HKP went to sleep and stopped telling everyone that Apple users are dilettantes.
More cowbell!
@Eric_LeVine,
Thanks very much for the update. It clears up a lot of things, and of course it will be great if the experience is essentially just the same on all devices whilst maximising the use of available screen space. I havenât been around long enough to be attached to Classic, although I do dive in very occasionally for the one or two features which arenât in the ânewâ desktop (block lists essentially).
The point I was initially trying to highlight was the difference in device usage between those users who add a lot of the value to the CT in maintenance of the database and those who donât. Given your reassurance on the future of the desktop interface that becomes interesting rather than important.
The conversation morphed (as conversations do) when someone started getting a bit snobby about iPhone users. My point in that part of the conversation was that far more wine drinkers as a whole use Android than iPhone, so the fact that 90% of mobile access is via iPhone suggests to me that, for some reason, CT either isnât visible to or isnât seen as adding value for Android users. I know that the Android app exists (I use it occasionally) and itâs great to hear that it will be maintained on a par with the iPhone app. So I was simply trying to raise the question of why it isnât as popular with Android-using wine-drinkers as the iPhone-using ones.
The fundamental issue I still havenât understood though is âwhat is CT striving to be?â. Are you aiming for it to be a valuable tool for a large proportion of the wine-drinking world (in which case the answer to the âwhy arenât Android users using it?â is important, or is the goal simply to be a âa productivity app for wine nerdsâ as it was described by CNBC a couple of years ago? If the latter then I can see that âwine nerdâ (particularly in the anglosphere) probably leans (much) more towards iPhone users than the broader âwine-drinkerâ market; but then youâre maintaining a huge database, the majority of which is of âvalueâ wines which will never be of interest to wine nerds.
So overall Iâm not particularly trying to make a point or pursue an agenda, Iâm just curious to understand more of the thinking on what CT is trying to do and what developments are in store, and your response was very useful for some of that. Thanks!
Partly because I have to sleep sometime - you posted your explanation at about 1am my time!
We have seen the gamut of opinion in this thread has to how much more or less important the TNs and scores are to the user.
From your chair, how central are the TNs and scores to the value and character of CT? How much focus do you have as you grow and evolve the product on how the changes will affect the quality and quantity of TNs and scores?
Thanks for any response you want to offer, and thanks for all you do for our community.
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I find the poll to be extremely biased toward a subset of use cases that tend to be PC based.
How about asking questions like:
When eating at a restaurant, I add tasting notes primarily via âŚ
When selecting a wine at a wine store, I reference tasting notes viaâŚ
When selecting a wine from my cellar, I reference my cellar inventory viaâŚ
Etc etc.
In addition, the questions are asking based on current capabilities of the platform. If there were improvements to the mobile experience, will people shift they way they interact with the application? The poll doesnât come close to addressing it.
But the poll was about âadding value to the databaseâ. How referencing tasting notes or browsing cellar inventory adds any value to the database?
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True, but that only begs the question of why adding value is singled out.
Because it seems to me that there is a signifcant distinction between CT users who add value to the database and those who simply use/read it. Without those users adding value CT is nothing, so how they interact with the database is crucial.
That was answered in the very first lines of this thread.
Mostly I myself browse CT with my mobile phone, but if I want to do anything more than that, I do it with my desktop computer instead. And that includes basically every and all things that can be included in the âadding valueâ category.
If the topic was specifically on adding value, it feels a bit weird to me to complain about the topic not including stuff that isnât part of adding value.
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That goes to my second point, which is that we are talking about the capabilities of the system today vs potential future enhancements.
For example, Vivino is a popular application where (I believe) most of the value is added via mobile device. At a restaurant, take a photo, add a rating and/or comments. That was designed for mobile. CT was designed for desktop. If the mobile experience was improved, it follows that more value would be added via mobile.
That being said, I fail to see the point of limiting the discussion to adding value when accessing that value is equally important.
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And that shows. That is also a reason why Iâve stayed away from Vivino. Although CT is far from perfect, the content of CT vs. Vivino are worlds apart.
Nobody is limiting the discussion. If you want to discuss the subject, youâre more than free to create a new thread on it!
However, if somebody wants to specifically discuss the subject delimited to the specific parameters they choose, theyâre equally free to do so as well.
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Vivino has a completely different business model - itâs essentially an online wine retailer which makes its money from people buying through its site. The whole ratings thing is sort of incidental and doesnât add a great deal of value to the site.
Thereâs no way CT could try to emulate Vivino and catch it - itâs 10 years too late for that. The essence of CT, it seems to me, is a community based around maintaining (via its users) an accurate database of wines and TNs. As an aside, I believe that CT shares label pics with Vivino and that this is a primary cause of the hundreds of (often absurdly) misplaced label pics that I report on CT (but I may have misunderstood that).
Vivino makes money from people buying wine through its site. CT makes money from people paying subscriptions to access the data that is built on its site by other users. They are two very very different business models. And for the CT business model, how the users who add that value to the site do so is key.
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Considering the regular threads about how only boomers (old people) drink high end wine, you really need desktop because we do not suffer from the diseases of youth:
(a) I am not addicted to my telephone
(b) I am old and looking at a larger screen is a good thing for my eyes
(c) I do not need access to CT for most of my usage - although the ability to access it on my phone while reading a wine list at a restaurant or deciding which wine to but at a wine shop is useful.
If you really want to piss off the boomers, how about an app for an apple watch so we really canât read the site?
so people can jog on a treadmill while consuming a bottle!
The point is this: without the users who add value to the site, there is nothing to access. In that sense, the users who add value are more important.
Imagine from this point forward no more wines or tasting notes being added to the CT database. For right now, and some period of time into the near future, that wouldnât be a big deal. But if you give it two or three years, the most current data in CT starts looking like that old stack of Wine Spectators sitting on the bottom of the living room table. Give it 10 years, and itâs pretty much worthless; not many people are going to want to access 10 yo âvalueâ.
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The community is the soul, the magic of CellarTracker. That was stated in our email last Friday.
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