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The Zipper is designed to be your local news and local
gossip smart phone app to end all apps but sometimes,
you want to create a story or thread that’s more general
in nature. How do you do this and when does it make
sense? We’ve considering building the ability to have
a general thread that isn’t area specific into the phone
but it wasn’t an easy decision and required quite a bit
of soul-searching, arguing and strong coffee. Let’s
take a look at why this once decision was so involved.
Let’s say you’re really into Star Trek (not casting any
judgments here…live long and prosper fellow geeks). You
want to report on news or events related to Star Trek or
just find fellow freakazoids to hotly debate Picard
versus Kirk. We get you. You pop up the Zipper app to
check and see what’s available when you search for “Star
Trek”. If you’re in L.A., hey…you might even see a
signing by William Shatner but that’s not probably in
you’re in St. Louis. That being said, there may be
other events Star Trek related in your local area that
pop up. Now the question is this…should what you see
only reflect the people and events in your direct local
area or should more general Star Trek news threads also
pop up that are not in your area? That’s the question
in a nutshell that we wrestled with early on. What are
the pro’s and con’s?
On one hand, it is called the “LOCAL NEWS” app with the
emphasis on local. The whole point is to get and give
local news and gossip in your area. The thinking on
this side of the argument goes this way…if you want
general groups or non-localized, topic specific content,
there are dozens of sites online that handle this and
they do a pretty good job of it. You can always check
out Yahoo groups or a host of others all grouped around
various topics. Dare we say Star Trek is there and
maybe even one dedicated to Ohura. So why re-create the
wheel? Well, there’s something to be said for providing
this info directly to the smart phone means of
delivery…custom built for this access in fact as opposed
to a website that tries to “also” provide smart phone
integration. Why not have this generalized (not
localized) news and/or gossip on the Zipper app? Now
for the cons.
Local news and local gossip. That’s it in a nutshell.
If we start to open the Zipper to non-local information,
what exactly is it? At that point, it runs the risk of
becoming cluttered or just a smart phone version of
Google which really isn’t needed. Personally, Google
works pretty well. The part of the internet that we
didn’t find what we needed was in the local space where
we want local news updated instantly from all the people
out there in my local area. This speaks to me because I
can’t currently find it now. I can find groups based on
any and every God-forsaken topic online already.
In the end, the “Keep it Local” ruled the day and we
decided that it’s better to one thing (local news and
local gossip) really well than be a jack of all trades
and water down the initial intent of the site. We’ll
look at the question again on the 2nd phase
of the Zipper based on what people tell us they want.
If they want to “scrub” the area off a given message or
thread, we’ll probably provide a way to do that. Of
course, any feedback from you is always helpful unless
you’re asking us about the social impact that one
Lieutenant Ohura had on American culture. That’s a
whole other topic.
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