Corvus Consulting

Newly-launched Fflick taps into Twitter to get opinions on movies, most notably from your friends. It’s a neat idea and a good-looking build that advances the idea of Twitter as a platform. It also makes one big mistake by co-opting people’s identities and using them as shills to grow the perceived community size.

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If you’ve been in software and website development long enough to see a few releases, this scenario is likely familiar:

It’s a few days from launch, or just around sign-off on a major design component. Someone on the project has an itch and reaches for external feedback, putting part or all of the design in front of new eyes. Then they ask, innocently enough, “What do you think of this?”

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Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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I’ve taken more than a couple shots at RIM on this blog, in part due to being a bit of a fanboy for the iPhone, and more for what I’ve seen as a lot of old school thinking about product development and design. But if I want to be fair, I have to give RIM props when I see what I think are good moves. Today I found just such an opportunity.

PCWorld says…

The BlackBerry swept the enterprise mobile market largely on the strength of push, which delivers e-mail messages and other content to the handset in the background as soon they arrive and can notify the user immediately. On Monday, RIM gave developers of consumer software a push API (application programming interface) for creating applications that could include Web-based e-mail and other tools.

That’s smart, because reliable push-notification is something that Apple tried to copy in the iPhone but has had all kinds of trouble with (recalling the MobileMe launch and the year-long delay to open a push service that third-party apps can use to deliver notifications from the background, where they’re (quite rightly) not allowed to run.

RIM is playing on their strengths rather than trying to chase what Apple is doing better, like a touchscreen experience. They’re also learning quickly that opening up the platform will let others help build their success. It’s refreshing to see from a company that was having a hard time breaking out of older thinking.