I had been working with my brothers on sgBEAT these past few months, and I had avoided writing about it because we hadn’t gone into public Beta yet.
sgBEAT is essentially a microblogging platform specifically dedicated to Singaporeans, where users can share updates of their lives via the Web or SMS. Another aim of our service is to enhance the way Singaporeans can communicate with one another, especially through this medium without the compromise of the privacy of their mobile number.
An interesting thing is that quite a few people have dismissed us as merely a clone of Twitter, which isn’t what we’ve set out to be. A problem that we’re trying to solve or ease is the way users can communicate with Twitter via their mobile, which currently isn’t available by Twitter in Singapore. There are other means, however none of which (to my knowledge at this point in time) are bi-directional, and one of the things we’re trying to do is to fix that.
We’re implementing bridging from our service to and from Twitter, which would basically allow users to communicate and receive updates from Twitter via our service on to their mobile. But on top of this, we’re trying to create a system which would specifically serve the local community in the context of Singapore, thereby providing a high signal-to-noise ratio for Singaporean users. These signals would be relevant in terms of the latest news and trends, or even common discussion topics like food, sports and the like.
Most of our initial features are indeed similar, but mainly because of the functionality that these features provide, and partly so that adoption would be easier. However, we do have and will be iterating new features, such as MMS support, and this flexibility will hopefully appeal to users looking to get what they want.
Public Beta more or less came over the last weekend, and I’m happy that some users have already started using this service. We’ve been working hard to implement new features and tweak current ones, and ultimately what we hope to deliver to our users is a convenient service and comprehensive platform that they’ll enjoy using on a daily basis.
Regarding my personal involvement in this project, I’ve been responsible for the general design and user interface of the site. I decided against a classic white background Web 2.0 look, and instead went with what one might call a gut feeling with this current design. I understand it doesn’t really appeal to everyone, but right now I still fancy it, and for my part it’s something different from what I’ve done previously.
I still have a lot to learn on web usability and designing interfaces, and the hard way of criticism is probably the best motivation to improve. Another thing I would like to mention is that I chose the colour scheme of red, black, white and grey for a good reason, as they were the original colours of Whisk Technologies.
One way to avoid this design criticism is to let users come up with their own design, and I’ve been busy this past week trying to perfect a Designer Kit which would allow them to do exactly that. Hopefully, there’ll be design enthusiasts among the users willing enough to try it out, and if it’s a success I hope to see a proliferation of personalised pages and most likely the option of themed pages in the future. I’m still taking small steps on this, however, but I’m excited that there is positive design direction that sgBEAT will be heading.
Tags: Design, sgBEAT, Twitter, Whisk Technologies
