Three things make vox.io awesome
Simplicity
There is no clutter. The homepage reminds of Google in its better days. Just one input field that is used to find contacts and dial numbers. I enter the name, press enter and it already calls the person. Nothing to install. Just talking. Nobody uses IP adresses to visit websites, why should we use telephone numbers to call someone?
Quick Call
Being able to generate disposal call links is a cool idea. I can send the link to a journalist or whoever I want and with one click they can talk to me. As they are already in front of their computer this is great.
Group Call
Why should I add numbers to some conference call tool or whatever if I can simply send a link to the people I want to talk with. It is so easy and fast. I can even generate a Google Calendar event with the link to send to the participants. Yeah!
vox.io isn’t just another voip service. It finally brings calling to the internet in a meaningful way.
Longer post that says the same on my german blog.
Unified Notification System
I want a service that combines notifications from all services I use. Twitter, Facebook, Quora, soup.io, gmail (?), tumblr, disqus, quote.fm … .
At the moment most of these are delivered per mail into gmail. Some of them have iPhone apps and with them push notifications. Some are able to use Growl to send me notifications on the Macbook. All have some notifications on their website.
Gmail already published their smart labels which removes most notification mails from my inbox to their dedicated Label. This already helps to unclutter my inbox but doesn’t really help me to stay up to date wherever I am.
I like notifications. I want to know when someone interacts with my content. But most notification systems are implemented bad. I hate it to get an email, go to the website and see the same notification again. Even worse if I get a growl notification, a push message on my iPhone, mail and when I go to the website there waits another notification about the same event. Quora already does a better job than most others. The have a tracking image in the email and if I already viewed the mail the notification is marked as read on the website.
One problem are the settings. They are often hidden somewhere on the website and aren’t nearly as granulated as I want them to be. And if they are it is too much.
This is a problem nearly every webservice has, as notifications are important to get a better retention rate. But I tend to deactivate them all after registering as they are often annoying. And the service was never visited again.
I imagine a service where I can view a feed of all notifications. Can easily change how the are sorted. Turn off notifications directly if I think they aren’t useful and activate others. I want to say at which times I want to get push notifications. I want it to only show me growl notifications if I am working at the Macbook. I want it to mark seen notifications everywhere as read if I have seen them. From the notifications I want to get directly to the item at the webservice or app if installed.
At the moment I only know of some mail based services which can’t be satisfying as they aren’t deep enough integrated.
I am sure there are enough people who would pay for such a service. I also think webservices would be open to it and pay too. Some already have the APIs to accomplish it.
Please leave your thoughts on this in the comments.
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You can use this idea in any way you like. Program a free open source service, start a commercial company, sell it to your grandmother.
Reboot
After using tumblr to recycle my soup.io posts since a year I will start to use it as my first public blog in english. If you followed me because of the images please head over to my soup and follow me there. I can’t provide you with a tumblr of it as the automatic import isn’t supported any longer.
Why?
Because I can. I am blogging since 2006 in german at 2-blog.net and was for some time quite successful. I still am. But who cares. Since some months I am part of work|i|o, a startup that tries to change how we work. My main role is communications at which I am awesome. In german. But my english sucks that much that I still have lots of problems with it and it makes me damn insecure. I was hiding, wrote concepts, planned stuff and everything but never went out there and told people how we want to achieve ALL the things.
This year is important to me and the startup. We need to get momentum. In the last months I was able to postpone stuff with stupid excuses. Now I am hungry and I want to see things happening.
My english is still bad but most of the people are able to understand what I am trying to say. Even if not they can always ask. Not doing anything won’t make me better. And it is just the language. I sometimes get told that I am still better than the majority of people for whom english is their first language. No excuse.
Correct me
This is one of the few blogs where corrections about spellings and grammer are more than welcome. I can only improve myself if I get feedback. Of course you should correct me on a substantive basis too. If I write something wrong I hope someone will tell me. If you don’t want to do this in public shoot me a mail at lucahammer@gmail.com.
What to expect?
I don’t know. One reason for this was a post I wrote for the work|i|o blog which was too long, too unfocused and to unimportant. It will never be published there. But I think that I might still be interesting for some people who want to get the whole story. The content here will in most cases be centered around me. If you don’t like me or aren’t interested in what I do and think, you shouldn’t follow this blog. It won’t make you happy. To everyone else: Welcome to the future. If you have any suggestions use the comments or ask-a-question or mail.
[Reposted from nameherhope]
[Reposted from hagis via antiprodukt]
[Reposted from KRachelle via SpiritusMovens]
[Reposted from charlottinka via HeartOrHead]
“Urlaub, sowas Flüchtiges! Zwei Tonnen Stahl und Plastik auf vier Rädern, das ist doch was Reelles, da sieht man doch was man hat. Und es ist nicht nach ein paar Tagen vorbei.”
[Reposted from apsikmania via Teerea]
[Reposted from jorjkyuriuss via ula]
Personal thoughts.
