

The Werewolf game: an interview with Google’s former news chief Richard Gingras by Natalia Antelava. Google executives, led by Richard Gingras, the company’s Global Vice President for News, acted as game masters. They decided who could speak, who had to stay silent, who lived, and who died. The editors participated enthusiastically. Some had flown in on Google’s dime. Many had received grants from the Google News Initiative, the company’s billion-dollar program to support journalism innovation. All of them depended on Google’s algorithms to surface their journalism to readers. I played one round, but felt so uncomfortable I decided to watch from the edge of the room, struck by how the whole scene looked like performance art: a dramatization of the actual relationship playing out in the real world beyond this ballroom. Publishers were going broke trying to survive in an ecosystem Google had architected. Google decided what lived and what died in its search rankings, in ad auctions, in the fundamental infrastructure of digital publishing. The parallels seemed too obvious to miss.

Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out by Pieter Arntz. (These also make Google Drive more responsive and less janky-feeling for me.)