Wunderlist - Capture ideas, things to do and places to see

@chadfowler congrats on the big update! Have you guys seen Well? It's no longer around, but they had the same goal of being the public platform for lists: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/27.... @phatduckk would probably have an interesting perspective on this :) Chad, do you see Wunderlist positioning as evolving to be more about the public/broadcasted lists (with being great for to do lists a side-effect), or sticking with the core value proposition as being the best to do list, with the public stuff being something cool on top? Would love to hear more about how you envision the future for Wunderlist/6wunderkinder.

@alexschiff Thanks! I do remember seeing Well, yes. Did you ever use it? The most important thing for us right now is to be the best list manager in existence and to become ubiquitous. We'll watch how our users respond to the public list ideas and decide how to respond to what they are doing and asking for. Whatever we do, we don't plan to pollute the core product. Its simplicity and elegance are its essence. With the new Wunderlist 3 architecture we've built something that allows us to iterate, extend, and integrate Wunderlist as a service without cluttering Wunderlist the application. We have a lot of room to experiment and to satisfy a long list of requests for the app without sacrificing what makes Wunderlist great.

@chadfowler I think that's the right perspective. I'd pay really close attention not to the % of people who post publicly, but whether or not it causes people to start feeling less secure about their personal content / feel clutter from having a core part of the app go unused. Had a great chat with @chrismessina about this last time I was in SF — when you start adding other people to what is thought of as a private space, people start getting a feeling of intrusion. It's much easier to get people to use a social product personally (i.e., Trello or Asana) than a personal product socially (what we tried to do with the last iteration of Fetchnotes). Also, in playing around with the product now (was having updating troubles), I think I got an incorrect initial perception that the lists were publicly searchable and you were trying to motivate people to broadcast them. Creating public lists in terms of just giving people a URL they can spread around is actually much more reasonable than I initially thought — you're only going to share that with people that the list involves. @chrismessina, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the move since you mentioned you use Wunderlist with your girlfriend. Have you found any utility in the public lists yet? Do you foresee yourself using it?

@alexschiff We read your post here with great interest...thanks for it: http://andrewchen.co/2014/07/01/... We definitely understand the need to separate public and private VERY clearly. We're planning more work around that to help make the distinction clear. Definitely interested to hear @chrismessina's take.

@chadfowler cool! Thanks for reading. If you ever want to chat about it, drop me an email at alex@fetchnotes.com. More than happy to discuss further via phone/vid chat/whatever. Don't make it to Berlin too often unfortunately :) Related to your earlier question, I never used Well consistently, but I've definitely played around with it. We thought about "public notes" for a brief period at Fetchnotes so I talked to a lot of people about the same concepts. At least from my research, there was a consistent theme (among less-techie people) that if someone doesn't feel comfortable enough to put ALL of their info in a system, they won't put ANY of their personal info in that system. If you start default public, it feels too risky. If you start default private, people don't really make the jump. @philtoronto used to use it I remember - maybe he has some thoughts?

@andreasklinger We have completely rewritten for speed and he new real-time sync architecture. We have also added a new public lists feature we're excited about. In general the release is focused on making sharing and collaboration way better. We are Layer fans at Wunderlist, but we aren't using it yet. Yet!

@camillericketts <3 thanks for using the product!

@bramk Thanks, Bram! It was all about responsiveness and speed for us in this release. I'm glad to hear it feels good to you.

@chadfowler Hey Chad. Is it too much to ask what do you think made the success of Wunderlist? You know there are so many todo lists around. It's one hell of a competitive market. What do you think differentiated it or which other agents might have made it more successful than the rest?