Bumpr manages communication across social networks. Don't be trapped by one network.
January 2009 - March 2010
Unlike aggregators, Bumpr managed communication between networks — breaking down the walled gardens.
Bumpr was a social messaging utility that helped people manage communication across social networks. Unlike simple microblogs like Twitter or aggregators Friend Feed, Bumpr managed incoming and outgoing communication across multiple social networks to create lasting friendships regardless of network feature preference.
Results
List management composed of people from different networks.
Conversation threads across networks.
Simplified communication management without sacrificing network-specific features.
Recommended friends/follows based upon similar interests or common experiences.
Provided overlaid features to deal with inadequacies of specific networks of the time. For example, Bumpr allowed Tweets longer than 140 characters, and created threaded conversations with Tweets long before Twitter officially released these features.
Conclusions
Released a strong early beta in 2010. This helped raise modest capital and interest, but failed to build enough momentum to get the project off of the ground. VC investment was limited in 2009. By the time investors returned, Facebook was considered unassailable.
Communication between walled gardens.
An example from the project
Premise
Take an example user, Sue, who has friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. To update her friends, Sue must update her status on three separate sites. A conversation with friends on different networks is practically impossible. Sue could try to convince her friends to join a specific network, but some of her friends prefer the pictures available on Facebook or music available on Myspace. Each new network Sue joins increases the amount of time she spends trying to stay in touch with friends and family exponentially.
Bumpr dramatically simplified the problem by allowing Sue to create a list of people from multiple networks. She could share her status and have conversations with one or more of these friends without ever considering which networks individuals prefer using. Those conversations were ‘automagically’ conveyed to all participants across the network divides. So, everybody could participate in a single conversation even though they were spread out across many social networks. This allows social networks to continue innovating with new features. Importantly, this approach wouldn’t force monopolistic behaviors by a couple large social networks upon the market.
Principle skills
Team leadership
Capital raising
Product management
Go-to-market planning
SSNiF identification
Wireframes
Visual design
Usability testing
Software development
Key learnings
Lasting relationship are built upon common experiences or common interests.
Research upon social networks has progressed quite a bit since 2009. However, we quickly identified the two primary vectors to create lasting relationships were common experiences and common interests.
Typical common experiences include things like the school you attended, employers you’ve shared, etc. Shared interests include hobbies, music, books, movies, etc. These common grounds provide fertile ground to grow long-term friendship.
Individual social networks have attracted differentiated audiences with specific features.
There are features we’re likely to see added to all social networks eventually. Threaded-conversations for example seem to be an obvious addition regardless of social network context. However, not all social networks supported threads at the time (i.e., Twitter). We can develop intermediate solutions to create more consistent experiences across networks in the meantime.
Once established, changing behavior to switch to a new social network is difficult.
Through a combination of internal and external research, we identified many reasons why people were unlikely to switch social networks once they’d become comfortable with an existing platform. The value of switching is typically perceived as quite low compared with the pain of behavior change.
Content and conversations on the social network should be given clarity and priority.
Clear communication between consumers is highly compelling for ‘stickiness’ and extended usage. Social networks have made many different decisions about how to accomplish this, and it’s often a key feature differentiator between networks. Passing some of these features through/across networks could create an interesting path to build upon those common interests/experiences or potentially reduce switching costs.
Early Designs
Early wireframe of the main feed
The feed was the heart of the Bumpr experience. Similar to other social networks of the time, we promoted elements to drive people to find other individuals with common interests. Social networks were still quite new to most people, so we felt any support to create a flourishing, positive network experience would benefit both Bumpr and all of the participants.
Visual design mock
Initial visual design used in the beta. This attempted to remove many visual artifacts common to social networks with improved simplicity and readability. The content was always meant to be the most important thing on this screen.
Project results
After failing to raise sufficient capital to move forward, I left the company in early 2010. Conceptually, this approach was appealing to several VC I spoke with at the time. There were more than a dozen competing social networks, and no clear dominate force in the market, yet. Although Facebook and Twitter provided slightly different value propositions, there was far less differentiation between Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, a rumored Google+, etc. Importantly, we wanted to leverage best-in-class features from each social network to help people identify others worth following/friending based upon common interests (e.g., music, movies, hobbies, etc.) and common experiences (e.g., school, job, etc.).
Our beta allowed users to
Create groups of friends from multiple social networks
Thread conversations across social networks, and ensure all participants in the thread saw all of the communication. For example, even though one participant only interacted with the thread from Facebook, she would see responses from participants using Twitter, Bumpr, MySpace, etc.
Simplified communication management with some features still not introduced on many social networks. For example, a 30 second delay allowing a user to recall a message before it’s actually shared with other participants in the thread.
Recommendations for people or organizations to follow with similar interests. We identified simple patterns of participation within Twitter and Facebook to begin, but considered AI modeling in the architecture from day-one. This was somewhat novel at the time.