If you’re interested in Groupon’s origins and how it evolved out of The Point, Crain’s Business explains it all (and more) in the following piece from their excellent Entrepreneurs in Action series. Past segments have featured our friends at EveryBlock and CrowdSPRING. Our thanks to Brandon Copple of Crain’s for the excellent work!

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

The Point has outgrown our office space! Yesterday, we moved down a floor of our building into a larger space. Here are a few photos I took of the move.

Ken and the tech team packing up

Alex grabbing some last things

Nick setting up the new phone system

Unpacking in the new space

Aaron and Ben in their writing sanctuary

Our new conference room

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

From last year’s Chicago New Media Summit (now the Chicago Convergence). I tried to fit a ton of content in 14 minutes, so its a bit fast – enjoy!

Watch Andrew Mason, The Point, Online Collective Activism in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

-Filed in The Point

Check this out – Desire2Learn will donate $1,000,000 to charity if Blackboard drops a patent lawsuit.

I like this “you wouldn’t hurt a puppy, would you?” style of building support for a cause. But what if you don’t have a million dollars? You can raise a pot of money on The Point, which are only released if the offending organization does as you please.

This has already been tried on The Point in an attempt to get Bono to retire from public life by donating a lot of money to fight AIDS if he does. Hasn’t worked – yet.

-Filed in The Point

We’re excited to announce that we’ve integrated Facebook Connect into The Point, making it possible for Facebook users to use The Point without setting up and managing a separate account or maintaing a separate login.

Back in December 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect – a service that lets people use their Facebook login and identity on third party sites that provide integration, like The Point.

Connect!

If you already use The Point and have a Facebook account (who doesn’t!?) clicking the Facebook Connect button will link your account on The Point to your Facebook account and you’ll be able to use your Facebook login from then on.

New users of The Point can just click the Facebook Connect button when joining a campaign for the first time, and a quick Facebook login is all it takes – no account setup, no account activation.

Your Facebook login information is never sent to or shared with The Point in any way; it’s entirely handled by Facebook.

Your Portable Identity – You Can Take it With You

Once you’re connected, your identity on Facebook – your name, profile pic – even your friends – will be available on The Point.

Tired of that profile pic?  Change it once on Facebook and it’ll be visible on The Point.

Your Facebook profile information is subject to the same privacy controls on The Point as you set in Facebook.

Let Your Friends Know What You’re Up To on The Point

When you join a campaign on The Point, we’ll ask if you want to publish a Facebook feed item to share it with your Facebook friends.  You’ll see a preview of what the feed item will look like, and have the chance to post it or, of course, say ‘No Thanks’.  It’s up to you.

You’ll also see your friends’ activity on The Point on their feeds so you can keep up with what they’re up to.

What’s next?

Of course, what’s Facebook integration without friends, right?  We’ll be adding features over time to let you see which of your Facebook friends are also using The Point and let you invite them to connect.

For example, you might want to know which of your Facebook friends are already members of a campaign you’ve joined.  Or maybe you want to invite your Facebook friends to a campaign on The Point.

What about Groupon?

For those of you using Groupon in Chicago (and soon Boston, and beyond!) to get great deals through the power of collective buying, you probably know that Groupon is powered by The Point.  We’ll be making the Facebook Connect features of The Point available to all Groupon users in the coming weeks.

-Filed in Groupon, News, The Point, Uncategorized

The project in a nutshell: develop a harmonious design language that can be shared by Groupon & The Point, allowing us to easily reuse ideas for both sites, while preserving a distinct experience and mood for each site.

Background

The Point, launched in November, 2007, lets anyone start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group, but only if the campaign hits a predetermined tipping point. By building a critical mass of like-minded people before taking action, The Point makes collective action easy and efficient. Learn more here.

All campaigns on The Point follow a general structure if X, then we, the members, will Y. We the members will give money or do something, but only if X happens. This basic model can be used for everything from arranging a party to boycotting a multinational corporation to organizing a fan-based bid for a major league baseball team.

In late 2008, we decided to step up a search for a business model for The Point. One of the options we’d been thinking about from the beginning was group buying – use The Point to offer a product at a discount, but only if a certain number of people sign up – enough people to make it worth it for the business to take lower margins.

We wanted the group buying experience to be dead simple. Campaigns on The Point can be used for a wide range of things – that’s nice, but it also contributes to a sense of “what is this place exactly?” that is a barrier to entry for casual users. We wanted to get all that stuff out of the way and create a focused experience for people who are looking for deals. For a number of reasons, we also decided to start with a narrow geographical focus – things to do in Chicago (our hometown).

Thus, Groupon was born in November, 2008 – a site that features a deal a day on something to do in Chicago. The guts of Groupon belong to The Point – you’ll notice all the action happens inside a The Point campaign widget that has been skinned in a Wordpress blog. We did it that way to get it running quickly, knowing we’d integrate it into The Point if and when it started to look like we were onto something – and that’s just what’s happening.

The Task

We’ve pushed Wordpress as far as it can take us. Now, we’re gearing up to integrate Groupon into The Point. We’re doing this for a few reasons:

• To take advantage of some of the features we’ve already built for The Point (discussion, invitation system, user-to-user messaging, Facebook Connect, etc.)
• To add new functionality to Groupon that would be foolish to add onto Wordpress – it’ll be easier and faster to add it to The Point’s codebase.

When I talk about “integrating” Groupon into The Point, I don’t mean they’ll “feel” like the same site. Groupon and The Point have different audiences – people looking for deals in Chicago, and (mostly) people looking to do good, respectively. Each site will maintain its own identity – we don’t want deal-seekers to be forced to contend with activism campaigns, and vice versa. While we’re pulling Groupon into The Point’s codebase, that is so it’s easier to add functionality; it’s a top priority to preserve Groupon’s focus and simplicity.

Looking at Groupon and the same campaign being displayed on The Point, you’ll notice that we’ve laid out the information differently on each site. In some cases, the variations reflect the requirement differences between Groupon and The Point. But in other cases, we just found a better way to do it on Groupon. We want to look at each difference between the two sites, and say, “is there a reason it shouldn’t be this way on both sites?” By doing so, we think we’ll be able to reduce the differences to a small enough number for a harmonious design language to be established.

If we can establish a common design language that is shared by Groupon and The Point, it will allow us to repurpose the elements that are shared by the two sites and develop both sites much faster. I’m speaking mostly of information architecture – can we reach a stylistic middle ground that allows us to reuse elements like user profiles and discussion?

The best analogy I can think of is Google. Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader are clearly different sites, but they use a common language that makes it easy for Google to repurpose page elements across the sites.

Who we’re looking for

Depending on how much background you have in UX, we’ll probably do the preliminary IA work in house, i.e. we will develop an initial “unified” wireframe for you to design against. Our familiarity with the model and all its edge cases makes it easier for us to put something together quickly, but we’ll be looking for your input on the overall sanity of our IA decisions.

We aren’t looking to do a major redesign of either site – just the minimum necessary to achieve our goals. This project will be limited in scope and time (no more than a week or two), but if we like working together, we have a lot of ongoing design needs and we’d like to have a trusty standby.

We’re looking to get this project started in February and wrap up by mid-March, at the absolute latest.

To apply, send examples of your work to andrew at the point dot com.

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

Just a quick update to let you know we’re barreling away here at The Point.

2008 was an exciting year – we came out of beta with a fresh new design and carrot campaigns in July, and launched Groupon in November, to name just two of the many things we’ve done. We’ve also had many exciting success stories, and we’re growing faster than ever.

In the last few months, most of our time has been spent on Groupon, the collective-buying side of The Point. This week, we should be launching Facebook integration, so you will be able to login to The Point using your Facebook account and automatically post to your newsfeed when you join or create a campaign.

Lots more to look forward to in 2009!

-Filed in The Point

I almost didn’t vote today. As the founder of a website that helps people focus on doing what matters, casting a vote in Illinois (where the election won’t be close and my vote won’t matter) is arguably hypocritical. Had I spent an hour this morning working on The Point instead of voting, it would have done infinitely more good (some vs. none = infinite).

But when I started compiling my argument against voting for the purpose of this post, I realized:

• My argument applies to me and exactly no one else.
• I still think everyone else should vote – indeed, I need them to so I can shirk.
• There is nothing I actually want to change about the way voting is marketed as a civic duty – even though it’s effectively the most meaningless way for an individual to participate in public life and no one deserves a sense of satisfaction for doing it, it still must be done.
• I don’t actually have anything worth saying about not voting.

So that was that – post abandoned, I would abstain from voting in silence.

But after reading an article by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt about the irrationality of voting, I was convinced, ironically, that I should vote.

Levitt explains that many economists consider voting pointless to the point of being a social stigma.

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”

But rational economics is based on the assumption that all parties act rationally. If Funk is using rationality to declare that I shouldn’t vote, then it follows no one else votes either. If no one votes, however, my vote will make a difference, so I should vote. But since everyone is rational, they just all came to that conclusion, so once again everyone is voting… and I shouldn’t vote. But everyone else realized that too… and on and on.

Voting is a particularly interesting collective action puzzle – because it’s designed to be anonymous and uncoordinated, everyone has the exact same cost/benefit (setting aside issues of difficulty getting to the polls, self-satisfaction, etc.). In other words, the rational answer to the question of whether to vote should be the same for everyone in the country.

I think the problem with Funk’s statement stems from a poor definition of what constitutes rational decision making (I’m way out of my league here, but this is a blog so you knew that already). Let me offer two ways of defining a “rational” decision:

• Decisions that produce the greatest personal payoff are in my best interest (Funk Rationality)
• It is in my best interest to behave in a way that I need everyone else to behave (Golden Rule Rationality)

I’m not articulating the essence of the distinction perfectly, so I’ll try and illustrate it through the example of voting. If the decision whether to vote is made without considering how other people should behave who are faced with that exact same decision, you get caught in the cycle described above. But if I approach the question of “should I vote?” from the perspective that every single person has to make the exact same decision and thus the conclusion needs to be the same, the answer is, rationally, “yes.” Just because economists understand the free rider problem doesn’t give them permission to perpetuate it.

So that’s a long-winded way of saying something you already know – vote, even though it doesn’t matter.

-Filed in Ideas, The Point

Rather than go through the excruciatingly drawn-out process of obscuring message with prose, I’ve decided to simply post my outline.

Introduction

• We consider The Point’s flexibility to be one of it’s greatest strengths
  • Change the day of the Super Bowl, fund a musical, or make election day a holiday
  • To really influence the status quo, The Point needs to attract more than self-identifying activists
• But flexibility is also a liability
  • Browse today’s popular campaigns you’ll find a lot more that doesn’t interest you than does
  • There’s the risk of finding content that clashes with your ideology, which could alienate you from the site as a whole
  • No, not “you” as in you – I mean, everyone else!

About Channels

• Channels divide campaigns into topics of interest.
  • Provide a more focused, rewarding browsing experience.
  • Election 2008, Social Experiments, Fund an Artist, Consumer Rights
• You can follow any channel to be notified when new campaigns are gaining some traction

Profound ending

• Falsely attribute one of the following quotes to Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Channels, had I knowneth thee, I’d have not besmitten my folly”
  • Check to see if it’s actually “knownedeth”
  • “Tally, on the hill! T’was it campaign channels?”

-Filed in The Point

We’re excited to announce our newest site section: Community.

Community is a one-stop-shop for you to keep up on what people are saying and doing on The Point.   The goals for Community are to help you find people to connect and collaborate with, and to inspire you by highlighting success and recognizing people who are doing great things at The Point.  Community includes the latest discussion, top contributors, new members, success stories and more.

There are lots of useful features wrapped up in Community, with more to come.  We hope you like it – stop by and let us know what you think or give your suggestions on how we can make it even better.

Here are the highlights:

Discussion

Keep up on the discussion going on within campaigns at The Point, start your own conversation by posting your campaign idea to the Brainstorm forum, or join the General Discussion.

You’ll always see the latest posts in all forums right on the main Community page, and be able to dive in with a click.

We also gather all discussion happening within all campaigns into a single view called Campaign Discussion, where you can see what people are saying elsewhere all around The Point.

Find People

You can do a quick search to find people you want to connect with on The Point.  We’ll be expanding this in the future to help you find people by geographic location, your address book entries and more.

Success Stories

From time to time, we’ll be featuring people who are having success with The Point, and we’ll talk about what made their campaigns tick.  We think this will help you find ways to make your campaigns more successful, or inspire you to start a new campaign.

Each time you visit the Community page, you’ll see a randomly-chosen Success Story.  You can click to see another, or click-through ‘Read More‘ to see a mini case study.

New Faces

You’ll see the newest members of The Point on the Community page.  We only show new members with profile pics, though.  Generally speaking, we find that people are more successful when they have a visual identity online – even if it’s a picture of your dog with a party hat – so we’ll be favoring people with a profile pic when we feature members around The Point.

Top Contributors

We like to give recognition for a job well done.  Here we’re showing people who are having the biggest impact on The Point.  We use a scoring system that gives points for creating successful campaigns, joining campaigns, and recruiting others to join campaigns, and contributing to discussion.  The Top Contributors leader board is just a start – we’ll be adding more ways to recognize our members’ great work in upcoming releases.

Successful Organizers

People who have run successful campaigns are given some time in the spotlight here.  Like Success Stories, we randomly choose a group to show each time you visit Community.

The Point Blogs

Finally, at the bottom of the Community page, you’ll find the most recent posts from here on our blog.

-Filed in News, The Point