Remember Lenny

Writing online

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Can’t finish a New Yorker story online?

The remind-to-read tool was developed by New Yorker senior software engineer Leonard Bogdonoff, who began working on it as a personal project outside of work. He plans to make the code behind it open source.

Bogdonoff began thinking about the glut of content produced online every day, and how easy it is for readers to save articles to Instapaper or Pocket and forget about them — or to just be overwhelmed by the continuous stream of posts on social media.

“I wanted to play with this aspect that people knew what they wanted, but the current mechanics don’t allow for people to actually engage with stuff that they know they want,” he said.

– From Joseph Lichterman’s, Nieman Lab article

/2015/10/30/cant-finish-a-new-yorker-story-online/

Remind to Read launched on the New Yorker 1 week ago

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Me:
remember the sendlater thing I was working on?
Im making an email interface
so you email the service with an email address noting how long it should wait, then it sends you an email after that length of time
ie. [email protected]
or [email protected]
you preregister, so it recognizes your email address and then replies back

JJ:
ha thats funny
why are you making it again

Me:
i use email to “hold on to” things that I want to go back to
instead of evernote or instapaper
so I want to create a way to buffer an email

JJ:
you know the app mailbox?
it does that – when you get an email you can tell it to send it again later

Me:
yep
this is more from a desktop standpoint
or even if its not an email you are receiving
ie, using the mail to function
or copying content and then sending it to yourself

Why publishers need a way to remind to read

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Publishers have lost their grip on audiences. The content they produce is circulated on platforms they don’t control. The ads they sell are priced by market places they don’t control. The business models and rules by which they play are no longer in their favor.

I believe there are two “modes” of content consumption that users go through: discovery-mode and engagement-mode. The discovery stage is when users are browsing email, looking at link-aggregators, scrolling through social feeds, etc. They are combing through the bulk of content available and looking for signals. This is not the time for people to engage heavily with content. For publishers, this type of user activity is filled with high bounce rates and low time-on-site.

The engagement stage is when users are ready to read and watch. This is when they are prepared to allocate time to focus. This can be before work, during a lunch break, in the evening or weekend. During these moments, people are more likely to finish content they are interested in and less likely to get distracted. The goal is to help users cultivate this mode of content consumption.

Most people who save content, use a bookmarking tool that eventually becomes unmanageable. People in the discovery mode save a bulk of links to read later, but never come back. Eventually people develop a ritual of finding all the good content they want to bookmark without ever allocating time to return. After a tipping point, tools like Pocket and Instapaper eventually become a bucket of links that are never read or visited.

Publishers should be providing more outlets for engaging the user who expresses interest, but doesn’t have time to stay.

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Developer

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Recently, I had lunch with a aspiring developer who reached out to me online. He was deciding whether or not to enroll in a web development bootcamp, and decided to ask my opinion. Up to then, he had been a freelance web developer and even employed off-shore contractors to build him a legitimate Instagram marketing service. His service was straightforward, simple, and making money.

I realized how my drive into the technical aspect of products have taken me away from the perspective of solving problems that people will pay for. Instead, I’ve spent most of my time exploring software development as a passion.

I started a series of projects this year that I have taken from idea to product. I released an update for my iOS app, built a community platform for sharing breakup stories, made a low-cost VR story builder platform, released a chrome extension, explored a social network based on the twitter network graph, and launched a delayed email sending widget for publishers.

Everyday, I’ve enjoyed exploring the problems associated to building a product that didn’t exist. I’ll pull out my computer to and from work and work on side projects. I figured out what skills I didn’t have and tried my best to learn them to make a service that other people could use. In each case, I was trying something new, that I couldn’t have done before.

I’ve gotten to the point in my explorations where I want to do more. My first few years of professional web development was focused around contracting. Through contracting, I was able to accumulate skills that provided employable skills. From there, I was able to freelance and deepen my understanding my value as an employee.

I became an expert of WordPress websites, learned to make stores, set up virtual environments, configure servers, mastered concepts surrounding best practices, identified how to keep up with trends, developed a rhythm for learning, and regularly attended meetups, conferences and hackathons.

After a number of years as a web developer employee, I found myself pushing away freelance projects and focusing on personal projects. I deepened my understanding of software that wasn’t immediately valuable, but would be important for seeing my ideas to fruition. If I wanted to make a social network, I learned how. If I wanted to make an iOS app, I understood the options and pursued the best route.

Through this, I learned Ruby, developed many rails applications, used front-end frameworks, built my own set of prototyping practices, became obsessed with workflow process, identified the fastest and cheapest ways to launch products, and began showcasing my past work.

As a front-end developer, I remember learning about mobile development and being very confused. I started learning frontend css frameworks to understand best practices and began identifying the common solutons to a responsive web. I learned how to use CMS’s and began regularly making WordPress websites. From there, I had begun reading about API-first development and didnt know how the tools I knew would let me build any application. The concepts made sense, but I didnt have the toolchain to do it. So I learned how to use node and rails and explored the different options. As I encountered problems or questions, I would identify the solutions and then learn them.

Im feeling like the next step is to build things with people that solve problems people will pay for. Its not a huge step from where I’ve been exploring. My attention recently has been lost on the “newest and best” programing languages and trends.

I have passed the point where I feel the things I don’t understand will have a significant improvement on what I can offer. Im ready to start working on projects that fill needs that people can’t fill themselves.