SendSocial sneak peek!
Posted: October 24th, 2009 | Author: marc | Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »What is a launch without a sneak peek into what it’s all about? Exactly!
We’re very excited to see how SendSocial will be received by you guys, and we simply can’t wait to launch this. As much as we can’t wait to hear your opinion, receive your feedback and respond to your criticism, as much do we want to get everything in place before launch. Having this in mind, we still want to show you a bit of the app behind this service, which is why we thought this post would be appropriate. Below you’ll be introduced to a few features and design implementations, which we’ve passionately worked on for the last couple of weeks. We strongly believe in the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) and have tried to design with that written on post-its everywhere… almost true.
Sending a request with SendSocial involves no complexity at all. It’s pretty straight forward; you fill out two required fields, and by the click of a button, you’re done. As you might expect, we provide examples and explanations of what to write, when to take action and where to do it, through the whole process of sending and receiving parcels.
As a user logged in via Twitter, we could imagine you wanting to know, what kind of messages we send to your friends from your account. Therefore, we’ve added a tweet live preview, from which you can see how the message, which will be sent to your recipient, will look like. This ensures that we won’t send anything in your name without your approval.
With SendSocial it is possible to have several addresses linked to your account. Imagine that you normally send packages from your home address, but would like to receive packages while you’re at work. This is no big deal, and you can easily choose whether myHermes should collect or deliver parcels, at any of your addresses.
Having used SendSocial for a while, we thought it would be useful with a place where all requests (accepted or not) would be available. The “History”-page is the place where you’ll find all request-activity for your account. You’ll be able to filter requests by date and sent or recevied – and sort by item, recipient, request date, progress and status.
Even if you want to see more (and I would like to show you more), I think this will be it for now; just to keep your (and our) excitement alive. I’ve heard though… it’s still a rumor…that another member of the SendSocial team will take you on a tour through the system, at some point before launch! So, you might want to keep an eye out for that. As usual we always welcome comments, suggestions and whatever you might have of thoughts about this (ad)venture.
Thanks for reading, take care – @marcfalk
Sorry to be pernickety but there’s a typo in the title. Should be “sneak peek”.
True Ben, thanks for pointing it out
What is the point of sendsocial? So far as I can tell, people pay you to contact someone on their behalf to ask for address info. Why would anyone use this service? Why would they not just send the person an email themselves and ask for the address?
Thanks for your comments. There are a number of scenarios where you might want to use SendSocial:
1. I want to send flowers to @Bonnie_Greer after seeing her show in the West End. The likelihood of her giving me her address is very slim, but SendSocial enables her to receive gifts from fans whilst still retaining her privacy – we give both senders and recipients absolute security.
2. I want to send a friend a surprise, but only have their email address or Twitter ID. It wouldn’t be a surprise if I went and asked for their address. Not only this, but sending via SendSocial simplifies the whole process of sending and receiving items, and is actually faster and easier for senders to use, regardless of whether or not you know your recipient’s address.
SendSocial can act as your address book, so if you’re constantly moving around, you don’t need to be worried about things being sent to the wrong address. It also means that, if a friend only has your home address, and you know that you’re going to be at work, you can choose where you want it to be delivered.
3. As a business person, I want to send a corporate gift to the CEO of a company, but I can’t access their details. SendSocial lets me reach them.
Remember as well, that what we’ve just launched is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible with SendSocial, and, if you can’t see any uses for our service just yet, I’m sure that you will soon.