Eli Gratz

This past Friday I made a simple project called HomeScreenShot.  It’s a project to collect mobile homescreen screenshots.  That’s it.

Why?

A homescreen says a lot about you.  The mobile is the most intimate screen a person has.  It’s always in your pocket.  It gets your attention if you have any spare second.  Showing others how you customize your most private screen, what you use most and taking a snapshot of that to share reveals a lot about someone.

This generation’s most personal artifact is held on mobile…so this provides insight into people/strangers minds and habits in a unique way.

How?

Just take a screenshot from your mobile (easy on iPhone and WebOS, easy on rooted Android, and app otherwise) and upload it to homescreenshot.com/submit

Then what?

I’ll post a few everyday, and you can start to see what your friends are using, and what their screen looks like. 

Who cares?

It’s something that we see everyday, and really tells a story.  I’ll add a few posts here and on homescreenshot.com talking about what a homescreen tells about the poster.

Next?

From the Wheat Thins YouTube Page there’s a video of a guy being given headphones after he tweeted about Wheat Things and @crunchiscalling: 

The Wheat Thins showed a user named Timmy Parker who wrote this.

The Real @timmyparker - a 25-year-old from Chicago seemingly uninterested in Wheat Thins (but congrats on the new job!)

Okay, no big deal to fake that twitter users talk about wheat thins, or that magically a group in a yellow can shows up to impress you with your problems, but it’s not even a browser…it looks more like a powerpoint slide (see below) and you took a real dude’s identity and used it in a fake commercial.  

@TimmyParker - I think it’s time to get paid, or settle for a pallet of wheat thins…either way.

I love Groupon  I always think about “What’s a better business model than that?”…nothing.  Selling coupons, holding cash until redeemed and having a 50% margin on sales made on items they don’t make in return for offline foot traffic is about as good as it gets.  A 12 million-person email list doesn’t hurt either. 

But with 500 clones and growing around the world, how can they stay fresh, leverage their scale and stay close to their roots?  G-Team?  Deal Personalization? Neighborhood level deals?  Nope.

I call it Groupon Xtreme. 

Groupon Xtreme would be an amazing deal…not 50-60% off a high margin item, but a really insane, extreme deal.  It wouldn’t have this “Deal Tips with 50 purchases” minimum, it would use that mechanism to drive true social sharing/evangelism to make the deal more exciting, genuinely at risk and also more popular.

Imagine $1 Burritos at Chipotle (usually a $6.50 value) if 500,000 are bought…today.  That’s a mission! 

This would be retweeted, re-tumbled, bought up by the 10s and have friends calling their moms to order extra for them.  The social spread that this would create would be enormous and the best part is that the deal is genuinely at risk….it just might not happen.  The only way to make sure it does is to buckle-down and share it with people who would consume it.  This is an easy example because it’s a popular restaurant and a great value, but it’s a half million units to move.

There excitement vs. just an email with a good deal.  Scaled up or down for local or national offerings, it would bring a much larger social experiment into play, and one that would make Groupon, the brand and the fans more engaged with the success and sales of the Groupon.

Just a thought…

Love, love, love this overview.  If someone can create a product that attacks even half of these problems *cough*Google*cough*, I’d switch from Facebook/linkedin/twitter etc…as long as my friends/associates/relatives/met-onces/buddys can come too.

More than one kind of connection, more than one type of profile to describe you…

The Real Life Social Network v2 View more documents from Paul Adams.