Silly article, but isn't Trello doing pretty well? They take it to the next level by making lists of lists of lists accessible.
Lists
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: Lists
#22The second type of list this article mentions, social lists so to speak, is definitely valuable to users and probably isn't receiving the specific attention it deserves. Foursquare as a "public itinerary" for a trip through select art galleries in NYC is a great example. Informal, public education could also be orchestrated with these "social lists"; reading material / exercises listed out in a syllabus and shared among interested parties.
Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...
Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...
But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.
Re: Lists
#23Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.
And sometimes, such as content from a poetry focused Pintrest account, a Pintrest board with a list of pictures of words...
Re: Lists
#24Some of my favorite vertical lists/services are:
* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]
* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]
* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]
* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]
* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool
[1] http://la.eater.com/maps/best-los-angeles-restaurants-38
[2] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/special-gifts-for-your-favo...
[3] https://www.producthunt.com/@callmeed/collections/startup-na...
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to...
Re: Lists
#25> I am somewhat perplexed by the lack of breakout success to date in listmaking. It’s an obvious category. And it is certainly not for lack of trying. The commercial internet is 20+ years old now. So you’d think someone would have cracked the code by now. But I don’t think anyone has.
I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to change, and not an indicator of potential success.
Re: Lists
#26Silly article, but isn't Trello doing pretty well? They take it to the next level by making lists of lists of lists accessible.
I don't think of Trello as a "list app". It's a kanban app, which is a kind of list I suppose, but "list" is way too vague for it.
Kanban is a pretty specific case. There have actually been a number of apps attempting to do kanban boards. Trello is the only one I've tried that actually works well.
Re: Lists
#27GitHub turned out to be a pretty decent place for collaborating on various lists. I mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub project. I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am reading / planning on reading [1]). [0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome [1] https://github…
we use the issue tracker to make lists of non-development tasks.
Re: Lists
#28Thinking about this more, the problem isn't that list apps are an underserved market, but rather that they're an overserved market. Making a list app is easy - so easy that "make a list app" is the glorified "Hello world" used to demonstrate real-world code for lots of Javascript frameworks and other language libraries.
Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those aren't so much lists as bait technique.
Re: Lists
#29Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.
I'd propose most successful social sites are successful list-based services, although the default filtering/ordering is not by author, which seems to be the specific case that the article contemplates.
HN, for example, allows me to go see a list of things that a majority of people in my demographic think is interesting today.
Reddit, as one example of a topical social site, takes it a step further and allows users to choose their "vertical," as the author would likely state it.
Re: Lists
#30One of the favorite lists of all time -- in terms of both contemporary utility and in simplicity, is the MacRumors buyers guide: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).
Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean, seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines, and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful. I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines (Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).