A Better Intro Page?

Carl Milsted, Jr on Sep 15 09:20:21

View QTML

The site has reached the good-enough-to-be-useful stage and then some. Now the challenge is to attract more alpha testers and to find the core initial adopters.

Back when this was Fnora, the front page was aggressively salesy and rather silly. People didn't like it, but mainly due to the scary logo and wild color scheme.

So now I have a corporatish front page, and I've pushed the word count down and use pictures to convey much of the info. People say it's better, but I'm still not getting a stampede of people taking advantage of the free alpha test platform.

So I was reading an Internet marketing book last night, and am contemplating turning the front page into more of a salesly landing page something like this:

Who Do You Want to Connect With?

[checkboxes]

• Old friends?
• New friends?
• Family?
• Church members?
• Club members?
• Coworkers?
• Colleagues?
• People with shared interests?
• Interesting bloggers?
• Celebrities?
• Experts?
• Political frenemies?
• Advertisers?
• Addictive click bait sites?
• Nigerian bot farms?
• Sock puppet accounts?
• Groups which make you angry? [It's Engagement!]

If some of the above strike you as a waste of time and energy, you might be in the right place. Read on.

Which Posts Do You Want to See?

[checkboxes or radio buttons?]

• Just posts with cute pictures
• Just posts from people I've communicated with recently
• Let evil robots choose which posts I see
• Let government agencies choose which posts I see
• Let me choose

If a certain legacy social site is making you feel lonely, it could be the evil robots. We're too cheap and lazy to create evil robots here. You have to choose what to see yourself.

Whom Do you Want to Show Your Posts?

[checkboxes or radio? I am uncertain here]

• Send to a random sample of friends to test for engagement
• Let evil robots decide
• Send to marketing agencies
• Send to the FBI
• Let me decide who gets to see which posts, and my contacts decide what to look at

Choice. What a concept!

How Would You Like Your Information Served?

1. Scrambled together
2. Grouped by type of contact

If you chose Option 1, you are the type of person whose idea of a good party is a beer keg at a baby shower or a mud wrestling pit at a company picnic.

If you chose Option 2, you are the type of person who can appreciate Conntects, which means "Connect in Context." At Conntects we do away with the infinite scrolling feed entirely. Instead you get a dashboard showing which of your contacts have new posts, and you can arrange the order of your contacts by how you met them.

Infinite scrolling feeds are addictive. Context shifts tire the brain. What is your time worth? What is your brain worth?

How Would You Like to Pay?

• Sell my time watching clickbait posts in order to view lots of ads.
• Sell my personal interest data to marketing firms.
• Sell my data to government agencies.
• Charge a few dollars zorkmids per month.

What is your time worth?

What is your brain worth?

What is your privacy worth?

While Conntects will be a fee for service social media site once we get past the alpha test stage, it will be dirt cheap compared to Facebook -- for many of you.

And there's more!

Bonus 1: Post in Style

If you just want to post quips, links and pictures, we can do that. But we can support long posts with fancy formatting when the inspiration hits:

• Italics
• Bold
• Highlighted Text
• Tables
• Computer source code
• Poetry
• Pictures within your text where you want them
• And even equations...$e=m{c}^2$

See more

Bonus 2: A Better Commenting System

Threaded commenting systems lead to indentations which run off the page. And keeping up with a conversation requires scanning comments you have already read, and going clickety clickety clickety until carpal tunnel syndrome kicks in.

Conntects features time ordered comments with hyperlinks and hover popups to show the replies.

See how they work here.

And comments can have the same powerful formatting features as posts. You can have deep conversations on Conntects.

Bonus 3: A High Trust Blogosphere

Remember the days of high trust blogging?

• When blogs had blogrolls?
• When comments were relevant and spammers were few?
• When Technorati tags linked posts on the same subject together?

Conntects features blogs as well as personal feeds. The tag space is fresh and not polluted with spam. The commenters [will be] paying members and you will be able to ban those who are naughty.

Conntects blogs can be public, private, or even secret. And you don't need to deal with plugins and whatnot.

Bonus 4: Host a Forum or Few

Conntects groups are powerful, thanks to our formatting and commenting features. Do you have a social club, church group, local political party, hobby network, alumni gathering, family reunion, or other social gathering you would like to host online? Conntects can help.

Take the Tour or Join Up Now

If you want yet more information, you can take the tour and learn about Conntects features in great detail.

If you want to know how Conntects supports inline pictures and all that fancy formatting take the interactive QTML tutorial. No signup is needed. (And you can see our picture editor in action while you are at it.)

Or you could browse our current members, blogs, and/or groups to see Conntects in action.

If, in the end, you prefer your online social life to be curated by evil robots, have a nice day. Thank you for your consideration.

But if you like what you see here, have a better day and Join Now!

Be seeing you!

Tags: marketing