This week I met with Pinyadda user Max Silver. Max has been using Pinyadda for just a few weeks, but has quickly become one of our most active ‘Power Users’. Max is a senior at Emerson College here in Boston studying Marketing and Communications. A Twitter-aholic, he’s fascinated with the way social products allow him to build a network that he would never otherwise be able to create.
Max heard about Pinyadda from the brother of one of his friends who told him he’d really like it. In true GenY social media form, he tweeted out asking for others’ first impressions with the platform before signing up.
Can’t get enough content, can’t share it quickly enough
Why Max’s friend suggested he’d love Pinyadda so much became very apparent once I started following him on Twitter. Max LOVES content and LOVES to share it. He describes sharing as something “innate in all of us” and is why he’s so impassioned about social media. He’s interned at Digitas, iMax in LA among several others and is looking to work for an ad agency focused on digital strategy. (After speaking with him at length about the future of social, I’ll shamelessly plug that he’d absolutely be a great hire.)
In this context, Pinyadda allows Max to “consume and share content more efficiently.” Always on the go from internship to class to tweetup and more, with Pinyadda he doesn’t have to go to 10 different sites and blogs (and which usually have “really bad sharing functionality”) to stay on top of his Twitter and information game. Pinyadda’s “simple feed interface” and easy pin to a social network integration means he can quickly scan relevant headlines and sources to soak up lots of information. (As a GenYer he remarks that it’s his generations perogative to “know about and be good at everything; not great at one thing.”)
Max likes that after scanning relevant headlines he can click on the select few he’d like to read more deeply, and then easily share those with his followers on Twitter with commentary. The motivation behind this is that he wants to provide value to others, considering himself a source of quality content. He had used Google Reader, but stopped because he found it too difficult/clunky to share and he wasn’t able to take a quick snapshop of what is trending.
Sharing is great, community is powerful
While the ability to easily share is most important, Max noted that the community Pinyadda enables around individual content items is truly powerful. He says he tries to have individual content item discussions on Twitter every now and then, but is incredibly annoyed with the character limits and irritation of having to go back and forth over 10 tweets to have a decent conversation.
As a result, Max has found himself interacting with LinkedIn groups for discussions around content. Fascinated with the integration of online and offline, he loves the ability to have conversations and make connections among people with shared interests. He thinks Pinyadda offers a better platform for that — what he describes as a “crowd-sourcing of your own information.” As a result, he wants us to bring back the “most pinned” and “most discussed” functionality. This was a feature we really enjoyed from the onset, and in an attempt to simplify our UX, removed. It’s great to hear a user who had not seen those features early-on now requesting it.
What a Twitteraholic wants from Pinyadda
As for his suggestions about making Pinyadda better, it’s no surprise it has to do with his avid use of Twitter. Number one, he’d like shorter Pinyadda URLs. (We’re working on it, Max, so thanks for bearing with us!) He’d also like to see an implementation of character counts when sharing to Facebook and Twitter.
Related, for individual link pages (where people land when they click on the Pinyadda links he shares), he feels a brief summary of the article would provide even greater value to the people he shares his links with. His followers could then come to the individual link page, get the gist of the article and quickly decide if they’d like to hop into the conversation around the article with Max. Since people can @ reply Twitter followers from Pinyadda, he noted this would effectively solve his frustration of not being able to have meaningful conversations around content items on Twitter.
These suggestions and insights are really important to us, especially coming from such a keen Twitter user. We pride ourselves as being the easiest way to find and share links on Twitter, and are constantly iterating to make that experience better. We’re looking forward to discussing Max’s suggestions at our next product meeting.
Max, thank you for dropping by our offices and for a really great discussion about Pinyadda and the future of social media and content sharing. You are officially a member of the team Yadda squad!
Pinyadda users, for great content recommendations and commentary, here are some topics I’d suggest you follow Max on:
Tags: customer, No User Left Behind, Pinyadda