"My Tree" - the circle is expanding!
I have long wanted to introduce the startup community that we are engaged in, but somehow I considered it unprepared and unfinished. But yesterday, after the next release, in which we presented to the world, perhaps, our main feature today, and we very much hope that this feature will get the prefix killer in the future :-) I decided that I should not postpone the matter further and declare yourself publicly! So - My Tree .
In this post I will describe a retrospective of the project My Tree . From the moment we started, ending with what we have today and briefly tell you what we do and what we plan.
')
My Tree service was originally conceived as a service for creating family trees by users, i.e. social network of a family nature, where the main place was allocated to the user's communication in the family circle.
Recently there have been a lot of similar services on the Internet, both on RU-net and on foreign websites. By the way, they wrote about some such projects even in Habré.
And the mechanisms for building and rendering Family Trees for these services are very similar.
This is, for example, the family tree of Homer Simpson on My Tree site:
As a rule, all these projects have one big problem - after the creation of their family tree, users leave the site, because The basic idea of ​​a genealogical social network is related relationships, and they, unlike friendship ties, are updated quite rarely, and the first thing a person does when a child is born is unlikely to go into the social network to add his child to the family tree.
Different projects solve this problem in different ways, some introduce a huge number of teasers and auxiliary chips (photo albums, celebrity trees, celebrity similarities from photos, automatic recognition of a user in a photo, etc., etc.) sometimes these chips become so much that the main direction of the site is hardly visible. Others hold contests to lure people to a resource, prompting them to be active on the site, handing out buns for it (virtual, and sometimes quite real). But the lack of all contests is that they cannot last forever. Although holding contests on the site is a very interesting element in attracting users, especially if it is supported by advertising (banner, because the CTR of well-made banners with teasers - “get a prize” is very high; contextual). Sometimes such bursts of activity allow you to better understand what exactly the audience of your site wants. But I can tell you about this (if you are interested) in the next post.
Therefore, on sites of this nature, as a rule, it is easy to bring the user, but to keep is incredibly difficult, because the user initially forms a stereotype about the narrow specialization of the site, and the fact that this site is not for communicating with friends, for this the user has VKontakte, classmates, facebook, my circle (underline).
We also followed the path of introducing a new auxiliary functionality, periodically reinforcing it with competitions. During this time we added the following auxiliary functionality:
Held a competition which was the invitation to the greatest number of active friends and relatives.
But it gave a temporary effect, and sometimes did not give at all.
Therefore, we began to think about the qualitative changes in the resource ... About what can break the stereotype of the users' mindset, what can help us keep the user on the site.
After much deliberation, we came to the conclusion that such a feature could be - the “Tree of Friends”.
Friendship is a very dynamic relationship, in our countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus) many do not know their pedigrees (the reason is difficult historical periods), and friends are hard to forget :-)
After that, the question arose about the visualization of these relationships. We looked at the various schemes available, such as visualizing friends on Facebook , and offered our own options, sketching. But at the end they stopped at this option:
The tree of friends is viewed from the user who is in the center of the circle.
When you click on your friend - opens his tree of friends.
With a double click - you go to the tree of friends of the person who clicked twice.
If you hold down the left mouse button on one of your friends, a menu will open for communication with this person.
Because when a user adds a person as a friend, indicates how he knows him (Friend, Colleague, Relative, I do not know this person, Friend of my friend) - we apply filters according to the character of acquaintances to the trees of friends. In this picture you can see all the colleagues of the user.
For a quick search for friends, a dynamic filter is used by the name and last name of the friends of users.
I do not want to turn this post into a manual on the tree of friends, despite the fact that it is already here and is written in our corporate blog . If it will be interesting - go read. There we write all the news on the project.
I just wanted to say that the implementation of this functionality is not trivial, since Initially, we designed it taking into account high loads and scalability (since we plan to implement it in high-load projects), and maybe in one of the following posts I will describe this architecture, again if it is interesting to someone.
Well, at the very end I wanted to thank the guys - mente (Sasha), who was developing and designing the Friends Tree and many other functionalities on the site, smartov (Alexey), who is the author of many useful features and ideas, and Nikita, who is not a Habra-user but is a very good person and flash programmer.
If you like a topic or an idea - please do not cheat them with karma :-)
UPD: It is very interesting to hear your opinions and feedback on both the idea and its implementation, as well as your opinions on where to grow further and what to try :-)
UUPD: If you are interested in some moments. Whether it is software implementation, project architecture, ways to monetize, development history - leave your wishes in the comments. If there are a lot of these, I will write a separate topic, if there is little, I will answer directly in the comments.
UUUPD: And the last. You can see and “play around” with my tree of friends on the website moederevo.com, I made it open for viewing, but for this you need to register with us on the service.
Thank you all in advance.
My Tree
In this post I will describe a retrospective of the project My Tree . From the moment we started, ending with what we have today and briefly tell you what we do and what we plan.
')
My Tree service was originally conceived as a service for creating family trees by users, i.e. social network of a family nature, where the main place was allocated to the user's communication in the family circle.
Recently there have been a lot of similar services on the Internet, both on RU-net and on foreign websites. By the way, they wrote about some such projects even in Habré.
And the mechanisms for building and rendering Family Trees for these services are very similar.
This is, for example, the family tree of Homer Simpson on My Tree site:
As a rule, all these projects have one big problem - after the creation of their family tree, users leave the site, because The basic idea of ​​a genealogical social network is related relationships, and they, unlike friendship ties, are updated quite rarely, and the first thing a person does when a child is born is unlikely to go into the social network to add his child to the family tree.
Different projects solve this problem in different ways, some introduce a huge number of teasers and auxiliary chips (photo albums, celebrity trees, celebrity similarities from photos, automatic recognition of a user in a photo, etc., etc.) sometimes these chips become so much that the main direction of the site is hardly visible. Others hold contests to lure people to a resource, prompting them to be active on the site, handing out buns for it (virtual, and sometimes quite real). But the lack of all contests is that they cannot last forever. Although holding contests on the site is a very interesting element in attracting users, especially if it is supported by advertising (banner, because the CTR of well-made banners with teasers - “get a prize” is very high; contextual). Sometimes such bursts of activity allow you to better understand what exactly the audience of your site wants. But I can tell you about this (if you are interested) in the next post.
Therefore, on sites of this nature, as a rule, it is easy to bring the user, but to keep is incredibly difficult, because the user initially forms a stereotype about the narrow specialization of the site, and the fact that this site is not for communicating with friends, for this the user has VKontakte, classmates, facebook, my circle (underline).
We also followed the path of introducing a new auxiliary functionality, periodically reinforcing it with competitions. During this time we added the following auxiliary functionality:
- Various mailings and notifications. We have a notice of users about events from the family calendar (Birthdays of Relatives, DR friends, Dates of weddings, Events, dates of death)
- Ad section
- Lists of all surnames
- Family calendar
- Introduced the display of network user activity
Held a competition which was the invitation to the greatest number of active friends and relatives.
But it gave a temporary effect, and sometimes did not give at all.
Therefore, we began to think about the qualitative changes in the resource ... About what can break the stereotype of the users' mindset, what can help us keep the user on the site.
After much deliberation, we came to the conclusion that such a feature could be - the “Tree of Friends”.
Friendship is a very dynamic relationship, in our countries (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus) many do not know their pedigrees (the reason is difficult historical periods), and friends are hard to forget :-)
After that, the question arose about the visualization of these relationships. We looked at the various schemes available, such as visualizing friends on Facebook , and offered our own options, sketching. But at the end they stopped at this option:
The tree of friends is viewed from the user who is in the center of the circle.
When you click on your friend - opens his tree of friends.
With a double click - you go to the tree of friends of the person who clicked twice.
If you hold down the left mouse button on one of your friends, a menu will open for communication with this person.
Because when a user adds a person as a friend, indicates how he knows him (Friend, Colleague, Relative, I do not know this person, Friend of my friend) - we apply filters according to the character of acquaintances to the trees of friends. In this picture you can see all the colleagues of the user.
For a quick search for friends, a dynamic filter is used by the name and last name of the friends of users.
I do not want to turn this post into a manual on the tree of friends, despite the fact that it is already here and is written in our corporate blog . If it will be interesting - go read. There we write all the news on the project.
I just wanted to say that the implementation of this functionality is not trivial, since Initially, we designed it taking into account high loads and scalability (since we plan to implement it in high-load projects), and maybe in one of the following posts I will describe this architecture, again if it is interesting to someone.
Well, at the very end I wanted to thank the guys - mente (Sasha), who was developing and designing the Friends Tree and many other functionalities on the site, smartov (Alexey), who is the author of many useful features and ideas, and Nikita, who is not a Habra-user but is a very good person and flash programmer.
If you like a topic or an idea - please do not cheat them with karma :-)
UPD: It is very interesting to hear your opinions and feedback on both the idea and its implementation, as well as your opinions on where to grow further and what to try :-)
UUPD: If you are interested in some moments. Whether it is software implementation, project architecture, ways to monetize, development history - leave your wishes in the comments. If there are a lot of these, I will write a separate topic, if there is little, I will answer directly in the comments.
UUUPD: And the last. You can see and “play around” with my tree of friends on the website moederevo.com, I made it open for viewing, but for this you need to register with us on the service.
Thank you all in advance.
My Tree
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/71798/
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