Crowdsourcing, Doritos Style

My husband brought home a mysterious-looking bag of Doritos last night. Mysterious because it isn’t labeled. It’s in black packaging, with the label x-13D and a write-in label with instructions to go to their website to “name the flavor.”

Crowdsourcing, I immediately thought. And I just gotta say, a really cool one at it.

So I went to the website to participate, thinking all I had to do was write it in. N’uh. There’s a ton more to do there. All in the name of crowdsourcing.

Not only can you participate in the x-13D experiment by naming the flavor and generating the ad for it (the ad generator launches 5.28), there are other things you can do, like “fight for the flavor,” where you can rate your favorite Doritos flavor (it isn’t Web2.0 if you can’t rate it, no?), and “crash the Superbowl.”

It has a Second Life feel to it but a much controlled environment. But it also isn’t crowdsourcing Dell style where you just make your suggestion, and you get rewarded by seeing a product you will actually want to buy out in the market. There aren’t any prizes, per se (or at least I didn’t see any), but I was definitely rewarded by the awesome user experience starting from ease of use to cool graphics, to knowing that your suggestion just might be on the Doritos label. Kinda like your kid appearing on the Life cereal box, I guess.

Tidbits

There are things I want to write about but feel I can’t until because everytime I start a post I always end up spending more time than I wanted. And the list keeps getting longer and longer and well…I don’t want to lose them.

So here are bullet points for now, until maybe the weekend…provided of course that this boy and his brother go to bed early and leave mommy with some blogging time.

• Wridea. How much I loved it at first and how I eventually forgot about it.

• My ZohoMail wishlist.

• Applications that I don’t want to tell anyone else about because I reaaaaaally want to keep them for myself.
• How excited I am to try out Zude. Because that’s just what I need…another profile to manage.
• How I don’t get UrbanSeeder (perhaps because I am not part of the target market?).

• My Wufoo wishlist.

And some thoughts in my head that I’d like to open up for discussion (I hear crickets…) because I will probably end up writing an incohesive post about them:

• Difficulty of convincing the enterprise to switch — Web2.0 services and applications are mostly free and low-cost, but cost-savings isn’t enough to switch. How would you address questions on reliability (“it’s free/low-cost”…”they might go out of business”…”it’s too new”…”what happens to our data if they go away?”) and security (“it’s web-based,” “it’s managed by someone else,”) ?
• I love it that an individual user can directly impact how an application/service is developed in the Web2.0 space through blogging and other communications and how quickly these companies adopt new direction based on user feedback. Not a question, just a statement, I guess…but your thoughts on this are welcome anyway.

Lisa out.

Invite me. Please?

Because I’m a true Digerati Wannabe, invitations to try out new things (apps on beta, private beta, double-secret beta beta, alpha, kappa or whatever hip Web2.0 term you want to use) never fail to excite me. And when I get one, I make sure to show it off and blog about it.

Now. I even though I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about, I really don’t want to give anyone the impression that what you see here is unbiased. If you give me an invitation to a private beta, you’ve already put me in a good mood so guess what. I’m probably going to like it, unless it just really sucks.

<shamelessbegging>

So. If you want to read about someone getting all happy and excited about your new web application, send me an invite.

</shamlessbegging>

That’s not to say, however, that I promise to write only good things. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Here are things that I am mostly interested in:

Business [social] networking — Apps that can help me connect with other people in a professional setting.

Mobile — I have a dumb phone. If your web app can turn it into a smart phone, I’d definitely want to hear about it.

Mobile Messaging — SMS alerts. I’m in Marketing. Can your app help me reach a bunch of people on their cell phones with just one click?

GTD, productivity, workflow — Can you help me be more productive? Can you help me organize the million things I have to do in a day?

Content Distribution, publishing – I have a bunch of cool things I want to tell people about. Can your app help me get the message out? (RSS, publishing tools, etc)

Search — Can you help me find information so I don’t have to fish the wide Google ocean?

Metrics — I like measuring things. Sitemeter excites me.

Tools – Again. I’m a digerati wannabe. I’m not technical. Can your app help me do cool things without me having to write a single line of code?

Business applications — I have a day job. And I like playing hero at work. You know the type. I love coming up with solutions and improvements to existing processes. Can your app make me look good at work? Email me if you need specifics of what I’m looking for.

I have a short attention span, not to mention I don’t have all day to try out stuff. If I don’t “get it” in two minutes, I won’t sit there to try to figure it out, because if I’m having a hard time “getting it,” I’ll probably have a tough time explaining it to everyone else anyway.

<shamelessbegging>

So please? Send me invites?

</shamelessbegging>

Urbanseeder

I just got my invite for the private beta of UrbanSeeder.  It looks really interesting so far.

Urbanseeder lets people communicate privately and anonymously with each other. The “seeder” can plant “seeds.” Seeds are unique urls that basically acts like a message board. The idea is to help users connect with people they meet in public spaces and invite them to a private conversation by the use of these seeds.

To illustrate, here’s a seed that I planted, which you can follow:

http://urbanseeder.com/459316432 

I know this is meant to be a flirting kind of an application but I bet there are other productive uses for it..I just can’t think of them right now. Come to think of it, this is kinda how blogs started, right? We were all anonymous at one point point in our blogging lives, no?