5 ms·

Sure, but Talko isn't the second mover in messaging apps, it's more like the millionth. This is a pretty mature market by now, and I'm still not seeing any obv

Sure, but Talko isn't the second mover in messaging apps, it's more like the millionth. This is a pretty mature market by now, and I'm still not seeing any obvious hook that would get me to switch.

downandout 12y ago
There are a few innovations in Talko itself (telling people if you're driving etc.). That may be enough, and it may not. It takes a fair amount of pixie dust for these things to work out, so no one knows. But it does have a chance. In a world where "Yo" gets more than 1 user (and a $10M valuation), I don't discount any app until it's removed from the app store.
- jonknee 12y ago
  I would never use an app that has the "feature" of broadcasting my current location and movement to friends and colleagues.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    I feel the same way, but I get the impression that "kids these days" love that kind of thing, so the fact that you or I wouldn't use this isn't necessarily a bar to success.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    That's the crux of the problems I see with this. I can believe it's a very good implementation of Skype, but the genuine novelties (location broadcast and record-by-default) are the first thing any remotely privacy conscious person is going to turn off most of the time. Is a setting that [unless turned off] tells people what form of transport I'm using really better at avoiding unwanted intrusions than a status update? Am I going to be more or much less likely to leave it on in the background in case any of my friends choose to come and socialise with me if everything is being recorded in the background? I can certainly imagine edge cases where those capabilities would come in useful, but it sounds like they're more likely to generate negative hype and corporate bans than encourage adoption.
- 01Michael10 12y ago
  Telling people my location or if I am driving is not a feature I want just like never used the status feature on any IM/text client ever had... People should never expect an instant reply to any IM, text, or phone call. The receiver's status is totally irrelevant. Society is going to hell from this type of technology.
  - tetrep 12y ago
    >People should never expect an instant reply to any IM, text, or phone call. Why is synchronous, remote communication disallowed? You seem to have ruled out instant responses to any form of remote communication, which greatly impedes, well, communicating. If I have a chain of questions that rely upon previous answers, it's either going to be woefully inefficient to send as asynchronous communication (I have to enumerate all possible questions, which also means all possible answers to previous questions) with respect to either data (one massive email) or time (one question per email, wait for response). >The receiver's status is totally irrelevant. Not at all. If I need information that any one of 5 of my contacts have, I can narrow down who I need to ask based on status rather than sending out 5 questions and getting 5 responses. Alternatively, I could ask them one at a time and wait 5-10 minutes for a response before moving on, but that's a large time sink and doesn't scale well at all. A simple available/busy goes a long way.
    - 01Michael10 12y ago
      Huh? "Why is synchronous, remote communication disallowed?" No one said that... I am just saying it's the choice of the receiver of the message when to reply. To many people today seem to have the expectations if can send a message under a second they should receive a reply back in under a second. Ummmm No. "Not at all. If I need information that any one of 5 of my contacts have, I can narrow down who I need to ask based on status rather than sending out 5 questions and getting 5 responses." So your contacts status is needed for your convenience? What about theirs? You sound young and really narcissistic. It's not all about you. To make it more clear for you... It's none of your business what I am doing and I will reply back when I f*cking feel like it.
jdimov 12y ago
It's not about the second mover advantage anymore (and certainly not about the first mover advantage). It's all about the LAST mover these days. Doesn't matter how many others have tried something before your or how successful those somethings are. Can you create an app / a business which will be the LAST to dominate its space?
- vonklaus 12y ago
  Right. Google is successful because it was the last search engine. It provided a completely novel way to do search (links vs. keywords) and Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last social network. However, to be the LAST MOVER you have to provide a value at some arbitrary, but huge, number. Let's say a 10x improvement over the incumbant (or various substitute products). That is why email is difficult to dethrone. It works well, is relatively secure (you can sort of choose your level of security) and spam settings make it reasonably painless. So this app is going to have to be a much better experience than hangouts (probably easy, hangouts is shit), or whatsapp, or email, or a phonecall, or instagram etc. This can be done, but the execution has to be perfect, the value proposition has to be 10x better than the one or two substitute services it replaces (largely phone & messaging) and it has to have a growth pattern that is substantial enough that it can be reasonably assumed that at least 80% of my contacts are using it. so to be last mover here they probably need >a product that is 10x better than a combo(or stand alone instance) of SMS/messaging apps/email/facetime/phone etc >widespread user adoption >trust/security >a revenue stream It seems cool, but it is a tough space to dominate.
  - anentropic 12y ago
    um... didn't it become the 'last search engine' because it was so successful rather than vice versa?
    - vonklaus 12y ago
      I meant successful in financial terms. It is past edit, so I can't change it to valuable. This is basically an adoption of things Peter Theil says. Googles value (financial) has largely been realized many years after founding (prob 10). So if they did not have last mover inertia, then they wouldn't have been around long enough to extract the value from the market.
kmfrk 12y ago
I think there's something to be said for picking up on something popular and doing it well; you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. I recall Pogue's article on walkie-talkie apps (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/technology/personaltech/zello-heytell-and-voxer-make-your-smartphone-a-walkie-talkie-david-pogue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/technology/personaltech/ze...), and how even the best apps had the most god-forsaken interface design. Being incumbent in a space doesn't mean you do a great job at something. Whether this makes Talko interesting and useful remains to be seen (I'm reserving excitement personally), but I definitely think there's a lot of room for improvement that Talko is taking advantage of.

Sure, but Talko isn't the second mover in messaging apps, it's more like the millionth. This is a pretty mature market by now, and I'm still not seeing any obvious hook that would get me to switch.

downandout 12y ago

There are a few innovations in Talko itself (telling people if you're driving etc.). That may be enough, and it may not. It takes a fair amount of pixie dust for these things to work out, so no one knows. But it does have a chance. In a world where "Yo" gets more than 1 user (and a $10M valuation), I don't discount any app until it's removed from the app store.

jonknee 12y ago
I would never use an app that has the "feature" of broadcasting my current location and movement to friends and colleagues.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  I feel the same way, but I get the impression that "kids these days" love that kind of thing, so the fact that you or I wouldn't use this isn't necessarily a bar to success.
- notahacker 12y ago
  That's the crux of the problems I see with this. I can believe it's a very good implementation of Skype, but the genuine novelties (location broadcast and record-by-default) are the first thing any remotely privacy conscious person is going to turn off most of the time. Is a setting that [unless turned off] tells people what form of transport I'm using really better at avoiding unwanted intrusions than a status update? Am I going to be more or much less likely to leave it on in the background in case any of my friends choose to come and socialise with me if everything is being recorded in the background? I can certainly imagine edge cases where those capabilities would come in useful, but it sounds like they're more likely to generate negative hype and corporate bans than encourage adoption.
01Michael10 12y ago
Telling people my location or if I am driving is not a feature I want just like never used the status feature on any IM/text client ever had... People should never expect an instant reply to any IM, text, or phone call. The receiver's status is totally irrelevant. Society is going to hell from this type of technology.
- tetrep 12y ago
  >People should never expect an instant reply to any IM, text, or phone call. Why is synchronous, remote communication disallowed? You seem to have ruled out instant responses to any form of remote communication, which greatly impedes, well, communicating. If I have a chain of questions that rely upon previous answers, it's either going to be woefully inefficient to send as asynchronous communication (I have to enumerate all possible questions, which also means all possible answers to previous questions) with respect to either data (one massive email) or time (one question per email, wait for response). >The receiver's status is totally irrelevant. Not at all. If I need information that any one of 5 of my contacts have, I can narrow down who I need to ask based on status rather than sending out 5 questions and getting 5 responses. Alternatively, I could ask them one at a time and wait 5-10 minutes for a response before moving on, but that's a large time sink and doesn't scale well at all. A simple available/busy goes a long way.
  - 01Michael10 12y ago
    Huh? "Why is synchronous, remote communication disallowed?" No one said that... I am just saying it's the choice of the receiver of the message when to reply. To many people today seem to have the expectations if can send a message under a second they should receive a reply back in under a second. Ummmm No. "Not at all. If I need information that any one of 5 of my contacts have, I can narrow down who I need to ask based on status rather than sending out 5 questions and getting 5 responses." So your contacts status is needed for your convenience? What about theirs? You sound young and really narcissistic. It's not all about you. To make it more clear for you... It's none of your business what I am doing and I will reply back when I f*cking feel like it.

jdimov 12y ago

It's not about the second mover advantage anymore (and certainly not about the first mover advantage). It's all about the LAST mover these days. Doesn't matter how many others have tried something before your or how successful those somethings are. Can you create an app / a business which will be the LAST to dominate its space?

vonklaus 12y ago
Right. Google is successful because it was the last search engine. It provided a completely novel way to do search (links vs. keywords) and Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last social network. However, to be the LAST MOVER you have to provide a value at some arbitrary, but huge, number. Let's say a 10x improvement over the incumbant (or various substitute products). That is why email is difficult to dethrone. It works well, is relatively secure (you can sort of choose your level of security) and spam settings make it reasonably painless. So this app is going to have to be a much better experience than hangouts (probably easy, hangouts is shit), or whatsapp, or email, or a phonecall, or instagram etc. This can be done, but the execution has to be perfect, the value proposition has to be 10x better than the one or two substitute services it replaces (largely phone & messaging) and it has to have a growth pattern that is substantial enough that it can be reasonably assumed that at least 80% of my contacts are using it. so to be last mover here they probably need >a product that is 10x better than a combo(or stand alone instance) of SMS/messaging apps/email/facetime/phone etc >widespread user adoption >trust/security >a revenue stream It seems cool, but it is a tough space to dominate.
- anentropic 12y ago
  um... didn't it become the 'last search engine' because it was so successful rather than vice versa?
  - vonklaus 12y ago
    I meant successful in financial terms. It is past edit, so I can't change it to valuable. This is basically an adoption of things Peter Theil says. Googles value (financial) has largely been realized many years after founding (prob 10). So if they did not have last mover inertia, then they wouldn't have been around long enough to extract the value from the market.

kmfrk 12y ago

I think there's something to be said for picking up on something popular and doing it well; you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. I recall Pogue's article on walkie-talkie apps (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/technology/personaltech/zello-heytell-and-voxer-make-your-smartphone-a-walkie-talkie-david-pogue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/technology/personaltech/ze...), and how even the best apps had the most god-forsaken interface design. Being incumbent in a space doesn't mean you do a great job at something. Whether this makes Talko interesting and useful remains to be seen (I'm reserving excitement personally), but I definitely think there's a lot of room for improvement that Talko is taking advantage of.