My dear guammies,
Some of you are very concerned about privacy and security, and want GUAM to be your one-off personal motivation platform rather than a publicly viewable app. That’s fine by us.
Ideally, everything we build at Contagion Health - including getupandmove.me - is about making "healthy" socially contagious.
This is why we’ve enabled the public profile view (see mine at http://getupandmove.me/jensmccabe) and encourage you to check the status of challenges and the mood/motivation factor of other guammies who are coaching you to move “out loud” on Twitter.
We’re doing everything we can to increase the sharing component of the app at an exponential rate.
Later this month we’re going to roll with Facebook integration and things should get real.
From day 1, many of you asked for Facebook Connect integration.
Even with our tiny, tight team of 2 founders we’re working to build a culture that is responsive to an extreme. And we will *always* explain our motivations (although this is probably TMI for most of you).
For this reason, before I introduce our new Stealth Mode, I'd like to share how we evaluate what we should develop next.
In short, we build something when several of you ask us to build it (the ‘louder’ and more numerous the asks the better, so get your friends to chime in on the UserVoice forum here).
Some of you may be wondering why we rolled out Stealth Mode before connecting with Facebook's platform.
I want to share how Contagion is calculating which new features to release. Forgive me - I’ve only recently discovered I *kind of* like math, and so I’m putting just about everything into equation form lately :).
For us, perceived total value of a proposed new feature looks something like this:
pTVf = pVf (Founder1+Founder2) + pVf (User 1 + User 2….) where pTVf = perceived Total Value of feature.
You’ll notice a few trixsy things in here. One, if Andrey and I disagree (probability = 50:50 at least J), sometimes that equation looks more like:
pTVf = [pVf (Founder 1) - pVf (Founder 2)] + pVf (User 1 + User 2…)
In other words, for each new feature we dream up or you suggest, we’re weighing the individual perceived value of a feature you recommend to you and any other users that suggest the same thing, combined with our perceived value of the feature based on our strategic and business goals.
We want to let you know with a tiny team of 2 – one of us non-engineer – it may take us a bit longer than your typical Red Bull crazed social gaming startup to roll out a new feature.
I’ll also blame this on our consciences.
Andrey and I go back and forth about what features to roll out when, and how to keep pushing preventive wellness microchoices into the public domain while at the same time building a platform that's safe and protected for you introvert types.
Long story short – Facebook-o-philes, look for your goods mid month when we launch version 3.0.
But for those of you who want to keep this thing under wraps, we’re introducing “Stealth Mode” today.
When you want to maintain shields up, just hover over a challenge that’s already been issued.
You’ll see some ‘Hide?’ text pop up. Click this and voila! You’ll see the challenge disappear!
Don’t worry – when you hide a challenge it isn’t disappearing from our database. (Speaking of our database, someone remind me – it would be awesome to have Andrey do a tech post about the programming guts of GUAM).
You can access your hidden challenges at any time by clicking on the new tab, named - you guessed it - "Hidden challenges" - at the bottom of your challenge stream.
We’re archiving this stuff (unlike Twitter) in case you might find it valuable later on, especially as we add the really heavy duty grown up stuff like microformat integration for data portability to Personal Health Record platforms like NoMoreClipboard.com, Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health.
The next thing we’re working on is a Facebook-esque ability to ‘poke’ friends who are, for some unfathomable reason, ignoring your challenges or just not completing them in the time period you’d like to see realized.
**Remember, each getupandmove.me challenge is a compact between users. Consider it a handshake, a gentle-person’s agreement. You move if they move. It’s that simple.**
Some of us who are superusers already know what a downer it is if you get excited about the app, challenge a whole bunch of people via Twitter, and then a bunch of them don’t respond. Sad face. L
So until we help you optimize to find users who WANT to be challenged at any given time, in a certain way, or simply those who just want to find new friends in our forthcoming ‘challenge pool’, we’re giving you the ability to ‘hide’ those offending outstanding challenges from view.
Now that I’ve probably bored some of you to tears with the background explanation, here are some easy to digest bullet points describing what you can do with Stealth Mode:
- Hiding a challenge effectively makes your profile's entry invisible to anyone but you. One caveat: The other end of the challenge is still visible, and is publicly visible if the person you are challenging has chosen to make his or her profile public.
- For example: @jensmccabe will run for 5 min if @shazow will walk for 5 min. If I hide that challenge, Andrey won't see it on my profile, but people could still see it on his profile.
- Once a challenge is hidden, you can still interact with it as normal by expanding the "Hidden Challenges" in your home page. Or you can ignore it.
We believe the Stealth Mode is useful in cases where you want to ignore challenges for now, or where you're working with private/personal challenges in an otherwise public profile.
Please note, we’re programming incredibly granular settings options here. One by one, you to hide only those challenges you want to hide. This means EACH challenge you want to hide you have to click on ‘hide’ repeatedly (although, hmm, this makes me thing we need a “hide all outstanding?” option).
Remember, hidden challenges you put into Stealth Mode aren’t being erased – they’re still tied to your profile. You just won’t have them gumming up your user interface.
Hope you likey!
@jensmccabe
@shazow
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