Has the tech industry forgotten users? We are in an insider bubble. You know when I read David Heinemeier Hansson write that all he needs is 10 apps I believe we’ve all lost our minds. Then I look at Techmeme and see all the insider baseball and nothing about real users and I realize we have indeed lost our minds. See, people keep talking about a bubble. What they usually mean is “oh, my gosh Color got $41 million and LinkedIn stock is nuts.” Wrong bubble to worry about, though. The real bubble is we’ve stopped understanding users.
See, this is why I took the family out of the valley on vacation. Not everyone is ignoring users, though. For instance, AppStoreHQ studied its users and found that apps do indeed matter. Turns out that if you STUDY THE DATA which DHH didn’t do, you learn that the long tail of apps is very important. “Well, these users actually installed 20,100 distinct apps! To continue the trend, GigaOm reports that apps are used more than the Web. Nielsen says that DHH is wrong by 4x. See, I met a lot of average people at Disneyland. Catching Up: The Most Interesting Tech Stories of the Day (6/27) OpenCandy’s Pokki Brings Web Apps To The Desktop, With Style. “The future is the web.” So goes the mantra that seems to be echoing throughout Google, Facebook, and plenty of smaller tech companies that view the web as the solution to sidestep the fragmentation created by native app platforms.
And they’re almost certainly right. But the web still has a long way to go — it’s quite rare to come across web applications that feel anything like their desktop counterparts. Now San Diego-based startup OpenCandy thinks it has a solution: a new product called Pokki that bridges the gap between the browser and native applications. In other words, they’re offering web apps that are a lot more convenient than web apps. First, some logistical news: up until now OpenCandy’s only product has been a native application installer for Windows that upsells users on high quality apps (it’s a little controversial — you can find our past coverage right here). So what exactly is Pokki? Am. This Email Got One Stanford Student A Huge Job At Foursquare. Serving a space between @briansolis & Briansolis.com - A lite version of BrianSolis.com.