Looks cool. but I get the feeling that if and when this becomes a success, the more users it has, the more noise (you know.. not literally) there will be, and you can quickly filter text noise but audio noise is much more expensive.
I'm sure you've thought about it, although that's what people call "a good problem to have", but I would really like to know what would you do if suddenly you exploded with users & trolls alike.
Another aspect of a lot of users is the flow of the conversation, what if I want to reply to someone but someone else posted ahead of me, the flow of the conversation can bounce around and become incoherent. What mechanisms are/will be in place to handle that?
P.S
Can't check out the app as I have an Android phone, but listened to a few web waves (? is it called)
Good luck.
@danr_4 Hi Dan - great feedback.
Regarding noise / a massive influx of content - we have some ideas on how to solve that. First, we hope to provide more automatic curation based on like counts, play counts, reply counts, etc. In the future, we also hope to have speech detection under the hood that can identify keywords. With those keywords, we can at least attempt to curate content for you that we think you'll like based on past listening habits.
Regarding replies and conversations - this is a very tricky problem. Although I anticipate this will become more complex and difficult to manage over time, the way we're solving it now is ordering the conversation in a tree structure, much like Twitter does for conversations. So although playback appears to be linear, the order in which you hear the replies is actually not.
Adding @nirzicherman here as he wrote the algorithm that supports this functionality. He may have some additional insight.
Thanks again!
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@mignano@nirzicherman Hmm automatic curation based on popularity makes it "too" social I believe, i.e popularity contest. NLP makes more sense. The replies is indeed tricky, but tree structure makes sense though it could also get incoherent as well if you go deep enough. what worries me is the "going back" factor. usually i can easily go back when it's one steady stream (i.e go back 30 seconds) to listen again to something I missed or want to grasp. This is much more complicated with audio replies (obviously text is easy). Interesting problems indeed!
@mignano@danr_4 Thanks for the thoughts, Dan! A big challenge early on was figuring out how to take a multi-dimensional conversation and flatten it into a linear stream. And it'll definitely continue to be a problem as more and more content is created. The tree-structure approach that Mike mentioned is a major part of how this works under the hood, but it will have to become more intelligent -- for example, by programmatically detecting sub-branches of conversations that are more engaging and bubbling them up to the top while still maintaining context. It's going to be challenging, but we're super excited to tackle this.
Looks fabulous and love the message flow. I'd use it for my startup but I'm stymied. We are a mixture of Android and iOS users (BOYD and all that stuff). Any plans for the other half of humanity? Prem
@premgyani We definitely want to get to Android later this year. We're big fans of Android, but we're more proficient in iOS development, so we started there.
@premgyani Hi Premgyani - we put this form together to notify people when Anchor for Android is available. Feel free to add your email: http://anch.co/anchorandroid
Really nice app overall. I've been recording, slightly editing and publishing my own "Audiologs" --tiny pieces of audio recorded together and pieced throughout the day. I publish them on Soundcloud.
Then I discovered Anchor and I'm curious to get an idea of where this is headed in terms of features/roadmap :)
@mignano, iv been playing with Anchor for the last couple of days, as you know, and am loving it! It's a great new medium.
I always ridicule new social apps cause how many social apps do we really need?? but certain apps resonate with certain people, for instance Im not on snapchat but I love Anchor. Keep it up!
@millennialluke Thanks, Luke! I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying Anchor! Let us know if you have any product feedback or suggestions.
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Really interesting idea, would love to try it out when you have an Android version. I've always thought something like this for the corporate environment could work wonders to seed important conversations, and improve engagement.
Loving anchor. There is an organic dialogue emerging from every wave and the simplicity behind it is pretty stellar. Simplicity isn't always easy so awesome app all around congrats @mignano and team!
@andreanaomi777 Thank you Andrea! Really glad to hear you're enjoying Anchor.
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@mignano@kristinmyers@nirzicherman I hope I'm the last one saying great onboarding 🙌.
Like the app, I've just recorded my #firstwave and did some interactions. I noticed two things:
- I'm a fan of my bluetooth headset and I use it all the time - hate to have the phone up to my ear - and I couldn't find a way to use it with Anchor. Any plans on supporting that?
- Another thing, when did my first, non #firstwave, I wanted to tag some friends to get them into Anchor. When I typed into the caption, it doesn't help me by searching through my Twitter friends to complete de mention. I tried with the "Tag your friends" feature but it didn't work. Btw, what's that feature for? Sends sms?
Having said all that, anyway I think it's great 🙃
-- EDIT
I've just seen the #feedback, so I'll make sure to record an Anchor 🤓
@fameal@kristinmyers@nirzicherman Hey Facundo! thanks for trying out Anchor, glad to hear you're enjoying the app. We're dealing with a Bluetooth bug at the moment - totally our bad. It's a tricky engineering problem, but we're hoping to solve it soon and have it in an update as soon as possible. Regarding tagging - that's weird that it didn't work. Is it still happening? If so, can you please email us at support@anchor.fm? That feature is so you can tag people who you talk about in a wave, so they'll hear the wave and chime in with a reply. You can also use it to SMS people who aren't on Anchor. Thanks again for the feedback and looking forward to hearing you on Anchor!
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@mignano@kristinmyers@nirzicherman@anchor, Thanks for conerning about those issues. can live without the bluetooh but I'll be waiting for it 🙌 About the invite feature, I didn't know it worked like that. I saw that it was trying to use the telephone numbers but didn't know why. Now that I get it, I suggest that it keeps using Twitter. I mean, invite people using the Twitter handle. I replied here to give some closure. I'll retest and send an email.
Thanks guys 🙃
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