Yesterday I went to This Happened London where three guys spoke; James Wheare about Twitshift, Campbell Orme about Making Future Magic and Tom Taylor about Noticings.
The talk on Noticings was the last one. It is, or rather was, a game about stopping and looking around you, taking pictures of the beautiful, unusual or interesting things that you see. Depending on what your picture was of and how it was tagged you got different points.
The tale of Noticings
Noticings was closely integrated with Flickr and never intended to be anything but a side project and an experiment. But it didn’t stay that way. Tom, who is one of the creators (both called Tom), told us the story of how it started in September 2009, evolved and gained players (2768 of them) and how eventually it was shut down just over a year later in October 2010. He showed a snapshot of the long list of feedback from users. Their questions, suggestions and problems and bluntly admitted that after some time they just didn’t want to look at the site. He continued saying:
I’m not blaming our users for turning up…
… but they just didn’t know what to do with them and their heart wasn’t in it enough to make it into the thing it needed to be in order to deal with a larger user base. So they shut it down.
The talk was only 10 mins long but an interesting story which draws parallels with Facebook and many of the other services out there who start out as something small and slightly different but take on a life of their own.
Facebook was never intended to be what it is today. It evolved because users turned up and used it. The difference (beside the potential in the idea) is that the team behind Facebook did figure out what to do with all of the users who were turning up, and they wanted to do something with them. Though Noticings didn’t gain that substantial a user base, the decision to shut it down still raises some interesting thoughts regarding that the things we create and draw users into, intentionally or not, do in some cases become part of their lives.
Online services are now part of our lives
We’re increasingly placing snapshots of and documenting our lives online. Fewer of us print our holiday photos or out and about shots. Some of them we download to the computer. Some we forget about. The ones we like the most are often the ones we end up sharing with the world by uploading them to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, with Instagram etc. It goes for bookmarking and read later tools, blog platforms, location based services, online communities etc. Should any of those that we rely on to use regularly, or occasionally, seize to exist a big part and arguably legacy of our lives would disappear.
Trusting in tomorrow
Our usage online is based on that we trust and take for granted that the services we used today will still be there tomorrow. Or the week after next, or month, or year. We trust that the people behind them keep them going, but your average Joe isn’t thinking about the effort, resources and dedicatation that goes into it. Or that one day someone, somewhere may decide to shut it down.
Of course there is a big difference (and currently unlikelyhood) in shutting down a service like Facebook compared to Noticings but, as we learnt with Delicious late last year, things change. Just as Tom answered with regards to why he thought people blogged about Noticings when him and his team in the end decided to close it down – “I guess they thought it was a good idea” – other people may still believe in what has been created even when the creator and teams behind it no longer do.
So when is it ok to shut something down and what, if any, responsibilities do we have to keep a legacy of the service?
Read how Noticing has handled the shutting down of their service and the legacy they’ve left behind on the about page.
