@saddington – hind sight is 20/20. If there was a point you could “do over,” what would it be?
— Heather (@_hmig) November 5, 2014
I was asked this about 5 months ago and it was too soon for me to be able to answer the question as it related to this failed project, Pressgram. In many ways it probably still is and yet emotionally I feel that I can say, with confidence, that I have moved on.
Today marks the 2-year (official) anniversary of Pressgram and it is with a very heavy heart that I am announcing that active development on Pressgram is being discontinued. Consequently, I’ll be pulling the app from the Apple Store on 9/11 and shutting things down permanently by the end of this month (9/30).
I have been drafting this announcement post for a long time and had, at one point, a 3,000+ word epic narrative but it just didn’t really make sense as I stood back and looked at it as a whole.
Simply put, there are no words that can adequately describe how I feel about this news.
There are a lot of things happening in the world of Apple right now with the exciting new OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 releases just around the corner.
In addition, Pressgram’s little desktop brother is getting closer and closer to launch and I need to allocate my time and attention there (although a small SSL issue that I just noticed will be fixed shortly for those who have had trouble with Facebook…).
It’s tough to stay focused when you’re a developer. Heck, it’s tough to stay focused doing most anything for that matter. The cost of not being focused is greatly excused and at times overlooked.
In fact, many of us live our lives in a completely un-focused state. Consequently, we will never know what it’s like to give your all to one thing entirely.
If you’ve never heard the term “sherlocked” then here’s your quick primer:
“Sherlocked” means that you’ve developed a product only to have Apple release the same functionality or feature set natively in a system update.
I’ve talked generally about this before in the upcoming iOS 8 update and there are a ton of photo and image editing applications that are collectively groaning as Apple again sherlocks an entire market segment and niche app industry.
I got this feedback this weekend from one of our users:
I’m traveling around Europe right now and am doing a lot of blogging as a photographer and I have to tell you, your app is saving my ass. The ability to post to all of these different sites at once (including my squarespace) is amazing.
You can see some of his photos that he’s taken here and here. I appreciate these small notes in my inbox every once in a while and it reminds me of why I built the app. Thanks Spencer!
I don’t really have a product video for Pressgram although I’ve created a few walkthroughs and promotional videos in the past (a’la Kickstarter, for example).
But I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently since I’m working on one for Pressgram’s desktop brother and companion app, Desk PM.
Here are some examples of great product videos that I’ve been taking a look at and that you might find inspiration from:
Do I have you thinking right now? Are you wondering about who and what is an expert? Are you thinking about what you look for in an expert or what qualifies a person to you as an expert?
These and many more question have come up lately in some conversations with friends on the web and in public. Just recently I talked to a group of business professionals about the term expert and how they define it. I also just recently talked to a team of Doctors about the same thing. So I have some interesting news to write about.
First let me start here. When I was in my senior year of college, and I am going to date myself now, 1976 I had what I considered a forward thinking professor who stated one day that you are only an expert for as long as it takes someone else to think of something that makes them the new expert. Well back then usually you had some time before someone took you over with their thoughts or ideas.
I know as an Investment Banker I never called myself an expert. I was always taught to consider myself a knowledgeable person in a field. I was also told to surround myself with knowledgeable people not experts. When I asked why my Dad and Uncle who were both very wise men said one day you will understand. It did happen one day and I am glad I listened.
Although I thought about it for years why didn’t I want experts? Then I would think back to my college professor and my Dad and Uncle’s talks and remember what they said. Especially my professor who said you’re only an expert until someone new comes along. So my question was why are there all of these so called experts around?
Well now it is 2014 and the same thing is happening. There are experts online, on the street and all around and I can’t figure out where they are all coming from? I know there can’t be that many experts. Go on G+ someday and look at all of the experts about Social Media or SEO or Marketing. I could go on forever and ever and it isn’t just on G+. Facebook, Linkedin, Quora and other social communities. Never mind all of the expert blogs I see daily. It’s truly amazing.
Many will probably get upset with me and I understand that. I know you consider yourselves to be experts in your filed and that’s fine. What I want to know is this. If you are a Social Media expert and you are helping a restaurant with their social media strategy how do you know what they will need if you aren’t an expert in the restaurant field?
Working in social media for a restaurant is different than let’s say a mens clothing store, right? I mean no two businesses are alike just like Doctors say about people. In fact, when I brought this up to my Doctor friends whom I spoke with last week they stated the exact same thing. They are very and or extremely knowledgable in their field. They need to know just their field and how to treat it. Then they have to understand each patient is different.
Back to social media for a minute. So how does an expert in social media work with a restaurant and mens clothing store and know both of those fields as an expert? Maybe it’s more than one client in many different businesses. The thing is it is still the same. Are they an expert in social media in general or all of their clients businesses as they relate to social media> I don’t see the latter happening.
They are an expert in social media and use the same for each business. Is that fair? My thought would be that there are so many social media experts out there for the taking why not be knowledgable in that field? Why not study more and frequently in your clients fields to address their issues? Why not refrain from being an expert when the term won’t fit possibly in 5 minutes after you use it because someone else came along with a new idea on how to do something better?
It’s 2014 and an expert is born every minute if you ask me. What I want to know is if there is an expert born every minute or so where does that leave the last expert? What happened to that expert I was talking to earlier? What if the expert was really a very knowledgeable person whom I want to always use? What if my knowledgeable person is better than an expert because he or she keeps learning and never claims to be an expert knowing they won’t be in 5 minutes or less?
I will always choose a knowledgeable person over and expert. I will always look for the knowledgeable person before the expert and my advice to you is to do the same for better business and living.
Rest in peace Aperture and iPhoto – you were two great apps that made a lot of people very, very happy:
With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.
And iPhoto will be replaced by the new Photos App that’ll be released in conjunction.
Thanks Tina Turner for help with the title, in a small way. I couldn’t resist using some of her words from her song “What’s Love Got To Do With It” for this post. Hope she doesn’t mind?
Have you ever heard the phrase “life sucks then you die?” If you haven’t you just did, but it is something I hear daily from a load of friends and family online and in person. When I hear that phrase I think “what the heck?” Are we really that fed up with our lives or depressed about our lives and why? What is it about that phrase that rings true for so many?
Over the Father’s Day weekend I posed this question to an assortment of friends, family and strangers online to see what kind of results I would get back. The question, which I would really like you to answer if you haven’t already was, when you say life sucks then you die, what are you thinking at that moment?
The answers were a range of emotions that I didn’t expect to hear. Most of the answers were that at that very moment something in their life or the lives of someone they know went bad. It could be a death or illness. Could have been a fight within the family at a holiday as one person told me about or just what started out as a simple misunderstanding grew into a family being disowned.
There were also the people who just felt that life had let them down in general. Life wasn’t turning out like they expected or wanted. There were twists and turns that they weren’t prepared for and never expected. I hear that.
After reading and commenting on the responses I offered these questions. Do you prefer to prosper in life before you nourish or after you nourish someone? Do you want others to prosper from you before they nourish you or after?
Let me explain a little deeper about these questions. Nourishing and prospering either at the hands of others or in helping others can totally determine the type of day or life you are going to have. When I think of all of these Tech Icons out in the world and the money they are making on us I often look at what have they done to nourish me or anyone first. Have you ever done that?
Take Facebook and the Zuck. How has he nourished your life? How has he prospered from you? Prospering doesn’t just mean monetarily either. It could be from information that Facebook has gathered and sold. How about Google, Yahoo and many others.
It isn’t just the Tech world either. It can be in any industry you can think of. What are they or the person who owns the company doing for you before they prosper from you, if anything? Have they made an attempt to get you to follow before prospering? It’s just a matter of life. It’s an order in life that follows the course of karma. No matter how you look at it, it comes back to haunt you at some point. But why let it?
Think about nourishing first in order to prosper later. You may find that prospering later could even be more rewarding. It happened to Patti and I with our diabetes organization and it wasn’t in the form of money. It was in the form of followers to our site at the time. I spent 2 years cultivating contacts and followers without ever asking for anything, including following us. They just followed over time. Then when we decided to really amp up our site we woke up one day 4 weeks later to 3 million followers and hits. I mean let me tell you we were jumping.
Nourishing works. Prospering is a direct result of nourishing. You can’t tell me that when someone talks to you for an extended time and then asks for money it isn’t easier to give it to them than the person that hits you up in 5 minutes or 4 words, “show me the money.”
Let me know about your way of nourishing and if you have done it in the past? Also let me know how you prospered after the fact if that in fact happened.