I love the idea of passively surfacing events and things to do besides something you use ever day: your calendar.
@uptogreg Chrome Extensions are often considered super niche and while the tech audience may love it, it's hard to build a big business (I think @benparr brought this up in another PH discussion a while back). What are you thoughts on this? Is the UpTo Extension a big focus for you or more of a "side project" to compliment your mobile app.
P.S. Just added this to the Chrome Extensions collections.
@rrhoover thanks! Great question... agreed that plugins are currently pretty niche, but I think we're going to see more and more extension development and adoption. It's a powerful platform to build on, especially within the context of existing applications like Gmail and Google Calendar. We're focused on providing an awesome event discovery experience, within a user's calendar -- essentially tapping into daily habits around calendar usage. The user experience has always been really important to us and extensions allow us to provide a discovery experience that is a seamless part of your calendar, without adding any clutter to your primary calendar view. Up until now, we've been focused solely on our app as the calendar destination but we're now experimenting with making our content and discovery platform available across different calendar platforms. This is our first launch in that area.
@rrhoover@uptogreg My (very biased) opinion is that browser extensions are the most overlooked platform. You get some of the major challenges with mobile apps solved out of the box:
1) automatic contextual habit. I never have to remember Rapportive exists and I want to use it. It's just there when it can help.
2) LOW user churn (if you aren't annoying). Maybe it's just us but I haven't seen any mobile app with the retention #s we see.
The one downside is less mature distribution channels and monetization strategies, outside of the ones that have given browser extensions a bad name. But if you can solve that part....
@cdixon Is there a better technology for the 'push' era?
http://cdixon.org/2014/12/21/two...
@rrhoover@cdixon@ketau couldn't agree more. We're already seeing better engagement and higher frequency of use vs our mobile app. I attribute that to the "automatic contextual habit" of browser usage in general. And these benefits are amplified when the extension is built into a more specific daily habit -- Google Calendar use (UpTo), Gmail use (Rapportive), shopping (Honey).
@uptogreg@jacobsmith88 what caused you to think that you should make an extension? How are you going to measure success w/ the extension and what decisions will that drive?
been following UpTo since the beginning, so i'm excited to see this play out!
@eriktorenberg@jacobsmith88 thanks! the decision to do a Google Calendar extension was all about removing friction. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to engage with UpTo and follow UpTo calendars. We think our calendar app provides a great experience for passive event discovery on iPhone / Android using a layered approach, but we wanted to offer a similar experience on the web / desktop, without requiring that a user has to switch calendars.
In terms of success metrics, we’ll be closely monitoring engagement (calendar follows, event clicks, etc) and adoption to help determine what functionality, content and other platforms we'll be prioritizing on our roadmap.
Thanks @jtriest for posting! We’re excited to share the Chrome / Google Calendar extension we’ve been working on with the PH community. One of the most popular features in our iPhone and Android calendar app has been our ‘Discover’ section which now has more than 30,000 calendars that you can follow - everything from sports schedules and TV shows to upcoming concerts, Meetups and movie releases. You can now follow any of our calendars alongside your Google Calendar, without any clutter. You can also publish your own public calendar for others to follow. Looking forward to everyone’s feedback.
@uptogregg - great job with extension!
A UX tweak I would make to easier process the content of your sidebar is to constrain/match what's displayed only if it falls within the date range that I have set in Google Calendar (i.e. day, week, month, custom period, etc..). When I select a date range in my google calendar I mentally assume I'm only looking at events within that date range.
@bracco appreciate the feedback. We actually started with that approach and then switched it so users could scroll to view more events. This is one of the things we wanted to get the community's feedback on so the comment is super helpful.
@uptogreg ahh that makes sense...I could see users preferring one vs the other. Two ideas:
Idea One:
Two distinct headers in the sidebar that are styled slightly differently than the day headers. The first would contain the date range of user's view such as "Within [Week]" if user had "week" as their selected range. The second header would something like "Later".
Idea Two:
Only load events in users selected date range. However, instead of static "Load more" CTA at bottom, automatically load the events past the users date range when they hit bottom (endless scroll). In this way a user knows they are seeing the range they have selected but if they scroll to bottom they get the more far out outlook.
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Nice Job UpTo team! I love and appreciate how natural the extension feels along side my google cal.
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