Podcasting on the Voicemail

@edent — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:00:47 +0000

My new commute involves a lot of driving, which means I've started listening to podcasts again. One of my favourite mobile related podcasts is The Voicemail - it's a quick half hour chat between two mobile industry experts; Stefan Constantinescu and James Whatley.

Stefan has been travelling for the last few weeks, so James has been co-hosting with guests. I've never recorded a podcast before, so I badgered James for a guest slot and, last night, we recorded episode 40 of The Voicemail.

If you're an iMusic fan, listen to The Voicemail in iTunes - and please rate the show if you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to the podcast feed. Or, you can grab the MP3 of Episode 040 directly. (31.30 MB)

I say "y'know" a lot. That's very annoying.

Context Specific Content Surfacing

@edent — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:42:51 +0000

In a mixed paradigm environment, how do you ensure content is surfaced which is context specific?

By which I mean - how do you make your content serve the user's time-bound constraints?

What I'm trying to say is - serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives.

Or, to break it down further, a user may only have a specific amount of time to dedicate to your app; how do you deal with that?

In a mobile game, the interface may present the user a choice of "Quick Play" for when the user is waiting for a bus, "Medium Play" for when the user is on the bus, "Long Play" for when the user is stuck in a traffic jam.

James Whatley blogged about this subject recently. In a mobile video app - such as the BBC iPlayer - the length of time the user can spend on the app is (probably) more important than any other discovery method.

Demo

So, I spent the weekend building a demonstration mobile service which starts with the amount of time a user is expecting to use the app.

LooTube!

As far as I could see, iPlayer doesn't have any public APIs, the videos don't work on all phones, and the content isn't available outside the UK. So I have used YouTube as the basis.

The "User Story"?

As a user, when I am sat on the toilet, I want to be able to view a range of interesting videos suitable to the length of my visit.

Point your phone at http://LooTu.be and this is what you'll see:

YouTube's API only gives us three lengths of video - short, medium, and long - so there's not quite as much granularity as I would have liked.

Clicking one of the buttons, retrieves a list of videos based on time. The "Quick" button will show the users videos which are less than 4 minutes long.

At the moment, http://LooTu.be doesn't allow the user to search for anything. It only takes time as a search query. It does, however, randomly select between YouTubes standard "top" feeds - most viewed, top rated, most shared, top favourites, etc.

Technical Details

You can view the source of LooTu.be - it's fairly basic HTML5 and jQuery Mobile. Feel free to laugh at my code and offer suggestions.

Thanks