Glyphish and the Long Tail

There’s a designer whose creativity is seen on many of your favorite apps, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and ours.  He’s not a full member of the app development team but you use his work all the time.  Joseph Wain is the founder of Glyphish, a firm that designs icons for mobile apps, a “long tail” service for developers.  

We purchased his sets but a few days ago he sent out a note asking his customers to help spread the word.  We’re more than happy to help.  I spoke with Joseph by phone today and he was very gracious.  He respects that we’re out there publishing apps to help make “the system” work better. 

For Congress in Your Pocket, he designs custom tab bar icons that you push at the bottom of an iPhone app to change screens.  For our upcoming Governors app, we are going with a full set that gives you options of seeing the full list of governors or just the Republicans or Democrats.

The ones we’re using here are less than fifty pixels by fifty pixels, which is tiny.  We tried putting together our own with mixed results.  Having a pro like Joseph design for you saves a lot of time as well as the ability to look in the mirror and still think you’re good at what you do (which is not this).

Here’s what we tried on our own (fuzzy):

 

Here’s what Joseph did for us (much clearer):

Chris Anderson popularized the statistical term “The Long Tail” as a method of understanding how successful companies like Amazon.com can be in selling products to small markets.  Joseph Wain is doing the same thing with developers in providing an essential service, extremely well, at a fair price.

You can follow Joseph’s company @Glyphish but it’s much more fun to talk with him.  Send him a message here and thank him for making your favorite app look like something worthy of an iDevice.

 

CIYP/Top 10

In the latest update, we added Google Analytics to see which pages and features our more than 40,000 subscribers are viewing.  It’s clear that people are paying attention to the political process and not just looking up their own members.  First, just looking at the folks who use Congress (our 99¢ app), here are the top “pages” viewed in the app:

Congress Top 10

1. Michele Bachman – launched presidential campaign
2. John Boehner- Speaker of the House, debt ceiling
3. Freshmen – Most vulnerable in 2012
4. Kelly Ayotte – freshman senator active on BBA
5. Mitch McConnell – Senate Minority Leader, debt ceiling
6. Nancy Pelosi –  House Democratic Leader, debt ceiling
7. Open Seat – Special Election in California-36
8. Eric Cantor – House Majority Leader, debt ceiling
9. Sandy Adams – Represents Kennedy Space Center’s district
10. Diane Feinstein – Bad poll, talk of Maria Shriver as replacement

Let’s contrast this to our professional users, those who buy CongressPro for the ability to get updates over the air, have separate tabs for committees, and take notes (also added in this round to Congress+).  They are looking more at the inside-baseball aspects of redistricting as well as those under-the-radar members who are attempting to move the debt limit ceiling debate.

CongressPro Top 10

1. Notes – People are using the ability to take notes
2. Bookmarks – They’re checking their bookmark lists
3. Lamar Alexander – Pushing for a debt limit deal
4. John Barrasso – Pushing for a debt limit deal
5. Freshmen – See above.
6. Brian Bilbray – California redistricting makes him a target
7. Chris Coons – Pushing save-as-you-go legislation
8. Diane Feinstein – See above
9. John Campbell – See Bilbray.
10. Jeff Bingaman – Came out against ethanol subsidy

Going forward we are going to add the ability to track Congress+ “pages” as well and roll-up a CIYP/Top 10 that we’ll report out often.  Look for it here and also on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.