Amen vs QUOTE.fm
Yesterday I read a tweet, which compared Twitter and QUOTE.fm to Youtube and Vimeo. It said something like: “On Youtube you find all the trash, Vimeo is for the pearls” and it really sums the whole thing up.
Now I want to compare QUOTE.fm to Amen. The two startups aren’t comparable like Vimeo and Youtube, because they don’t share the same business model, but somehow they share a similar vision and aesthetic: simple design, focused functionality.
Secondly both services are somehow hyped. The Amen-hype started even before anyone knew what the startup was about: “two million funding”, “Ashton Kutcher as a Business Angel” were the bullet points which flowed around the internet, but no facts were published. As a result the attention of on-and offline media was quite big. I have to say, that after the big prelaunch hype I forgot about Amen. The more I was happy when I “rediscovered” Amen on the App-Store as one of the recommendations. I instantly loved the neat design of the Amen-App, I also somehow liked the service: review anything (not bound to restaurants / purchases etc) on the most simple and powerful way, call it “the worst” or “the best” person/place/thing. But after a short time of usage, I got annoyed of many things: adding friends which don’t use or don’t have activated facebook-connect isn’t possible; finding other users who post relevant content is hard; there is no search-function; duplicate content falsifies list-results and worst: people posting bullshit. In the end you find an app, which is nice to look at, a service which could be fun and addictive, but which is overall badly implemented and what I think, which was not rethought very well. Sure, most of these facts can and will be fixed, but the fun fact on my side is strongly decreasing.
On the other hand we have QUOTE.fm: in contrast to Amen, the whole process of developing the idea (from the very beginning), until the launch was documented by all involved people. No secrets. This way you could watch the project grew organically and see it finally launch this week. The design of the website is really simple and beautiful, the texts you discover are even better! I have never used a service before, which brought me (without having an account) this much use in such a short time. Because of the snippets of the texts, you get a feeling for the meaning of the upcoming and the intention of the author. From 10 quotes I click on, I read 9 articles until the end, means I really like the subject and style of writing (I usually know after the third word, that a text won’t be readable and interesting for me and skip it), which is a 50 time higher read-rate than I have compared to stupid bit.ly links on Twitter and other services.
To cut a long story short: the quality and added value you get by using QUOTE.fm is incredibly high. Structure and functionality of the website are well thought and when you think of the potential of QUOTE.fm (mobile-app, some kindle(aka upcoming other amazon-products)-integration), I don’t have any concerns we will hear a lot more of the QUOTE.fm boys, which really created a little think tank in Hamburg, and will surely increase the fun and use fact constantly!
