GitHub turned out to be a pretty decent place for collaborating on various lists.
I mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub project.
I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am reading / planning on reading [1]).
I'm really glad you brought up GitHub in this way. I have been using GitHub for much more than versioned code storage.
For example, I've been using it as a collaborative writing zone with a friend of mine. Our use is definitely nothing too remarkable, but as far as collaborative writing goes, it's not easy to imagine a product with more technical capabilities than git.
The real hurdle is just non-technical people being intimidated by the terminal / command prompt. I'd like to think that stigma is on its way out, but wouldn't we all?
I don't understand this post at all. The reason no one has built a monopoly around lists is that they are a ridiculously cheap commodity, both for the personal and network use cases.
As is obvious from the post, Fred meant a list services that are used to publish lists for others to consume. Lists like the MacRumours' Buyer's code mentioned in the top comment. http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
There's an obvious network effect: producers and consumers, more of each makes the service better, if producers get something as a return, even if it is just silly internet karma points.
Yeah, the Apple Notes app is a perfectly sufficient app for making most lists, and it automatically syncs to all of your devices. That's just one fantastic free option.
I think the reason no one has nailed the distributed list making part is because that's basically email, which it's really hard to improve substantially on, it turns out.
Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.
Pinterest boards are basically visual unordered lists with the default view of Pinterest bring focused on the items users can create lists with rather than of the particular lists on the site.
I'd propose most successful social sites are successful list-based services, although the default filtering/ordering is not by author, which seems to be the specific case that the article contemplates.
HN, for example, allows me to go see a list of things that a majority of people in my demographic think is interesting today.
Reddit, as one example of a topical social site, takes it a step further and allows users to choose their "vertical," as the author would likely state it.
I disagree. What makes a list a list (and not a group of cool shit) is that the list itself has (probably a lot) more value than the individual items. I'd argue the case that this is very rarely true of Pinterest boards, and Pinterest probably would also given the fact that it seems generally as a user you're confronted with a mashup of items from other people's boards, and not as often do you land on the board itself as a curated collection.
Simple, general-purpose personal publishing is not really a part of the modern web in any straightforward way. There are plenty of special-purpose 'listmaking' services — but it's hard to imagine one tackling the problem in the general case because it's just not a great business. Email gets shoehorned into this usecase because it's one of the only personal publishing tool that's totally decentralized and really easy to use.
Why on earth would anyone bother paying for a list app, when there are so many ways to do it for free? The best you could do is try to write something really excellent and get bought as a replacement for one of ${GIANTCO}'s existing list products. So best case for a team is probably an acquihire, and it'd require a fair investment for scaling at zero revenue to get even that.
basecamp is a list app, and they've been very successful in the space, and have remained small and independent for over 10 years. They were also bootstrapped, and managed to scale; but they did have revenue to support that.
I think there's plenty of room for small, independent list apps in niche verticals. But the original article isn't looking for Basecamps. They're looking for a unicorn.
Came here to say this... but actually, when I think about it, I use it much less than I could/should. It gets confusing after a while: you can't find the lists you have, and start making the same list over and over again (in my case, things to pack when going out on a photo trip).
It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by date (regardless of depth, etc.)
workflowy.com is a great product. I wish there'd be more development on it though. It seems to me the product has become stale and the devs just sit back and collect revenue.
I don't think of Trello as a "list app". It's a kanban app, which is a kind of list I suppose, but "list" is way too vague for it.
Kanban is a pretty specific case. There have actually been a number of apps attempting to do kanban boards. Trello is the only one I've tried that actually works well.
I don't think Trello is kanban-specific. Yes, it does kanban very well, but I know of many different types of people that use trello in completely different ways (and they've never heard of kanban).
Counterpoint: I have never used Trello as a kanban board, with predefined column names, left-to-right motion, and strict WIP limits.
I have a board for my house, with columns for "buy/sell", "maintenance", "check later".
I have a board for my family, with a column representing an upcoming milestone/event/party, and cards representing tasks my wife and I still have to complete.
Our company uses a top-level Company Report board, with each column representing a company goal, and each card representing an in-progress project.
I've also seen boards represent options and possibilities - "everyone add a to the column of the conference(s) you want to attend this year" - then the card becomes the locus of planning for that person's conference travel and so forth. My family did this earlier this year when searching for a home to buy - each card was a house, and the columns approximately represented neighborhoods.
The second type of list this article mentions, social lists so to speak, is definitely valuable to users and probably isn't receiving the specific attention it deserves. Foursquare as a "public itinerary" for a trip through select art galleries in NYC is a great example. Informal, public education could also be orchestrated with these "social lists"; reading material / exercises listed out in a syllabus and shared among interested parties.
Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...
Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...
But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.
* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]
* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]
* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]
* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]
* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool
> I am somewhat perplexed by the lack of breakout success to date in listmaking. It’s an obvious category. And it is certainly not for lack of trying. The commercial internet is 20+ years old now. So you’d think someone would have cracked the code by now. But I don’t think anyone has.
I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to change, and not an indicator of potential success.
Thinking about this more, the problem isn't that list apps are an underserved market, but rather that they're an overserved market. Making a list app is easy - so easy that "make a list app" is the glorified "Hello world" used to demonstrate real-world code for lots of Javascript frameworks and other language libraries.
Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those aren't so much lists as bait technique.
One of the favorite lists of all time -- in terms of both contemporary utility and in simplicity, is the MacRumors buyers guide: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).
Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean, seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines, and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful. I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines (Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).
What I meant was that it may have started out as cumbersome (i.e. someone's Word document)...but hopefully by now they've moved it to a spreadsheet-like format. Given that Macrumors is a well-established site, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't baked into their CMS as some kind of module...though it really could be done as a set of spreadsheets (or YAML) and then as a static site.
How long would it take to research every iPod-era-and-onwards Mac product line -- including dates of refreshes/announcements? I bet no more than a day...especially if you just start from the Wikipedia page, which needs some cleaning up of taxonomy, but is pretty good (and relatively machine-parseable):
There is definitely some editorial decision making that needs to be done about how to best classify things. But the Apple product line is pretty small, so the number of decisions -- e.g. should "iPod classic" and "iPod touch" be separate "families"/product-lines -- is relatively small.
After you have a list/spreadsheet of product-lines and dates...then it's not hard to write a script that calculates the number of days between each subsequent release...which gets you much of the main utility of the Macrumors' guide: days since last release, and average days per cycle.
(it'd actually be kind of cool to see this done with the major programming languages...)
I've recently been using an app called Mashfeed (http://www.appstore.com/mashfeed), which lets you create & follow lists of social media feeds from the top networks (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter). It basically combines all the posts from the selected feeds into a master feed, making it easy to stay on top of content you're interested in, without all the clutter. this app should def be on the "list" (wink wink) of apps for list making!
I was just gonna comment about this. I've been a huge fan of Mashfeed for about a year now. Surprised I don't hear about it more often. I hate how the big social media networks give me one huge feed to sort through. Mashfeed lets me organize my favorite feeds from Instagram and Twitter into lists so I can literally only look at posts I want to see without scrolling through a bunch of nonsense.
Actually, combined with outlook tasks Sharepoint makes a pretty good to-do platform - you have a site per project already. Add a task list to each site (which you may already do). When you go to the mysite (or newsfeed, or whatever they're calling it nowadays) you see a consolidated list of all open tasks, including your personal ones from outlook).
I'd argue that the killer feature for a todo list-making app is the ability to delegate/share a task and then track it without your own list becoming overwhelming. Outlook is 90% of the way there, but strangely haven't seen a huge uptake in the BigCo's I've worked with...
For me Google Keep is by far the best list management tool out there- it solves the singular use case very well.
For the network use case, I think there are "levels" to it- some of which Keep solves.
For my wife and I, we share lists for groceries, errands, restaurants to try, etc.
Keep is absolutely fantastic for sharing with only a few people.
I think there may be a level at which point Keep wouldn't handle a lot of people- though I'm not sure exactly what the level would be- but I haven't really tried it beyond a handful (4-6) people.
Friendly reminder that Foursquare still exists, from one of its early investors. :-)
But seriously, lists are useful because of their content. What a list does is condense information--an artifact of curation and maybe prioritization. So the value of the list correlates with its author.
Some lists are popular because they are curated by experts (newspaper restaurant reviews). Others are popular because they are curated by crowds, and thus express a collective social signal about what's valuable (Reddit, HN).
So, I'd have to say that lists are a horizontal thing. Lists will succeed or fail based on their utility and relevance, which to me says that lists don't really compete across verticals, except to the extent that everything competes for mindshare in general.
Excel is also the Mother of all list-making apps. From Spolsky (May 2000):
> When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
I drew a line in the sand some months ago, and it was we will not turn our product into a spreadsheet.
But when customers need certain capabilities, sometimes the "obvious" solution looks exactly like a spreadsheet, since we deal with sets of related, domain-specific lists.
Those are always product-breaking, lazy-minded solutions that in the long run won't serve the customer well and generate mountains of technical and UX debt. Like a "miscellaneous" category for UI actions, they indicate a shortage of insight and imagination.
105 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub project.
I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am reading / planning on reading [1]).
[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
[1] https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/notes/blob/master/00...
For example, I've been using it as a collaborative writing zone with a friend of mine. Our use is definitely nothing too remarkable, but as far as collaborative writing goes, it's not easy to imagine a product with more technical capabilities than git.
The real hurdle is just non-technical people being intimidated by the terminal / command prompt. I'd like to think that stigma is on its way out, but wouldn't we all?
lol vundle
How does the list making app get exponentially better the more people are using it?
There's an obvious network effect: producers and consumers, more of each makes the service better, if producers get something as a return, even if it is just silly internet karma points.
Pinterest boards are basically visual unordered lists with the default view of Pinterest bring focused on the items users can create lists with rather than of the particular lists on the site.
If I wanted to see a board of "25 Great Christmas Gifts for Under $25", it's not obvious where to look or whose board is authoritative.
HN, for example, allows me to go see a list of things that a majority of people in my demographic think is interesting today.
Reddit, as one example of a topical social site, takes it a step further and allows users to choose their "vertical," as the author would likely state it.
[edit: grammar]
Started as a way to make lists for yourself, turned into shared lists.
Heck, reddit's original idea was pitched as Delicious with voting, so you could say reddit fits this group too.
It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by date (regardless of depth, etc.)
workflowy.com is a great product. I wish there'd be more development on it though. It seems to me the product has become stale and the devs just sit back and collect revenue.
Kanban is a pretty specific case. There have actually been a number of apps attempting to do kanban boards. Trello is the only one I've tried that actually works well.
I have a board for my house, with columns for "buy/sell", "maintenance", "check later".
I have a board for my family, with a column representing an upcoming milestone/event/party, and cards representing tasks my wife and I still have to complete.
Our company uses a top-level Company Report board, with each column representing a company goal, and each card representing an in-progress project.
I've also seen boards represent options and possibilities - "everyone add a to the column of the conference(s) you want to attend this year" - then the card becomes the locus of planning for that person's conference travel and so forth. My family did this earlier this year when searching for a home to buy - each card was a house, and the columns approximately represented neighborhoods.
Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...
Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...
But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.
* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]
* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]
* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]
* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]
* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool
[1] http://la.eater.com/maps/best-los-angeles-restaurants-38
[2] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/special-gifts-for-your-favo...
[3] https://www.producthunt.com/@callmeed/collections/startup-na...
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to...
I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to change, and not an indicator of potential success.
Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those aren't so much lists as bait technique.
Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).
Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean, seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines, and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful. I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines (Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).
How long would it take to research every iPod-era-and-onwards Mac product line -- including dates of refreshes/announcements? I bet no more than a day...especially if you just start from the Wikipedia page, which needs some cleaning up of taxonomy, but is pretty good (and relatively machine-parseable):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...
There is definitely some editorial decision making that needs to be done about how to best classify things. But the Apple product line is pretty small, so the number of decisions -- e.g. should "iPod classic" and "iPod touch" be separate "families"/product-lines -- is relatively small.
After you have a list/spreadsheet of product-lines and dates...then it's not hard to write a script that calculates the number of days between each subsequent release...which gets you much of the main utility of the Macrumors' guide: days since last release, and average days per cycle.
(it'd actually be kind of cool to see this done with the major programming languages...)
I'd argue that the killer feature for a todo list-making app is the ability to delegate/share a task and then track it without your own list becoming overwhelming. Outlook is 90% of the way there, but strangely haven't seen a huge uptake in the BigCo's I've worked with...
For the network use case, I think there are "levels" to it- some of which Keep solves.
For my wife and I, we share lists for groceries, errands, restaurants to try, etc. Keep is absolutely fantastic for sharing with only a few people.
I think there may be a level at which point Keep wouldn't handle a lot of people- though I'm not sure exactly what the level would be- but I haven't really tried it beyond a handful (4-6) people.
But seriously, lists are useful because of their content. What a list does is condense information--an artifact of curation and maybe prioritization. So the value of the list correlates with its author.
Some lists are popular because they are curated by experts (newspaper restaurant reviews). Others are popular because they are curated by crowds, and thus express a collective social signal about what's valuable (Reddit, HN).
So, I'd have to say that lists are a horizontal thing. Lists will succeed or fail based on their utility and relevance, which to me says that lists don't really compete across verticals, except to the extent that everything competes for mindshare in general.
> When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065....
But when customers need certain capabilities, sometimes the "obvious" solution looks exactly like a spreadsheet, since we deal with sets of related, domain-specific lists.
Those are always product-breaking, lazy-minded solutions that in the long run won't serve the customer well and generate mountains of technical and UX debt. Like a "miscellaneous" category for UI actions, they indicate a shortage of insight and imagination.