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February 3, 2010

Send a Request vs. Ask a Question on Viewpointr

The release of our preview provided us with some great feedback to which we have been working on implementing.

One difference you will see in this iteration is that we will encourage you to send a request instead of asking a question. What's the difference? Sending a request involves a process. Asking a question merely merits an answer. The nature of Viewpointr is to get in touch with people that you DON'T know by going through the people you DO know. However, with the plethora of Q&A sites in the market, users form a perception that their question should be answered right away. However, if you reached out to your friend via email, would you expect a response immediately? Email has a different perception. And, so should Viewpointr. We may have gotten this wrong in our initial preview, so hopefully, we'll get it right on this iteration.

If you're trying to get to various types of people who are outside of your immediate network on your own, it's extremely difficult. Do you poke around on LinkedIn? Do you creep on Facebook to see mutual friends? Do you try to randomly reach out to someone you don't know on Twitter? Any of these are difficult. However, if you rely on your friends to connect you, there's a high chance of success that you will get a meaningful response in return from the people you're looking for. Viewpointr allows you to easily send requests through friends to get to the people you don't know.

So, try out our new iteration -- Fill in a request. Invite friends to make connections. Your friends will point your request to their friends. 

P.S. if you don't get a response immediately, that's because you didn't just ask a question, you sent a request to your friends. Don't worry! If your friends are your friends, they will point your request to the types of people you're looking for.

Let us know what you think. Share your thoughts on Facebook, Twitter and / or our Feedback Forum.

Looking forward to hearing from you. 

Cheers,
Andre

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December 9, 2009

New Splash Page

As a result of your feedback, we have revised our splash page to better communicate the value proposition behind Viewpointr. 


We have essentially boiled it down to one simple question that I'm sure you have asked your friends time and time again -- "Can you point me to (a certain type of person)?" 

Here is our new splash page:

Here is our old splash page:

Hope you guys like it. For those of you who haven't tried it out yet, sign up at here to get an invite.

Cheers,
Andre

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December 8, 2009

Viewpointr vs Email

Many of our early private users have asked us -- "Why would I use Viewpointr over email to send questions to my friends?"

Firstly, Viewpointr facilitates communication with your friends-of-friends, not your friends. Your friends point questions to their friends who can best answer your questions.

The other reasons why you would use Viewpointr vs email are:

  1. Unlike the back and forth with email, you can directly ask your question to people you want viewpoints from.
    For example, if you're looking to get in touch with a "designer" and you reach out to a few friends who you think can put you in touch with them; you would have to write an initial email to your friend (or friends), wait for a reply, and then, your friend(s) would either have to do an email introduction or provide you with the designer's contact info. All of this takes time and involves a bit of back and forth.
  2. Host your conversations in one place.
    For example, if you're looking to get multiple viewpoints from a several different types of people such as "designers, architects, and engineers" regarding the same topic / question, it makes sense to have that conversation in one place where it's easily tracked, stored and retrieved when needed.
  3. To capture you and your friend's influence.
    The beauty of Viewpointr is having the ability to capture the various types of people and information that your friends have access to. Our online profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, and Twitter are often static and don't share the full story with regards to the types of people your friends can point you to. Viewpointr captures your questions, the questions you point, and the questions you answer seamlessly without you doing anything else but pointing or answering them.
Try it out and let us know what you think.

Ask a question that you're looking for multiple viewpoints and invite at least 3 friends to point it. Have a conversation with them and see how your profile grows.
 
***

As a brief sneak preview to what we're working on -- users will soon be able to benefit from all of Viewpointr's features by simply using their own email. Think posterous meets yahoo answers! Very exciting. Stay tuned via Twitter and Facebook.

Cheers,
Andre

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December 7, 2009

Viewpointr's Email Notifications

Recently, we received a spam complaint regarding the email notifications we send from our system and we just wanted to explain the meaning behind them.

The nature of Viewpointr is for users to ask questions and invite their friends to help direct those questions to their friends who can answer it. At this stage, most of our user's friends are not users of Viewpointr yet. Therefore, the only way that a user's friend receives their question is to point it through email.

The user asking the question triggers an email notification from our system to the user's friend. These emails are not spam. A user has essentially invited friends and we send an email notification that notifies their friend.

So, if you receive an email from Viewpointr with any of the following subjects containing a friend's name, please do not send to spam.

   
Click here to download:
Viewpointrs_Email_Notification.zip (15 KB)

Your friend is a user of Viewpointr and is simply asking you a question through our system.

We have no intention of spamming people. Our only intention is to help facilitate communication with people who are outside of one's network in order to get the viewpoints they're looking for.

-Andre

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