app

Can we harness the power of laziness for good?

/ Josh R / Leave a comment

We humans are lazy. And people who make apps know they can tap into our innate desire to preserve effort. If something can be made easy and doesn’t cost a ton more, humans will probably end up choosing the easier option.

Originally published on the Reason Digital blog

It’s why apps like Uber and Deliveroo are so successful. No more awkward call centres or cash to get a cab or delicious food sent to your door. Yes, the app makers are doing us a huge service but ultimately, they want us to spend more overall on something we might not have previously bothered with because it was too difficult.

So if we can tap into the laziness and make humans buy more stuff, can we use the same principle to make humans give more stuff?

That’s the idea behind Gone for Good – a smartphone app that makes giving as easy as getting. Gone for Good lets you donate your unwanted stuff to local charities with just a few taps of the app.

Take a photo of your items, give it a few words and pick your preferred charity. Once they’ve accepted the donation, a friendly volunteer will come round at a convenient time to pick it up.

 It’s charity giving for the Uber generation.

No more bagging things up to leave outside the charity shop or calling the council to arrange a collection. Gone For Good is the easy way to get rid of things you don’t want for a good cause: from cushions to sofas, charities will welcome it all. It’s perfect for busy people who don’t have time to get to a charity shop and also great for those who can’t get out and about to give.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been trialling the app in Manchester with both local charity shops and those charities with a national high street presence. During the trial, Gone For Good helped users donate over £10,000 worth of goods to charities through the app, including sofas, bikes, mattresses and even a piano! In one instance, over 100 office chairs were donated.

That’s why we’re really pleased to say that Gone For Good is now available nationally, allowing anyone to give away virtually anything to charity, anywhere in the UK. To make this happen, Gone for Good has partnered with two major national charities – British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK – and more will join in the coming weeks.

Now you really can give away things to good cause as easily as ordering a cab online. It’s charity giving for the Uber generation.

Download Gone For Good now from the Apple App Store or Google Play for Android.

Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!

/ Josh R / 19 Comments

No AOLI recently succumbed to the hype and downloaded Mailbox, a mobile email client that tries to help you manage your overflowing email inbox and achieve the mythical “inbox zero”.

Mailbox does this by encouraging you to immediately archive, trash or schedule the email for a re-read or response using a swipe interface. It’s pretty good, actually, and I’ve found myself with fewer new emails just sitting in my inbox waiting for me to do something with them. My older email archive is another matter.

There’s one major flaw however.

By using Mailbox, I’m effectively helping to re-AOLize the web. You see, Mailbox only supports two email providers: Gmail and Apple iCloud.

I find it incredible that an app developer working on an open, well-documented and well-understood platform like email has effectively closed down access to their product to users who are on just a couple of providers.

Don’t get me wrong: I know the problems are difficult, especially as open platforms beget a multitude of implementations.

But by choosing to lock yourself into the Google API, when there is another, really open way to do things, feels like a mistake to me. If Mailbox supported any standardised IMAP provider, they’d no doubt have access to a much wider user base who would use their app across multiple providers.

And they might even be able to charge for the app and make an income – rather than selling themselves to Dropbox to survive.

It doesn’t help that locking me even more to the Google ecosystem and all the threats to my privacy and freedom that brings with it. Dropbox is another cloud company with a questionable approach to customer’s privacy and freedom.

Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way. Let’s remember that this is exactly how much of the consumer internet worked in the late 80s and 90s: CompuServe only reluctantly added email to its internal messaging and AoL generally preferred to lock down users to its own walled-garden of content rather than having them access the web. Both these networks, once seen as pioneers are now effectively defunct.

When developers choose to lock-in to an ecosystem like Google, they also lock in users. And that’s when innovation dies: users’ choice is restricted, so they demand less (and alternatives don’t get developed). By using it myself, I’m helping depress demand for a good email client that works with multiple providers. That’s not a good thing because it means I’ll have less choice.

Despite email being an inherently tedious form of communication, it’s essential and here to stay. If developers want to play their part in improving email, then it’s not going to be by re-AOLizing the web and locking down to a single provider: it’s going to be by supporting open email platforms that enable a wide range of people to use your product.

As it stands, Mailbox has been a useful so far. But I know my own time with it is limited, as I continue to transition away from closed source, anti-privacy services like Gmail to self-hosted, free and open source alternatives.

And that will be a loss for the Mailbox developers.

Review: Share your food eating habits with Food Feed

/ Josh R / Leave a comment

Food Feed logoBBQ Food by @cubicgarden, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0It’s barbecue season in the UK and, in between the downpours, there’s nothing more satisfying than getting out in the sun and charring some meat or veg.

Unfortunately, like Christmas, this can mean your eating habits suffer. Whilst attending a barbecue chez @cubicgarden last weekend, I discovered an interesting Twitter based app called Food Feed, which bills itself as an easy and simple way to track your food habits.

Using Food Feed is very simple. You just need to go to the Food Feed website and sign-in with your Twitter account. Then all you have to do is follow @having and start tweeting.

By tweeting “@having” at the start of your tweets, Food Feed can aggregate all your food tweets in one place, which means you can find them at foodfeed.us/username (like mine). Adding a picture in to your food tweets can make it more memorable or sum up a large meal!

You can share this public feed with anyone you want – your doctor, nutritionist or even your mother. It’s a great way to link up with other people eating the same kinds of foods for inspiration or, in my case, to improve my eating habits and put all my food tweets into once place. If your friend on Twitter following @having too, they can see your food tweets without it interfering with your wider stream.

Unfortunately, Food Feed doesn’t offer much more than a simple search and aggregation tool. It would be great to see it integrated with an app like Meal Snap that estimates the calories in your meal through a photograph. However, the downside of using Meal Snap is that you have to photo every item of food and the data gets sent to Daily Burn, rather than being quite as simple and easy to share as Food Feed.

Check out Food Feed for free and see if it could be useful for you.