"Bynd Zero". Yeesh. This just feels like another thing I'm obligated to burn down and manage. A better solution, for me at least, is to continue to not care about Twitter and Instagram, and stop caring about Facebook. You're not missing out on anything. Nothing bad happens if you miss little controversies or links to blogs.
A general rule I like to go by is "if it's important, it'll come up again".
Missed a phone call and there's no message? If it's important, someone will call back or email / similar. If not, then I shouldn't worry anyway.
> There was a time that I used to check my Facebook about a 100 times a day, but lately I only check it a few times a week. Something is fundamentally broken.
Sounds like something was broken, and now it's ok.
Hi ndnichols, thanks for your feedback! "Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see." The FB EdgeRank shows only an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 each day. Some people do not care about Social Media but some do..and we believe that customers need a better solution to this :).
Hey oemerax, thanks for taking the time to respond. Like you said, I'm probably not the audience for your app :-) For me, the important aspect of social networks is their pleasure-to-time ratio. E.g., "I'm going to look at Facebook for five minutes while waiting for the bus, I haven't looked at Facebook in two days, please show me the most interesting stories of the last two days so my five minutes pass quickly." (I don't think Facebook does a particularly good job here, but I think that they are at least trying to build the thing I want.) Where it sounds like the people you're targeting are thinking "I want to see every post from my approved friends". So you're going for completeness, which I don't care about. (Again, different audience, haha.)
Also, as German "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" (aka "1 Euro GmbH", a German LLC that doesn't require the 25k capital normally required for a GmbH) sounds incredibly fishy (deservingly so or not). My instant reaction when seeing that in the footer of the Bynd app website was extremely negative; I think it's worth scraping together the cash capital for a full GmbH to avoid that potential first impression.
Hi pluma, thanks for your feedback! The Android version will be released soon after. Would you mind testing it?
p.s.: the company was created by three students and is currently bootstrapped. The UG is great for a start but you´re right: nothing beats a GmbH :). We will transform into this asap.
I think centralization is the problem here. "One central hub" just becomes susceptible to all the same problems that we face with Facebook et al. To truly create a solution to this, we need an open-source service so that people can go to spacebook.com or whatever for normal use, but properly motivated folks could run their own server too. Sort of like Diaspora, only with a centralized hosting option.
Theoretically, yeah. Someone just needs to make it "cool" enough that people actually start using it as their primary method of social networking. RSS has a niche now, but it would be really cool if it were adapted to fix this problem.
It doesn't even really need "adaptation". It's already fairly suitable. It just needs someone to write code to use open standards instead of trying to force us in a walled garden.
I've been using RSS for 15 years now. I've watched people mock the idea in favor of $SERVICE, for a wide variety of values of $SERVICE and now most of those services are dead, Facebook already deciding what you see, and Twitter now going down this route. Meanwhile, my open-world RSS subscriptions just keep chugging along, through at least 5 different major readers I've used at various times, with subscriptions to things that update every hour and things that update every couple of months. It just keeps clocking along, delivering value, over and over and over, while walled gardens rise up, choke themselves, and die, destroying people's networks in the process. Meanwhile, I just keep on keepin' on, because I am not beholden to anybody.
(Edit: It also occurs to me to point out that my blog in its capacity as an RSS provider has survived 3 platforms now, and that the only one that required the readers to take any action was the one time I switched from the hosted service to a DNS name I control. That was less trivial though.)
There's a bajillion options that already exist... all you have to do is stop jumping into the walled garden. No matter how nice it looks. No matter how advertised it is.
Ask yourself... "Am I confident this will be here in 10 years?" RSS will be. The only way it can die is for nobody at all to use it. Will Twitter? Will Facebook? Well, I won't guarantee they won't but I'd give less than even odds for both, frankly. (At least, without some sort of major event that really changes them, like an acquisition or absorption into something else. Yes, talking about Facebook being acquired sounds strange today... a lot happens in ten years. Right, MySpace?)
With Bynd you will be able to see all updates from your friends, family members, colleagues, bf/gf accross different platforms. It´s all about the "friends" who really matter.
> I have many Facebook friends, but my feed feels less relevant than ever.
"I have this cause, yet I am experiencing the effects of that cause!"
WTF, how do you not see that having too many "friends" is going to create a Facebook feed that's irrelevant to you?
> There was a time that I used to check my Facebook about a 100 times a day, but lately I only check it a few times a week.
That must be really hard for you.
The problem is not that Twitter et. al. are filtering out all the good content, it's that 99.9% of social media is completely fucking worthless to anyone except advertisers. The solution to this problem is not an app, it's to delete your accounts on these "services" and go outside.
Isn't it just a prettier RSS reader? basically Flipboard?
Also, I'm skeptical of the concept of "bynd-zero" because it is impossible. In fact it'll be even more stressful because the stream of contents is endless and the only way around it is to shut off this feed addiction.
Flipboard is awesome but once you bundle different social media accounts -> the information overload doubles, triples etc. It´s possible to reach "Bynd Zero", if you only follow your close friends, family members etc (Priority level 1).
This kind of use-case is actually part of why I started using Flipboard in the first place, back when I had an iPad. I could consolidate my social media feeds into a "magazine" and just skim the highlights.