26 March 2008

I met Allen at SXSW and I made him a demo of sobees. Afterwards, I sent him information about sobees as well as an invite for the alpha. Here is an extract of what Allen wrote about sobees:

At the beginning of this review I noted that Sobees could become a mainstream hit. I could see my mother using this application and being able to connect to my writings, family photos, and keep connected to the things I want her to see. Why? Because I can setup Sobees for her and manage it remotely. It would certainly reduce the, "Allen, I lost the link to the mahjong page, help me" calls.

This comment delighted me. At the very beginning of the project, we wanted sobees to address our parents’ needs, our non geek friends, … On the blogs, we read mainly about geeks’ tools. As geeks, we have plenty of web tools and services available. Friendfeed is the latest good example. Our question is: will our parents use Friendfeed? Will our relatives use Friendfeed? Will our non geek friends…? And if not, why? What are their needs? What alternative should we offer them? There is a population of users needing simple and effective tools. They will never have thousands of friends, but they don’t want to miss any item posted by their grandchildren, by their relatives, … My mother wants to be sure she won’t miss it when my daughter is posting new pictures, when she is blogging,…. Our vision is that she finds most tools inside sobees.

The fact that Allen saw this possibility without clear mention of it in our communication is a confirmation that we are on the right way. The road is still long but it is so exciting when we have such confirmations.

You can read the full article here .