Startups’ users want to know what you are doing, but they don’t care about how you feel

Posted on August 6, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 news |

I hope the title is self-explanatory. In case it isn’t let me just tell you about something strange. Thousands of people are currently using Twitter on a daily basis, which makes it one of the most common applications on the . At the same time very few people still remember about a nice , launched about a year ago: IRateMyDay.

If you belong to 1% of surfers who haven’t got any idea what Twitter is that’s what it is in a nutshell:

Twitter is a free networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco company Obvious Corp. (source: link)

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Ok, what about IRateMyDay. That’s a slightly different story:

This site tries to understand one of the greatest mysteries of human being: feelings. Each day, we experience a variety of feelings; sometimes good, sometimes bad. We try to share them with people who surround us, but that is often difficult.
IRateMyDay allows you to share your feelings with the rest of the World in total simplicity! Each time you rate your day, you bring your salt grain to a global vision of the human feeling.

Have a look at some statistics:

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Interesting, isn’t it? I can’t understand why people love Twitter and rather neglect IRateMyDay. That’s a mistery of the . There are no rational reasons why word of mouth or any other form of should work for the first but not the second .Have a look at this graph taken from Alexa:

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As you see Twitter has don much, much better than IRateMyDay. My question is why?

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4 Responses to “Startups’ users want to know what you are doing, but they don’t care about how you feel”

  1. Peter on August 6th, 2007 11:20 pm

    If I had to choose on eof them I would choose Twitter. There is so much fun using it. It’s like a game you can play everyday.

  2. Gedeon Maheux on August 7th, 2007 4:39 am

    Does IRateMyDay have an API so that users can post via a desktop client or do they have to visit the website itself?

    Twitter didn’t start to become popular until 3rd parties created desktop clients for the service like Twitterrific and Twitterroo. This would be my guess about why one is popular and one is not.

  3. Noel Churchill on August 7th, 2007 6:49 am

    A lot is in the name too. Twitter sounds fun and provokes curiosity. There isn’t any mystery to the name irate my day. It sounds more like a chore than a fun thing to do.

  4. Benjamin Berube on August 7th, 2007 7:43 pm

    The answer is pretty simple: media coverage. IRateMyDay started in October 2007 and has been growing steadily ever since, without much publicity. Just give it coverage on TechCrunch and you’ll see if it can’t reach a similar growth!

    IRateMyDay doesn’t target the same audience as Twitter. Actually, some users even use both. IRateMyDay offers a way to quantify all the data you enter, with monthly statistics and even a World map.

    There’s an API for IRateMyDay, although it does not allow rating directly from it (yet).

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