friday blog

After over 25 months since the first launch, we're finally shedding our beta tag. In fact, we're putting on a new shiny suit. We didn't post an update for friday last couple of months, it was obviously because we were moving around too many things. After weeks on internal testing and phased roll out, today the app is open for all in the Play store. So what is different?

Instincts

Since for ever, friday was about the timeline. But we realized that along with seeing what happened, it would be fun to show you what is next. So we're introducing the new home screen, which has a range of cards including your travels, meetings, people, places etc.

Travels

Friday now identifies where you are and where you were. Your travels and mode of transport. It condenses this into a nice travelogue everyday.

Summary

Friday also shows you a daily summary card, with people, places and events.

Music

We are introducing a new min-player inside the friday app, which will play your favorite songs based on your mood. 

Friday Pro

We're introducing subscription plans for friday. For as little as 99c you can back up your whole life onto our cloud. We back up all photos in full resolution, provide you options to restore you calls/texts and contacts. And more features are coming soon. 

Why subscriptions?

We will always have the free version with all the core features intact.

We will never sell your information to any advertisers.

We're very clear on these two points. At the same time we're incurring huge amounts on server costs for running syncs and machine learning engines, apart from storing all your data. This is why we are introducing the subscriptions. Our biggest cost today is storing full resolution photos, which contributes to over 25 Terabytes already, so we have decided to keep it a paid feature. Also, we are adding Pro specific features like backup and restore, apart from the ones which we will introduce soon. The free version will always provide you the bare essentials , but we would be very happy if you subscribe and decide to support us. We have kept the pricing to the minimum allowed by Google Play Store. 

When I say "the phone" I mean the phone app in today's context. We have smartphones, feature phones, touch phones, QWERTY Phones, iPhones, Windows Phones and what not. But all of them share one common primitive app, which is the Phone Dialer app. The same list of recent calls, which we name as Call History.

Call History sucks!

Call history is like a Vestigial organ, I don't understand its purpose. It is meant to quicken the process of calling someone. So it is like a quick look up list of your important contacts. 15 years back, with not much processing power in a phone, Call history was the best way to imagine this. But in today's advanced Multi-core processor phones era, Call History is pretty much useless. It is filled with your Pizza delivery, Customer Care and other senseless numbers you've dialed recently.

We were fed up.

So, we thought we will create a dialapp which will magically show the people you want to call at any give context. It is powered by friday (of course). It will learn from your calling patterns, location, time, recent social interactions and many other things (secret sauce) to populate a list of people whom it thinks you will call (most probably).

We have found that (from our private beta), 65% of times the person you want to call is within the first page, and 84% times he is in the first two pages. (a page = 5 contacts).

Think about the amount of time it can save in your daily life. If you make 25 calls a day and each time contact searching takes 30 seconds, we bring it down by 26 seconds. So that is around 11 mins a day.

So in a month we give you an additional 5.5 hours. You can catch up a full season of Sherlock with that time and you will still have an hour left!

Easier, faster and simpler. Now friday is like your second brain!

You may have read about our team getting a taste of the Silicon Valley and the startups out there. With a bucket load of feedback and critiques that we got from you and the awesome Valley dudes, we set out to simplify the friday experience.

We wanted friday to be lighter, simpler and faster and aesthetically pleasing.

This release takes design patterns very seriously, not just the look and feel, but also how it interacts with you. The way you refresh the feeds, or the way you browse the posts, or even the way you read content etc. A lot of thought has gone into building this new User Experience. And this is the first release that brings the new experience to the table. We will add a series of iterations making improving this in the coming months. 

We hope you love the fluid and seamless experience that this new friday offers you.

So friday is just log of all your events? Ok, a beautiful log of all your events? Fine, a beautiful log of all your events with Natural Language Voice search? 

When you don't update a mobile app for over a month, it could be for two reasons:

The app is being phased out, and the devs have given up

A massive update is being readied. 

If you haven't guessed already, in our case it has been the latter. We have been working on a lot of core updates to the app in the last couple of weeks. We gave you a slight glimpse of what's coming in the last post. We have already updated the app to the app store, the first of a string of updates we will be pushing this year that will completely refresh the app experience! 

As I have been saying in every post, the whole evolution of the friday app is a collective effort. Between you and us. As a user you guys have given drawn us the dotten lines to reveal the bigger picture. We have just been joining them and completing the picture. So thanks for all your support.

  So read ahead to see what we have added in this push.

Details and actions.

We have enhanced the timeline experience, and turned it into a storyline. Each event in the storyline is now interactive. You can expand it, read the whole content, reply, share, post etc. This literally turns friday into your breakfast app. The app you want to open the moment you wake up. The single activity stream which shows all your messages,mails, posts and what not. And you can respond to all these events right from the app.

Sharing comes to web

Sharing is getting its first shot of steroids with this update. Now you get a unique URL for every public share you make from friday. Friday lets you post directly to twitter, facebook and foursquare. Or you can use the share link to post it anywhere on the web. What does the link do? It shows you a beautiful landing page for the activity you have shared. Check out one of our fun shares here. Going forward the landing page will get richer and more functional. This is just the beginning!

Direct Answers (beta)

You ask friday "how many missed calls did I get from John last week" and it shows you a timeline of all the result. Not good! So we thought we will change it. Now friday will show you a direct answer. Like "23 calls". Also, lists out all the John (like John Mathias, John Travis etc) and the places where these happened. If you want, you can see the timeline. Only if you want. How cool is that?

But, it is in beta. Don't expect it to give you answers for every question yet. Give it some time and it will learn with you. But we're super excited with this. We are slowly imparting the power of iris to friday.

New icon and typography!

My favorite part of the update, friday gets a fresh icon. In sync with Android Jelly Bean theme, a crisp and sharp new friday icon. And a friendly cutesy title font. We have also laid out a complete new theme for the app, which we will roll out soon.

Back end overhaul

We have also made a universe of improvements to the backend. For starters, we now save all your photos in our own servers and that too in full resolution!! So, every click you do with your phone camera lives for ever. And remains secure and private (unless you choose to share). Also, the sync and API call latencies have been cut by over 6-10 times. So the app is lot more faster.

Giving you a glimpse of what is coming to friday!

It has been a month since we updated the friday app. We have been continously making improvements in our server to make the sync and overall experience faster and smoother. But that doesn't stop here. We believe the concept of friday is very powerful and we have to evolve the product with you, with your feedback, your behaviours and how you use the product. I definitely agree that on the first release we have not got the best experience, though we have made a very powerful and stable technology.

Productizing friday.

With all your feedback and responses we set out to build the next version of friday around a month back. Something that will be much more simpler and easier to use. We wanted to cut the noise and build something that would be easily understandable. And we are on course to provide you something that you will want to open and use everyday. 

When will this happen?

As first steps we will release an update next week, and update which will not change the user interface, but enhance the existing layout with a couple of usability tweaks. It would also add a lot of back end changes, making the experience smoother and richer.

That doesn't stop here! Later this month we will present to you an entirely redesigned app, to take advantages all the enhancements we have at the server side. I can't stop myself from sharing with you a very early look of how the new friday will look! We'll try to make this available to you at the earliest. Let me tell you, I am really really excited about it!!

Friday finds your karma!

If you have been using friday for quite some time like thousands of others, you might have noticed small and big UI updates and new features in the past few weeks. We have trying to simplify the new user experience, to make it easier for everyone to get fridaying. At the same time thanks to all your feedback and comments we are making the experience even more awesome for the existing users as well.

Karma and patterns.

We started out by making it easier for you to post updates to your favorite social networks with the friday activities. Just choose what you're doing, with whom and where. And wham! it's posted to your social. Friday can also better understand what you're doing and help you recollect stuff later on as you post more activities. Karma builds on this and other inputs, and tells you how good your day was. 

Karma tries to relate to your daily activities, events, travel, music, snaps and many other aspects of life and rates you day, with our super cool algorithm, finding how happy you're feeling on a day. It is like the klout score of your happiness. How can you improve this score? Just try to do good stuff, get social, listen to good music, spend time with friends etc. Yeah, do what you would generally do to be happy and karma will just reflect that. And if your karma is going below 1000, make sure you call your best friend or watch your favorite movie or simply take walk and get some fresh air. Happiness is everything!

Let us know what is your highest karma (Note: I achieved a karma of 3219 the next day after we pushed the last update!).

Newsletter

We are rolling out (in a phased manner) the friday newsletter, friday all week. From the responses we've got from twitter, facebook and mails, it looks like you guys are loving it. This is just a small glimpse of the power of the platform. Friday could actually help you find your loves and hates, and patterns and suggest things to you. Isn't that super cool? If you have any feedback on how to improve the newsletter let us know. We love ideas!

Our sign up process sucked! So we fixed it.

It has been around a month since we launched friday into the Play store. The response has been pretty good, but we found a glitch. Around 25% of people were dropping off in the sign up process; that is, they start signing up but never finish it. So we realised there is a big issue with sign up.

What was wrong?

too many cooks spoil the broth

goes the old saying. For us it was

too many options kill the sign up.

Yeah, there were way too many screens and options which confused the user and a few gave up, while others just couldn't navigate through the maze. We wanted to give our users the complete experience when they landed up on the homescreen. We wanted him to choose his privacy options before he synced anything with our servers. And we missed out on the simplicity part of it and paid for it.

Simplified?

Yes, the only things we need (for sure) before he can see his timeline is his Google connect. So we don't have sign up/login etc. anymore. No creating usernames, passwords, accounts etc.

just connect with your Google credentials.

Whether you're a new user or an existing user signing in to a new device, just Google Connect. We'll identify whether you want to sign up or login and take you forward from there.

If you're logging in, you will go to the homescreen. If you're signing up, we will show just one screen asking you to choose your privacy options. From there you can see your data syncing to our cloud and then your timeline. And while the data is syncing, you can add further services like facebook, twitter etc, if you want. 

Old sign up

Choose email >> Choose password >> Add Google >> Add services >> Choose Privacy >> tune settings >> Sync with cloud >> Home

New sign up

Google Connect >> Choose Privacy >> Sync with cloud >> Home 

We have also found that there are few thousand accounts which are stuck in one of those (older) sign up states. I will personally get to each one of you and help you reach the home screen. I am sure you'll what you see beyond the finish line.

Why, you should trust the friday system.

We launched friday on the play store last week and a lot of articles and  blog posts have been written about us. Two words we saw consistently in the discussions were "spooky" and "privacy". I want to address both the concerns here, so that both existing and new users feel at home when using friday.

Spooky.

Spooky might not be as bad a adjective as it first seems. Spooky can also be replaced with magical? When a person levitates, we might get spooked. Or when the first electric bulb was lit, people felt spooked? So, spooky is just something that is ahead of the time. And trust me we're spooky in a good way. We do good things, by helping you remember your life, build your past, relive moments etc.

Privacy

This is where I want to elaborate. Couple of points which I read on the privacy lines in  blogs/discussions etc.

We are a startup based out of India. Some people were skeptical since we were based out of India and they may not be able to save themselves, if we did something wrong. We built this app for the world, wherever people use smartphones (Androids). And wherever we place ourselves, others can ask this question. But, we have tried to solve this to an extent, right now we have our data in Amazon Storage (S3) in US. We will try to keep data of each user in a data centre close to their nation. Moreover, India has a good law structure, and treaties with most of the nations. 

We're literally an unknown startup. Yes, we are a startup, that by itself makes us underdogs or hipsters (whichever way you see). But every biggie has gone through this. Look at this in a different perspective. We won't even try doing something unwanted (or bad) which would literally wipe off our company, since friday is the only gateway to our success. We won't even dare try something silly and kill our prospects.

How secure is my data. Pretty much of the time we spent last two years building friday was dedicated to getting the right level of security. This is the rough architecture of our system

So essentially any data sent from your phone is hashed by a combination of your username/password with an additional level of hashing with DeviceID. And then stored in our Solr servers. Now even, we cannot go and pry into your data. When you make a pull request (for the data), you again supply the 3 salts which helps us fetch the corresponding data. When it comes to applets, (3rd party app calls) we use OAuth for them, and from there follows the same process described above. This is why you can trust the system.

First of all, the good news. We'll be introducing friday officially into the play store, this friday. I think the app have evolved enough to take on the world. Thanks to all our beta users and your feedback. As we gear up for the launch, I want to introduce and initiate the next stage of the friday suite. They're called Applets.

What are applets?

The bigger vision of friday is not just about creating a stand alone app, that captures your whole life and answers your questions. But rather going beyond that and creating useful context aware apps, that could actually turn your Android smart. These apps, that uses friday as the quintessential data fabric and builds interesting use cases are called Applets. And it not just us, we will open up the friday API to other developers for building applets.

Trails

So, as we graduate friday to the play store, we are starting our next beta cycle of applets with our first offering, Trails. Trails, as the name suggests uses friday APIs to create detailed daily travelogue of your life. Select a day, and trails will show you wherever you went and what event happened on each point in the map. Further it shows a timescale for each day, your busy hours, wee hours and what not. It is so much fun, and this is only the beginning. We have dozens of such interesting and useful applets waiting to be unveiled.

It has been two weeks since we updated friday app. And obviously that is because we have been working something new. Before we get to that, we have signed up around 5000 users for the beta and they've created over 10 million snaps (unique life events) with friday. And both numbers are growing at amazing rates. So, looks like you guys are loving friday. 

The general feedback we got from you guys was that the friday UI looks dull and boring, so we thought we'll do something about it. So, presenting an all new friday timewarp, which is very responsive and clean.We've pushed the new update NOW. You will get update notification, if you open the app, or you can directly download it from here.

But that's not all, today we're introducing Friday Activities.

With friday we're building the sheer power to understand your life by letting you talk to friday as you would, with a real person. So, we have come up with Activities. With this you can update what you're doing right now, with a very taps and minimal typing (you hate to type on touchscreens don't you?).

Update status?

Say you're watching the Amazing Spiderman movie, just tap on the watching icon, and type in the show name. You can also choose who you're with (from address book), also choose the place (IMAX?) and save it as a private note, you can also beam this directly to your facebook, twitter, or foursquare. Updating your social status has never been so easy! Check it out yourself, try saying what you're watching, thinking, eating, playing etc.

In the coming updates you will also be able to know how popular your activity is, for example friday will tell you how many people are watching Amazing Spiderman right now, or how many people are eating Quarter Pounder Burger right now. 

Widgets and Trivia.

Yeah, one more feature. We're adding homescreen widgets with the new friday release. You can directly post activities from your homescreen, or do a search. And we also have a widget which shows interesting context aware trivia about your life. Do keep aside some space for friday on you Android home screen!!

So at last we have quite a few real users! We have been on private beta for around a month now, and we have indexed over a million documents; but the most important mission, of evaluating the User Experience has been accomplished. Based on the feedback, we are bringing in a entirely new design.

Focus is on YOU

What we realized from the previous layout was that the focus was straying between tabs, like timewarp, spaceview etc. Though we believe each tab is unique, we realized the tab that talks about you the most is the timewarp. So we are making timewarp the centre of focus and pushing everything to background, in a subtle way.

We have made it less confusing and simple to use, by putting in the menu control that facebook app has popularized and many others have followed. The new menu control cuts down the complexity and makes it very easy to use. And it is already becoming the de facto standard for mobile apps, just like pull to refresh. We have not killed any functionality though by doing this, everything has been carefully sorted and presented in the slider menu.

A word on filters.

If you are still wondering what the bottom pull up bar does, it is pretty simple. The timewarp can be filtered to show events from only a particular time period, a person, a place, a type, a text query or a combination of these. The pull up bar shows what your timewarp is actually showing. You can also just to a previous filter level by just tapping on an item in the filter tree. 

When is friday coming to the Google Play?

  This is a 4 step guide to installing friday for your life.

  1.   Login Screen

If you've just installed friday and haven't signed up yet, tap the Create button for your free account!

    2.  Signup Screen( Create friday account)

Now, the signup process of friday consists of a first time sync of your android phone data namely, calls and texts to the friday secure cloud, so it is advised that you have ample battery charge and consistent internet connection on your phone.

  On the signup screen, we give you the choice from the gmail accounts added in your android device to use as the friday login name. We use this account only as your username and do not sync anything automatically from this account. (Unless you add this account later for syncing). The password should be atleast 5 characters long and is your friday password. When you tap signup your user account is created on the friday cloud.

3. Settings Screen

After signup you are prompted to add your accounts to friday to sync. Here, one GMail/Google Apps account is mandatory. You can add more than one Google Apps/GMail accounts. You can also add your facebook, twitter and foursquare accounts. These help in creating a rich semantic map of your life and events.

  You'll be prompted to complete the respective authentication pages of these services. Once added these accounts are displayed on the accounts fragment as shown in below.

  * The General, Sync, and Services settings are loaded with optimized defaults for daily use. Only if you are really sure, go ahead and tweak these values. Make sure you have enabled all the services you want in the Services tab. 

4. Firstrun Sync

The signup concludes with firstrun sync. Here, your call and text message logs are synced to the friday cloud. This may take upto 15 minutes depending on the amount of your data and the speed of your network connection.

When finished you will see the blue continue button as shown in figure 3

  On tapping the continue button you can see the friday splash screen. This will be your default friday opening page (if you don't have password protection on).

After firstrun sync if your data still hasn't synced you may me prompted to sync it manually from menu as shown below otherwise....

... you're ready to go! After the sync your data is being indexed and processed to be made searchable, so the counts you see maybe incorrect. Give us some time and it will be corrected.

It’s been 2 years since dexetra actually started working on what we believed to be the gamechanger right from its concept stage. We now have Friday (in closed beta) !! Yes, the congeniality concept such as this obviously needs to be verified.  So, we decided to go for an Alpha release and it turned out to be a winner. Since then, we have taken more than a year to develop Friday beta from scratch taking into consideration the suggestions/feedback put forth by our Alpha testers; key differentiator being the server sync functionality, resulting in a really fast and scalable suite.

The crucial learning from the Alpha release was pertaining to the feature set of Friday. The Alpha users conveyed that the features were way too overwhelming and most of it unwanted. Friday Beta now has its feature list toned to what the users need most. With this post, my objective is to elaborate on all the functionalities of Friday.

After installing the Friday you need to sign up with your email address that you have configured on your device. This will be your user name. After signing up, you will be directed to initial settings screen.  The settings screen contains four fragments: General settings, Sync settings, Services settings, Accounts settings.  Below are the snapshots .

    General settings.

As you all know, Friday will be building a huge semantic map from the phone ranging from calls, texts, music and so on. The sync is initiated automatically. However, if you need to be notified of these syncs, you could have it done by enabling the ‘Sync Notification’ option. Thus, whenever Friday fetches data, the sync notification will be shown.

Next option is about sending error reports, this should be enabled to help us improvement of Friday. Only errors from your phone would be logged into the Friday servers. 

You could choose to have password protection so that no one else can view your personal data. In which case, Friday will ask for the password every time you open the App. The set password could be changed on the General Settings screen.

In the General settings page, the users have a choice of setting the active device. As of now Friday can sync data from only one device, but can view data accumulated from multiple devices. When a user signs up, that particular device is set as the active device and the data (calls, texts, image, location) will sync to the server from that device. What will happen when you sell your device or you decide to get a new one? Now, all you got to do is install and login to Friday on your new device, and then set the new device as your active device.

Sync.

This screen contains the sync settings of Friday. Depending on which the Friday syncing will happen. If you opt for battery efficient level, the sync frequency would be low. I would prefer the moderate level, which is set by default. 

  Services settings

This is where you can disable the sensors on your device. You could enable/disable the sensors by tapping the icons. If you disable the call sensor, no calls will be logged during the disabled time.

PS: As of now Friday doesn’t access GPS directly, we have optimized the location sensor in such a way that it will not consume a lot of battery. In short, there is disabling the location sensor to conserve battery does not really make much of a difference (since it is already opimtimized a lot!).

  Accounts settings

After signing up you must add at least one GMail/Google account to Friday for syncing contacts and the images. You could also add your facebook, twitter, foursquare accounts. The Friday experience would be much richer with feeds from the various accounts subsequently helping the user to relive the entire life with enhanced connect to the real world.

Menu screen

After you login to Friday, you are taken to your Home/timewarp screen. By clicking the menu button you can access the menu. I am placing the image of menu below.

Add Thought

The users can post thoughts on Friday. You can add images as well, which can be viewed in your timewarp.

  Bump

If you met your Friend, you could let Friday know via bump. The people, in this case, have open bump on Friday in their device and… bump !

  On the Login screen, you can view a different menu.

Delete user and Help

If you wish to delete your Friday account and its complete data, you could do so by the ‘delete user’ option. I would recommend you to read the help page before using Friday.

Note: Friday does not retain any cache or logs when you delete your account. So, once you delete your user, retreiving you data again would be impossible.

Push data to cloud.

By pressing this, all the data that was logged on the device will be sent to the cloud. Friday uses sync adapter for syncing data. If you need to make sure that all new data (like the call that just occurred) is reflected on the cloud, you could do so by this button. 

Up until this, we have gone through the settings and options within Friday, now let me guide you through the main part and understand what Friday exactly is. After you login to Friday, it will take you to the user dashboard. 

This contains four important fragments.

      Home

      Timewarp

      Spaceview

      Infograph

Home

As the name suggests, its your personal overview. In this you will get a complete depiction of the events that happened in your life. On the home page, you can view the number of calls, Texts, mails, songs, images, thoughts, thirdparty feeds and the People you have connected with. The icon at the centre (business card), shows the people that you have contacted via calls, mails and texts.  Assume that you have 1000 contacts in your contact list and you might, actually, have contacted only 100 people (via call, mail and Text). The people icon would only show 100 in this case. The thinking is that Friday would only show your actual contacts.

Timewarp

This is the Timeline of your life, it shows all the events that happened in the reverse chronological order. On the top of timewarp screen, the time, date & location of the event is shown. If similar events occur within a small window of time,  then Friday groups that intelligently, clicking on the more button will expand each snap.

  Spaceview

This component shows the locations that you visited and the number of events that occurred with respect to that particular location. This screen might not be populated when you first install Friday. On the contrary, it could take some time (a day or so) to show some location in spaceview. Spaceview helps you collate the events and the places in one go. By selecting any of the places from the list, you can filter down to all the events happened at that particular place.

  Infograph

This is the place where you will be able to view all the stats. First row shows you the call, Text and mail icons, by clicking any of these it will show the details. The ‘top contact’ list shows the people you are in touch with the most.

  Refresh

The left corner of the user dashboard features the refresh button (for manual sync). The refresh button would send the latest data set to cloud and the new semantically mapped data will be fetched from the server as well. For instance, if you call someone and need to see that particular call in Friday immediately, you can manually refresh by clicking this button and that call will be reflected instantly.

Filters and Search

One of the major features of Friday is searching and filtering your life data. Let us first explore the filters and see how to apply filter in Friday.

On Home screen, you could see nine icons calls, texts, mails.. etc. However, I might want more specific data, the details. For example, if I click on the calls, the call filter is applied in my data set. In other words, all the calls and the relevant details will be extracted from my semantic map. Here, the counts of all the events except for calls and contacts become zero. The ‘people’ count represents the people I have contacted via calls.

On my timewarp, all the calls that happened will be listed in reverse chronological order. Similarly, the spaceview shows all the locations where the calls occurred whilst the infograph shows only the stats relevant to calls. Likewise, I would be free to apply any filter that is displayed on the home screen. This acts as tool to help me deep dive into the particular data I am looking for.

  Person Filter

Now, I have applied the call filter and have obtained the data subset.  What if I wish to view the data for a particular contact ? Friday assists me on this. All that needs to be done here is to click on the ‘people’ icon on the home screen.  Upon clicking, I will be shown a list of all the people who have contacted me (and I have contacted) via calls. From this list, I can now select any user that I need to filter the data down to. Let’s say I have clicked the user John in the contact list, now the Friday will be showing all calls to & from the contact ‘John’.

  Location Filter

What if I am still not satisfied, I now want to know about the “calls from/to john when I was in Chicago”. Can Friday help ? The answer is yes and its simple; go to spaceview and click “Chicago”. Friday will now trim the whole data set to show the calls from & to John in Chicago. The spaceview will show the list of places you had visited.  The wonderful part of Friday is that you can apply filters in any order, ie you can first select the location “Chicago” after that you can select calls and then contact John.

  Go back to a day

If I need see only the events that happened on a particular day, Friday allows me to do so by the date filter. There is a calendar icon at the top of the screen. The calendar lets me select a particular date, and then Friday shows all the events that happened on that day. Lets you relieve any day from your past. And if you need to see only the calls on that particular day, you can apply filter on top !

Friday lets you apply all the filters in any order you choose, but you cannot apply a filter multiple times. Another thing to be noted is that you are not permitted to apply a text filter above a call filter, simply because there is no sense to it 

  Answers with friday

The most important feature in Friday is that all your life is made searchable! You can ask Friday (in simple English) on anything about your life and Friday gives you answers in the form of calls, texts, locations etc. You could see the search button on the top right corner of dashboard. Simple questions like

What did I do in Bangalore?

Show me the last message I got from John

Photos which I took on low battery.

Search is the final nail.

The concept of Friday was born around 2 years back, when it was not even called friday. From then to now, the product has taken a lot of makeovers. Some small, small really hubsch. When we launched our alpha version 10 months ago, it was quarter done. It was a standalone mobile app, which could index stuff for you and lets you ask about it later. But it was not scalable, it was not meant to be. After all it was just alpha. We wanted to see if whatever we've been dreaming for an year had any value. But we were really amazed at the feedback from the users. We started getting anxious too. 

Since then we have been working on our full release. For 10 months now, what we thought would be done in 6 months. In the meanwhile lot of interesting apps have come, like Path, facebook with timeline, siri (and of course iris), memolane etc. Many of which had elements of friday. Everytime we see such a product we go back to the drawing board and see how we are unique compared to each of these. I can write pages on that, but it is up to the users' to find that. 

We are almost nearing our release (less than 30 days!). Now, the most important feature that we have is search (asking!). Thanks to iris, we could iron out some of the issues there. Friday's core is asking. Asking naturally what do you want to know. "Who was with me for last Chistmas bash?" Friday just gives you the answer. How simple right? This is what puts friday in a different level from other social networks, journals and similar suites. And this is what we are putting most of our efforts on. And of course, we are so particular about the User Interface too. We want it to look jaw dropping.

What is the use of building complex programs and apps, building huge and extensive databases and repositories if in the end it is not possible for you-the user to ask what you want. And by users I don't mean programmers and nerds, I mean every common man out there who haspocket space for a smartphone. Now, go back to search engines and boxes, how are you seeking information? Do you ask questions? No, you punch in a bunch of keywords, and browse through the results to find what you want. This is not the best way humans communicate. and so we use a better technique in newFriday. You won't be searching anymore, you would be asking and we will be giving you answers, not results.

When we launched alpha, we did an experiment on this, though the result only a moderate success, the experiment itself was a huge positive. When comparing natural languages to the languages machines understand, they are poles apart. Machines understand definitive unambiguous grammar, while languages that we speak are free flowing and rather too flexible. A majority of our research efforts was on bridging the two modes of communication. And we have taken rather a different route for that, we are not trying to teach our engines English language, nor are we trying to impose an unintuitive complex query language to you.

newFriday's answering engine works with Predisense™ box, which will help you ask questions very clearly, with bare minimum taps. It could be a question as simple as place where you met her, or more advanced ones like the photos you took just before your phone died while listening to your favorite track. Unlike search engines, Predisense™ won't guess what you're trying to search, but will identify exactly what you're asking, and hence will give you very definitive answers.

image courtesy: xkcd.com

It is all about moments, as the popular saying goes, "We remember moments, not days". We had such a moment when we were finally ready with our promo video for the new friday. I will stick with the name new friday, because I am not sure what we should call the next iteration. 

new Logo.

I also worked around the friday logo/titling a little bit. We have renamed Friday to friday, gives a sense of friendliness when it is an all small-case title. To augment that we have moved to lighter font weight. The previous logo was more authoritative and corporate like, we felt it would better to give friendly and cool look.

new Promo

A promo for new friday was being planned for months. To convey the essense of friday in 2 minutes still explaining all the features was a challenge. To visually represent that as a promo was tougher. We worked for weeks on the story board, thanks to Magikwand, we could get a fairly exact visualisation of the story board. And thanks to Brad for the voice over, Jonathan for the bgm. 

We believe the video has come out well, tell us what you think.

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