Ping

@rrhoover Simplicity and mystery. Ping evolves. Those who decide to let Ping live on their phone will be surprised and delighted.

@davidbyttow so should we read anything into how things are going with Secret with this release or is this just a N-O-R-T-H-like experiment?

@graham_earley Exactly. Now I'm hoping for it to be actually useful.

@msg Agree. Desktop app metaphors have no place on mobile devices. They're too personal.

@msg Agreed, it's a slick app. I'm guessing people will copy the transition style if Ping gets traction.

@Lumilux Agreed, was thinking the same thing.

@rrhoover nice post. I think the side projects are mainly a plus as long as they're thought through. If it's really a hackathon project released, then the expectations can be more clearly set how you'll handle it afterwards (ie- a little press and then only if it's a rocketship will we invest time in it.) Or you can be more strategic with the scope. With MyAnalytics, we didn't have it all perfectly mapped out, but there were quite a few benefits we had in mind that making the app would bring to our main product; free products have been great lead gen for especially SaaS apps for quite some time and could easily be considered "side projects". It was also a nice relief to have green space to think about what a product should look and feel like since KISSmetrics was pretty well developed when MyAnalytics started. Some of my favorite moments working with Hiten were our lengthy discussions on mobile and the new interface options we could use there that didn't exist for our web-app, KISSmetrics.

@erictwillis Ditto