The Green Bird is a way to collect and get quick access to your favorite Peckables. Available for iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa ("Enable The Green Bird") and Google Home/Assistant ("Ask The Green Bird").
I downloaded Peck last week after @om tweeted about it. To be honest, the UX was confusing to me. I signed up without really understanding what it does. I'm still a bit confused but apps that baffle me are sometimes the most interesting to explore. 😊
@rrhoover Thank you for trying it out. Our origin story is a bit longer but basically people open and close apps to get little pieces of information and that is wildly inefficient. You don't need an app for everything. The mobile web is pretty clunky. And conversational UI makes you type more not less.
So Peck is a simple haptic interface to let you tap on people, places, and things. We started with the Green Bird as a way to get some habitual info and decided a "disposable" stream made the most sense. So when you tap on things responses flow into your stream. Some responses may have embedded actions if you tap on them (like Sharing, Viewing, etc.). And most things that you Peck will also come back with some more peckables so there is semantic/contextual discovery happening.
At scale with our open platform, things get very exciting. 🐦
@rrhoover@om I'm having the same experience :P I guess I don't know what to expect so every peck is a little bit confusing. I assume I need to connect more things (apps)?
@davidsfeng it becomes valuable when you create your own set of sources and a tight little network. Hopefully you will follow some of your friends and share your thoughts there after!
I love the idea of getting one aggregated, on-demand, disposable feed that suits me in the moment. Pulling a news feed out of the air rather than having 10 apps push at me. Stoked for the launch — congrats @narendra, Daniel & Jimmy!
Hi @Narendra neat app. Signed up and skipped adding Twitter during signup. I went back to add the service later, and noticed that it didn't actually verify my twitter account. Rather it just slurped in the photos. Is that the only Twitter integration currently?
Also - a tad bit of user feedback. If I'm my topmost peck card and I open a new peck card (Features, Headlines, etc), those new cards open below the cards that I currently have open. As a user, I'd prefer those cards to open 2nd in the stack, because this means I don't have to scroll passed old cards to get to my new one and makes Peck operate more like the social feeds I am used to.
Thanks for the feedback, @knownhuman. We use Twitter in several places in the app. As you saw, we use it in the onboarding to grab your name and avatar.
We also use Twitter as a source of data for a lot of Peckables. Since you yourself can be pecked, when you added your Twitter account as a source, that gets added as information others see about you. This does not use Twitter as an authentication method, just as a public data source. We will likely do a deeper Twitter integration down the road that will require you to authenticate again.
As for the user feedback, yes, we've wrestled with this one. We've tried adding cards to the top, the bottom - but not the middle. We'll give that a try, too. As a side note, you can swipe left to remove unwanted cards or peck the Green Bird to reset everything.
@tyreus Interesting. From a UI standpoint, I didn't consider that a middle add. To me Card 1 is effectively a fixed of navigational card.
For twitter integration - what would happen if I put in the name of someone famous on Twitter? Would I get pecks directed at them? Since I added later in the flow, and there was no oauth, am I missing out on pecks actually directed at me?
@knownhuman The Twitter source you set for yourself only dictates part of the content that others see when they peck you in the app. So if you set your Twitter source to be @mcuban, people will see content from Mark Cuban when then peck you. But the notifications go to you because your actual Peck account is linked to your phone number.
This seems intriguing but you guys/gals could've done a better job explaining what exactly it does on your website. My first impressions were that it was a dashboard of random contextual data from various apps, but that's too vague and doesn't adequately explain the value proposition to me.
@ghobs91 Sorry if it isn't clear. Out of the gate, it is exactly what you said, a speedy way to get contextual data. As the platform builds out it will have very broad based utility and contextual smarts.
Awesome! When I was at Dexetra, building Friday app, the end vision was something like this. But, I like the way you have simplified the UX, with very little distractions and using just whitespace and text styles to pop up out context. Great job.
UPDATE (October, 2017) -- we have been hard at work expanding the vision for Peck. Check out our new Ship page for upcoming Peck for Voice! https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
We are over the moon to finally have Peck out in the wild and on Product Hunt.
Our proposition is pretty simple: we want you to use your phone less and get more out of it. Our solution is quick access to tiny bits of information with taps called pecks. Peck a little for the most important piece of contextual information, peck a lot for more.
Our dream is to make ever person, place, and thing peckable. We believe that micro-apps are going to help re-organize and prioritize all the data out there.
The Peck app is our first step. Something simple and useful to get at important bits of data.
We are working on a designer tool that makes building simple peckables trivial.
After that, we’ll open up a full developer portal to let people build all sorts of useful services in just minutes.
I’m Narendra and have been hacking at the Web since 1994 and have lots of stories. Reply here to ask me anything about Peck (or anything else tech/product!)
@narendra I remember when you first pitched me on this idea! Glad to see it launch! What've you learned and innovated on from that first inception until now? What do people find interesting and compelling — or better, confusing — about what you're trying to do? When do they get the "ah ha!" moment?
@chrismessina I think the most important part of this process has been relentless cutting of features, ideas, and use cases to get to something clean and wide open with potential (i.e. like early twitter).
I wanted the initial app to have some habitual use out of the gate and it is great for that if you enable your calendar and health (like a simple Fitbit). We spent a lot of time trying to make Peck something handy for a morning ritual and possibly an afternoon or travel checkin.
We dialed back the haptic interface for peck intensity to just low and high. That was important.
Embedded in the app are the seeds of a lot of things that have huge potential at scale: pecking back and forth with friends, endorsing peckables as a means of social discovery and filtering places/restaurants you might want to visit, and the foundation for the platform.
We just finished a simple in-house design tool that allows for rapid creation and deployment of peckable micro-apps so yesterday we were able to roll out all NFL and MLB teams in less than an hour.
Lots of stuff coming. I want to peck Uber and know how many vehicles are nearby and approximate wait time and then take the next step to request a car!
@chrismessina I just glanced at the API and I think we can accept that challenge! I have to run out for a bit, but I'll start as soon as I get back. I'll post a screenshot.
@narendra Excited to see Peck come to life. Finally an app that looks to simplify and give us back some control of time. I'm all about the high order bit. Think about the serendipitous improvement in battery life and end to "app-opener" remorse (equivalent to buyer's remorse).
Can we change the metrics? (France here o/). Can we block some features to others, it sounds good on paper but for example but, "John was last seen in San Francisco" is something I would like for myself but nobody else. Love the bird/animal!
@lbrkr Thanks for pointing that out. Yes, we did decide to focus on the US initially, just from a practical point of view. Peck processes a fair amount of incoming data like weather forecasts and distances. Our current implementation does allow you to choose the output units, so we suspected non-American users would get frustrated at seeing Fahrenheit and miles. Also, all the initial content we loaded is in English.
We have every intention to support the rest of the world in the not too distant future!
While I'm here, inspired by the Uber integration, I was thinking we'd accept requests for a few hours. If you know of a public API you'd like to see as a custom Peckable, reply to this and we'll try to make it happen!
@dinakar_tumu As @narendra mentioned, each Peckable is a bit of automation code written in Javascript (Typescript to be exact). That Peckable runs in response to a user's peck and the streams the data back to the app. Recommending Peckables and content to users is done using a graph database (Neo4j).
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