Apple Survey Fail
Uh, what?
This is like a test!
Uh, what?
This is like a test!
Interesting discussion over at Gizmodo:
Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.
My good friends Uri Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego) and Aldo Rustichini (a professor at the University of Minnesota) provided a very clever test of the long-term effects of a switch from social to market norms. A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn't work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late — as they occasionally were — they felt guilty about it — and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended.
But the real story only started here. The most interesting part occurred a few weeks later, when the day care center removed the fine. Now the center was back to the social norm. Would the parents also return to the social norm? Would their guilt return as well? Not at all. Once the fine was removed, the behavior of the parents didn't change. They continued to pick up their kids late. In fact, when the fine was removed, there was a slight increase in the number of tardy pickups (after all, both the social norms and the fine had been removed).
This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.
Thank you to all who participated in the Premium Features survey, where we asked what kind of features you would consider upgrading to a PRO Account for.
So we have a few new features to announce...For All Accounts (inc. Free):Social Sharing ButtonsPart of the challenge of customer acquisition for Goodgecko is that by nature, survey apps have thousands of different uses.
The definition of MVP has become far too broad for comfort. Lets try to call a spade a spade.
I will sum up my trip to Singapore with one picture.
Scent Trail is a bit of an abstract term, but it's a very important concept in web marketing. A strong scent trail produces higher conversions.



Remember that Twitter Survey I posted a while back? It had questions like this:
From Bund to Bun. I'm sure someone can tell me the Chinese name for this. It's a warm bun filled with salted butter and covered with a mysterious sugary powder. It is shamefully perfect as a food that hits all the right spots.
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