Emojli: how we accidentally made the application and why we no longer want to do it
Tom Scott and Matt Gray launched IM, in which all communication, including logins, is conducted only with the help of emoji . “Not a word. No spam. Only Emoji. ”What came of it, and why you shouldn’t make your own proposal in the video and retelling under the cut.
Tom: So, we were in Westfield in Stratford, London, in this abyss of consumerism, sat on a bench after a long day, and Matt had the idea of an emoji messenger. But strangely, no one has yet done this, although everyone is talking about Emoji after Unicode announced support for a new set of icons. Now in unicode there will be a “Spock gesture”
. And Yo recently came out, and how these ideas are not connected in other minds is unclear.
We thought it would be easy. This is just IM, nothing special either in the backend or in the frontend, we'll do this week. Yeah ... In general, we did not do this in a week, and I riveted a simple page with registration of logins — in emoji, of course — and sending an alert by email: “Thank you, we will contact you.” And we thought that everything was fine, nobody would pay attention, we would say that it was a joke and everyone would forget everything.
Matt: Tom and I, as we usually do, uploaded a video on YouTube about it. And a few people saw him. In short, in a couple of days we had 70,000 logins reserved. Seventy thousand. And all because of a little stupid idea on Westfield's bench.
Tom: And the most interesting is the logins. For example, on instagram my login is tomscotttt, and I got rid of it easily. With Emoji, this will not work, because you can not type your name, ... although some still managed. Emoji has blood type icons, these are already A, B, and O. There are characters like D and M that ADAM gives. And there's $ there. It turns out BOOB $. We accidentally launched an emoji spelling contest.
Matt: And we thought it would be nice to put an email on the page, in case people have any questions. Never do that. Hundreds and thousands of letters "I tried to register as, it does not work, why?"
Tom: BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS ALREADY TAKEN IT! There are only five hundred characters in Emoji, you have to use more than one!
Matt: We sent hundreds of letters saying "Use more than one emoji" and at least five "No, the login must consist of emoji." As a result, a small stupid idea on the bench turned into a work of technical support of a single registration form.
Tom: And we had to make an application. I am a professional web developer, I have years of development behind me, who can guess what I wrote a backend on? PHP!
Matt: And I did the front end. I am a broadcast engineer, I am not programming, I made a couple of web pages. Guess what I was doing the frontend? HTML + CSS + JavaScript!
Tom: The question arises why we have not released a web application, which, in principle, it is - there are many browsers, and none of them support emoji. At all. And since we touched on this topic ... iOS supports Emoji, even very well. Android ... so-so. Windows Phone ... not at all, because Windows Phone uses IE, which does not support emoji.
JavaScript does not handle Emoji very well, it considers them to be two different characters. You tried..? If I now say "MySQL and Unicode" ..? * audience laughter * Who guesses how I made sure that the data, which, by the way, are sent well from the frontend, will not be broken when sent to the database and back? Keep in mind that I did all this on a bunch of PHP + MySQL. Base64!
And yes, we had to register under the law on the protection of user data. Registration cost £ 35!
Matt: And all because of a little idea on a bench near the mall. In general, we used what we owned to finish it all as soon as possible. Honestly, we did not strive for quality.
Tom: All went a month.
Matt: Even more.
Tom: And today it is already launched, we launched it yesterday, that is, yesterday Apple allowed Emojli in the App Store. I don’t want to say that Apple poorly moderates applications, but the whole process took eleven minutes from them, and they didn’t check that much.
Matt: At ten o'clock at midnight we received the email "In Processing". Panic, nerves, adrenaline! Midnight. "Prepared in the App Store." And we sent it in a week.
Tom: And what is most interesting, the first email came ten minutes before the announced launch date. I'm not saying that it lay in a pile of applications all week, until someone found it, “Oh, they have to run tomorrow, people, ..”, although it probably was so.
Matt: And some at this time decided that we were a startup, including newspapers.
Tom: If ten years ago you said “They wrote about us at Time,” it would be really impressive. Today, Time is just BuzzFeed, which refuses to admit it. To get an interview in Time, just send them the text, because "OMG, content, you can use it!".
Matt: I don’t understand how today two white middle-class men can have an idea and not be a startup. We just did a funny thing.
Tom: We look like guys who are waiting for giant investments, like two techno-bro assholes in T-shirts that run apps because they make a lot of money, but ... no, we just had a stupid idea. The press does not agree with this, as well as one investor, who recently contacted us by email, and, apparently, we will have to get in touch with them once.
Matt: To summarize. A stupid idea that we thought would end quickly, for which we do not have free time, for which no one pays us and for which we spent our own money ... It’s easy to understand how much we want to continue.
Tom: Not really. But it works, and works well. A decent amount of people already use it. We sent 70,000 letters to people who reserved their logins. Right from here. The problem is ... If you send 70,000 letters to people who have Twitter, they will write something like "My login * eggplant * * is eighteen and older *" - and this is the real login ... And we thought that this application is impossible to hang 18+, with emoji just can not ..! According to the law on the protection of users' data, it is necessary to compile a list of things that can be stored on the server and show that the list does not contain sensitive information. And as an example of this, they cite sexual orientation. The same can not be in Emoji, I thought ... In general, there is an emoji with two men holding hands.
Matt: But the problem is that people do not yet know how to communicate using emoji.
Tom: Well, how to say, my friend received a message like "* a cup of tea *?" And answered "", this is considered.
Matt: The basis is laid, but it is worth writing to someone outside the circle of acquaintances, as no one understands what you meant by these small pictures, which really mean nothing, and the conversation is somewhat crushed. Some tried to interview us in this way. They sent us a bunch of Emoji, we did not understand anything, tried to guess, sent them a bunch of Emoji in response, they also did not understand anything, but they published it all.
Tom: Yes, we have not mentioned this yet: a month has passed between the announcement and the launch. During this month, two clones appeared, one of which was called Emojli. We wrote to them: “Guys, you use the same name as we did, registered the domain three weeks later and started Twitter emojli with rubbish at the end. Have you not noticed us? ”They replied:“ No, we have been thinking about it for a long time ”. They had 21 five-star reviews in one sentence each, and they all suddenly disappeared, but they are still ahead of us on the AppStore and it just pisses me off! And we still receive letters about their application! "Where to unlock the login?" - "This is not the application." "I can not send a message to a friend", - "Other application".
Matt: Don't make apps.
Tom: In general, this is our main message. No economy, make money on it. There is no support either.
Matt: And they also send us letters "the application does not work in iOS 6". I ran the app in iOS 6. And you know what? Does not work. So I had to put a tick "not for iOS 6". I spent a month on this crap. Enough
Tom: I do not want to seem ungrateful ... A lot of people have registered, we have made an application, great, ... and now it hangs like a stone on our neck.
Tom: So, we were in Westfield in Stratford, London, in this abyss of consumerism, sat on a bench after a long day, and Matt had the idea of an emoji messenger. But strangely, no one has yet done this, although everyone is talking about Emoji after Unicode announced support for a new set of icons. Now in unicode there will be a “Spock gesture”
. And Yo recently came out, and how these ideas are not connected in other minds is unclear.We thought it would be easy. This is just IM, nothing special either in the backend or in the frontend, we'll do this week. Yeah ... In general, we did not do this in a week, and I riveted a simple page with registration of logins — in emoji, of course — and sending an alert by email: “Thank you, we will contact you.” And we thought that everything was fine, nobody would pay attention, we would say that it was a joke and everyone would forget everything.
Matt: Tom and I, as we usually do, uploaded a video on YouTube about it. And a few people saw him. In short, in a couple of days we had 70,000 logins reserved. Seventy thousand. And all because of a little stupid idea on Westfield's bench.
Tom: And the most interesting is the logins. For example, on instagram my login is tomscotttt, and I got rid of it easily. With Emoji, this will not work, because you can not type your name, ... although some still managed. Emoji has blood type icons, these are already A, B, and O. There are characters like D and M that ADAM gives. And there's $ there. It turns out BOOB $. We accidentally launched an emoji spelling contest.
Matt: And we thought it would be nice to put an email on the page, in case people have any questions. Never do that. Hundreds and thousands of letters "I tried to register as, it does not work, why?"
Tom: BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS ALREADY TAKEN IT! There are only five hundred characters in Emoji, you have to use more than one!
Matt: We sent hundreds of letters saying "Use more than one emoji" and at least five "No, the login must consist of emoji." As a result, a small stupid idea on the bench turned into a work of technical support of a single registration form.
Tom: And we had to make an application. I am a professional web developer, I have years of development behind me, who can guess what I wrote a backend on? PHP!
Matt: And I did the front end. I am a broadcast engineer, I am not programming, I made a couple of web pages. Guess what I was doing the frontend? HTML + CSS + JavaScript!
Tom: The question arises why we have not released a web application, which, in principle, it is - there are many browsers, and none of them support emoji. At all. And since we touched on this topic ... iOS supports Emoji, even very well. Android ... so-so. Windows Phone ... not at all, because Windows Phone uses IE, which does not support emoji.
JavaScript does not handle Emoji very well, it considers them to be two different characters. You tried..? If I now say "MySQL and Unicode" ..? * audience laughter * Who guesses how I made sure that the data, which, by the way, are sent well from the frontend, will not be broken when sent to the database and back? Keep in mind that I did all this on a bunch of PHP + MySQL. Base64!
And yes, we had to register under the law on the protection of user data. Registration cost £ 35!
Matt: And all because of a little idea on a bench near the mall. In general, we used what we owned to finish it all as soon as possible. Honestly, we did not strive for quality.
Tom: All went a month.
Matt: Even more.
Tom: And today it is already launched, we launched it yesterday, that is, yesterday Apple allowed Emojli in the App Store. I don’t want to say that Apple poorly moderates applications, but the whole process took eleven minutes from them, and they didn’t check that much.
Matt: At ten o'clock at midnight we received the email "In Processing". Panic, nerves, adrenaline! Midnight. "Prepared in the App Store." And we sent it in a week.
Tom: And what is most interesting, the first email came ten minutes before the announced launch date. I'm not saying that it lay in a pile of applications all week, until someone found it, “Oh, they have to run tomorrow, people, ..”, although it probably was so.
Matt: And some at this time decided that we were a startup, including newspapers.
Tom: If ten years ago you said “They wrote about us at Time,” it would be really impressive. Today, Time is just BuzzFeed, which refuses to admit it. To get an interview in Time, just send them the text, because "OMG, content, you can use it!".
Matt: I don’t understand how today two white middle-class men can have an idea and not be a startup. We just did a funny thing.
Tom: We look like guys who are waiting for giant investments, like two techno-bro assholes in T-shirts that run apps because they make a lot of money, but ... no, we just had a stupid idea. The press does not agree with this, as well as one investor, who recently contacted us by email, and, apparently, we will have to get in touch with them once.
Matt: To summarize. A stupid idea that we thought would end quickly, for which we do not have free time, for which no one pays us and for which we spent our own money ... It’s easy to understand how much we want to continue.
Tom: Not really. But it works, and works well. A decent amount of people already use it. We sent 70,000 letters to people who reserved their logins. Right from here. The problem is ... If you send 70,000 letters to people who have Twitter, they will write something like "My login * eggplant * * is eighteen and older *" - and this is the real login ... And we thought that this application is impossible to hang 18+, with emoji just can not ..! According to the law on the protection of users' data, it is necessary to compile a list of things that can be stored on the server and show that the list does not contain sensitive information. And as an example of this, they cite sexual orientation. The same can not be in Emoji, I thought ... In general, there is an emoji with two men holding hands.
Matt: But the problem is that people do not yet know how to communicate using emoji.
Tom: Well, how to say, my friend received a message like "* a cup of tea *?" And answered "", this is considered.
Matt: The basis is laid, but it is worth writing to someone outside the circle of acquaintances, as no one understands what you meant by these small pictures, which really mean nothing, and the conversation is somewhat crushed. Some tried to interview us in this way. They sent us a bunch of Emoji, we did not understand anything, tried to guess, sent them a bunch of Emoji in response, they also did not understand anything, but they published it all.
Tom: Yes, we have not mentioned this yet: a month has passed between the announcement and the launch. During this month, two clones appeared, one of which was called Emojli. We wrote to them: “Guys, you use the same name as we did, registered the domain three weeks later and started Twitter emojli with rubbish at the end. Have you not noticed us? ”They replied:“ No, we have been thinking about it for a long time ”. They had 21 five-star reviews in one sentence each, and they all suddenly disappeared, but they are still ahead of us on the AppStore and it just pisses me off! And we still receive letters about their application! "Where to unlock the login?" - "This is not the application." "I can not send a message to a friend", - "Other application".
Matt: Don't make apps.
Tom: In general, this is our main message. No economy, make money on it. There is no support either.
Matt: And they also send us letters "the application does not work in iOS 6". I ran the app in iOS 6. And you know what? Does not work. So I had to put a tick "not for iOS 6". I spent a month on this crap. Enough
Tom: I do not want to seem ungrateful ... A lot of people have registered, we have made an application, great, ... and now it hangs like a stone on our neck.
')
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/235375/
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