Paul Adams‘ book Grouped contains a lot of clear, rational sentences about human social behavior. They aren’t surprising sentences, but I don’t think anyone’s put all these insights in one place before in plain language. The insights are the result of years of research by many different people. The book cuts through the noise of [...]
Posts by Sean Flannagan
Sharing vs. Selling
22 Jan 2012
So if sharing online is about validation, what if the objects being shared are for sale, and you stand to benefit from their sale? Does money always ruin it? There is a lot of sharing and curating going on of objects that are available for sale somewhere. See Svpply, Fancy, Pinterest, large swaths of Tumblr, [...]
22 Dec 2011
Refavorited is a Tumblog (do people still say that?) where my favorites from Etsy, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flickr, Fancy, Twitter and Wikipedia go, automatically, via ifttt. Etsy is not yet an official channel on ifttt (but is so ready), so I’m using my Etsy favorites RSS feed as a trigger. As for Wikipedia, for a long [...]
Etsy Book Picks:
07 Dec 2011
A Pinterest pinboard I can’t help but add to a few times a day, though Etsy Board Games is gaining momentum. Alternate filtering in effect for followers here on Etsy. No official API yet, but that hasn’t stopped Kellan.
Onboarding Inspiration
13 Nov 2011
I collect screenshots of details I come across and like, on the desktop or phone, in an “inspiration” folder on Dropbox. But I haven’t found a good way to capture great onboarding flows yet other than blogging about them. Here are two standouts that kind of smacked me in the face. Stripe plops you inside [...]
04 Sep 2011
If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they’d often make good startups. –from a Paul Graham classic that’s worth reading in its entirety, repeatedly, and keeping handy in your Instapaper account.
Consider the Albatross: Foraging and Activity Feeds
14 Aug 2011
I came across this post on Quora on “Lévy-flight personalization” and optimizing Quora’s activity feed for novelty-seeking users. Its inspiration is the albatross, a long-range ocean forager that’s larger than you think. Lévy flights are seen in the behavior of many animals. It’s the pattern that emerges when an animal darts around randomly in one [...]
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Applying Hippie Knowledge to Web Product Development
14 Jan 2011
I admit it: I collect hippie books. Optimistic books about making things published by very small presses in the 1970s. But I only recently realized that I can download PDFs of many of these books from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World, and I’m so glad I did. Because I’ve now [...]
