Phil Arscott is a Pinyadda power user. Don’t take my word for it, though, take his:

“It’s addictive. You go to your fridge to get your food, you go to Pinyadda to get your news and information.”

If you’re into environmentalism, economics, science or history, Phil is a must-follow on Pinyadda. He not only Pins really interesting items, he provides phenomenal commentary on them. (I pretty regularly check out his Profile to see what he’s been reading.) While Phil primarily uses Pinyadda for pleasure to pursue these interests, more recently he’s been using it to pinpoint opportunities for work.

Phil heads up operations at The Village Enterprise Fund, a micro-grant program that enables Africa’s rural poor to start sustainable, income-generating businesses. He helps these people through what the Fund describes as a “grassroots model of economic development” – training, seed grants and mentorship. Get how successful this model has been: 75 percent of the businesses they help build continue beyond 4 years, and roughly a third spin off other ventures. As of last summer alone they’ve launched over 19,000 businesses. Wow.

“Pinyadda changed the way I consume information.”

This was apparent to me even before Phil made the statement at the end of our chat. Let’s track his news and information consumption habits pre-Pinyadda:

Phil visited sites directly, searched for topics he was interested in, and got lost in news aggregation sites. He mainly relied on iGoogle when he had a chunk of time to catch up on the news and his interests, where he had set up a full page of publisher widgets. His main gripes with iGoogle are threefold:

(1) Limited by the setup: Adding a million news widgets didn’t make it easy for him to scroll through headlines. (2) Publisher widgets became destinations for topics: He found himself mentally placing sites into boxes – e.g. site X became his destination for world headlines, site Y for politics headlines. (3) Not enough content: Each widget showed only a few top headlines, and often were the same across publishers. The fact that the headlines rarely updated didn’t help.

Now Phil simply follows the topics he’s interested in on Pinyadda. And instead of going to individual sites for certain topics he thinks each outlet publishes well, Pinyadda automatically serves him a feed of articles from an array of websites on that topic. This discovery aspect of finding new sites and blogs in his topic feeds are one of his greatest enjoyments:

“Pinyadda completely and in one day expanded the portfolio of websites I use – from a handful to 20, 30 or 40 … I would have never done that or heard of the sites without Pinyadda. And every single day I have new articles with new sites, right there in front of me.”

“Pinyadda connects people in a way that is much deeper than friending them.”

When I let Phil know I enjoyed his comments so much, he revealed his motivation behind providing them: the value-add he provides other people by extending the dialogue beyond the article. In other words, Phil doesn’t just comment because an article interests him, he comments because he knows who is going to read it. He went on to describe this as very different than the stream of comments he finds on an individual publisher’s website: “Comments are more useful on Pinyadda. I know who’s going to see it — someone interested in the same stuff or my friends.”

The dynamics of this aspect of Pinyadda are what keep Phil engaged. He likes that he can follow people based on what they’re interested in, regardless if he knows them or not. Phil explained, “You create relationship that’s not based on what you Tweet, it’s based on legitimate interest.” Pinyadda’s mission is to connect people around the best information for their unique interests and needs, so I enjoyed hearing Phil say this. We look forward to building more features into Pinyadda that work to cultivate more of these connections.

The behavior change

I asked Phil about his experience getting set-up on Pinyadda. He described what many users do: the more he used it, the more he enjoyed and relied on it (until he finally “hit a wall” and ditched iGoogle). He remarked that accomplishing this behavior change must be hard to overcome, and Pinyadda actually have some product enhancements in the works that we believe will decrease this behavior change gap.

The core of these product enhancements actually hit Phil’s main product suggestion: improved profiles. We hear you, and are excited to make these spaces more fun and more of a home to display, for example, your interests, curated articles and favorite sites. These profiles will then also become more valuable destination pages for other users on the site to see commonalities with others users they should follow, displaying the unique information identity of each user.

Phil, thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback and taking the time to speak with me. As noted above, Phil is a must-follow on Pinyadda — I learn something new from him just about every day.

Tags: customer, No User Left Behind

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Yadda Squad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.