Sunday, 13 September 2009

New password request - fix

The recent surge in registrations has given us the opportunity to talk with a lot more users who've been in touch about various errors on the site. Some have proven to be human errors that actually point to usability issues we're looking at. But some are bugs we've just never encountered.

One of the most puzzling of these was a user who reset their password twice but still couldn't gain access to the site. We got back to them within a few hours to say we were on the case, and then let them know of the fix within 36 hours (thanks Pav!). It turns out that if the user cut and pasted their new passowrd from an email opened in Outlook, a space character was added to the end of the password thus making the password invalid. This seems to only affect Outlook email clients. WEIRD. 

Posted by comotivate at 11:11 AM in Technical faults and issues raised and discussed
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Tuesday, 20 January 2009

Incentives

I've been wondering what I can do to increase the level of commitment to the site and to the team you join. The best incentive is always based on your actual goal and the state of motivation naturally derived from working with someone just like you. However, I'd love to hear ideas on what other things I could use to sweeten the comotivate experience. There are some social networks that have begun to basically bribe people to be active. I have no funding and no desire to artificially increase traffic to the site. I'd like everyone on comotivate to be present because they are personally involved in their goal and their buddy's goal. So what can I investigate to compliment this position and provide an appropriate incentive to people? I will try and look at a music download partner. If anyone has any recommendations, please comment.
Posted by comotivate at 2:34 AM in Technical faults and issues raised and discussed
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Monday, 5 January 2009

no safety in numbers

I've noticed a trend for users to join existing comotivate teams and want to get buddied up immediately. Whilst I can understand this urge, I don't think it's always a good strategy. A lot of the teams with big numbers are open teams and are not proving to be as successful as the smaller teams.

Look at the team's TAB score before you join them. The higher the TAB score the more engaged the team is with their goal activity. Don't self-saboutage your goal by 'hiding' in a big team and then blaming everyone else for not getting started properly.

This site is about empowerment - an attempt to provide more opportunities and tools to help achieve what's important to you personally. Seize the opportunity, don't give away your power. Join a team that has people in it that are as much like you as possible. Beware of large teams with low TABs.

 

Posted by comotivate at 7:13 AM in Technical faults and issues raised and discussed
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Wednesday, 22 October 2008

where does comotivate fit?

I have been doing a lot of research into various social media and it struck me that one of the main challenges is in trying to categorise web resources within this social media context. I guess it's only industry commentators that might be interested, but I would have thought brand managers and marketing execs would need to get this helicopter view of the space as well.

I've found 10 categories (but this is work in progress)....

1. Dominant utilities: these are the leading social networks through which huge numbers of people experience the web. Their entire online experience is characterised by use of these sites. Examples: MySpace, Facebook, youtube

2. Constituencies: often these are not significantly differentiated but have a user base with established status levels and emotional investment.  Examples: Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Skyrock, Orkut, SecondLife (and many others)

3. Themed: these social networks are founded on ‘horizontal’ niches: business, travel, music, achievement. Examples: LinkedIn, WAYN, Last FM, comotivate (and many others)

4. Verticals: these social networks are founded on ‘vertical’ niches: profession, leisure pursuit, ethnicity, gender. Examples: Damsels in Success, MiGente, Lawyers.net, Sermo, Gamervision (and many others)

5. Optimizers: these are often tools or applications designed to share and organise content. They can accelerate distribution via their linkages. Examples: Qassia.com, StumbleUpon , Digg, Delicious, Ma.gnolia (and many others)

6. Commentators: these self-styled authorities heavily influence opinion via their blog and provoke high numbers of comments from readers. They are ‘human optimizers’. Examples: Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe, Gary Vaynerchuk (and many others)

7. Platform-centric:  these social networks are centred on mobile devices. Examples: MyGamma, Itsmy, Trutap, Flirtomatic, Mig33, Dada (and many others)

8. Facilitators: these sites provide templates for social networks to be created featuring off the shelf tools. Included in this category are also storage sites. Examples: Ning, Weebly, Crowdvine, Social Engine, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, woofiles (and many others)

9. Aggregators: these applications help users manage their multiple profiles across different social networks.  Examples: Social Thing, iStalker, Social Stream, Profilactic, Spokeo (and many others)

10. Feeders: these social networks provide limited, personalised access to the status updates of your contacts. Examples: Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and many others)

 

Posted by comotivate at 3:17 AM in Technical faults and issues raised and discussed
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Friday, 27 June 2008

hotmail address issues resolved

We identified a problem getting emails through to hotmail accounts last week but think is now resolved. If anyone knows any different, please email fixer@comotivate.com 

Posted by comotivate at 1:28 AM in Technical faults and issues raised and discussed
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