Confessions of a product CEO

The age of emotions

3 years ago I started Jolicloud to reinvent our computing experience and make the cloud a better place.I discovered a world that is miles away from the social media industry.
I’ve observed myself following less  Twitter and Facebook, spending less time trying the new new thing, getting away slowly from the fear of missing out in the social world.

I think we define the world we want to live in and I believe the current pace of the social Internet is not sustainable in the long term for the human brain. Too much stimulation, too much noise, too much stress.

The ability to understand and live in a high density information world is what divides the world today. For us, the world is about data, for the majority of the planet it’s something they no longer understand.

But even for the small elite that we are, there’s a form of resilience to the obligations of the socially connected world: We can’t be at our best all the time and our life is not just the story telling we curate to our followers and friends.

For most of us, this social life is not fulfilling. I see some people leaving Facebook, people leaving even all form of Internet connection, but in fact what we need is a new set of services that helps us slow down. I have been advocating for such services for the last years, hoping that more people would join the Slow Internet Movement and start synchronizing their digital life with their inner pace.

We are definitely entering a post social, post app, post hyper consuming era : the age of emotion.

The age of emotion is the third age of the Internet and marks a certain maturity in how we as application developers should serve the user and respect its inner emotional balance.

The first age of the Internet was the age of the convenience. It’s been dominated by Google and Apple. It was about simplifying the actions that we did in the real life. Commoditizing search, access to software , commerce, payment, … A lots of companies have made their way into success by making all aspects of our lives more convenient.
But convenience has a low perceived value : I can search for something that it’s perfectly OK to forget 5 minutes later.

The second age is the age of conviviality ruled by Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and whoever facilitate the creation of new relations between people. The result is a dramatic increase of our social environment and the emergence of a social pressure: not only the number of “friends” increased but all our interactions with them are memorized. Because the business model of social is to understand and monetize our intimacy, it’s in the interest of theses services to keep the conversations open. It has an impact on the depth of what we communicate and If we don’t restrain ourselves, we can spend hours watching others private moments instead of living ours.

The new age of emotion is centered around ourselves and our lives. It’s about what matters. It’s about cherishing the moments, connecting with things that make us feel good and share them with people that can fully receive and enjoy them. It’s not about how much you consume or how many people you know, it’s about unique experience of lives. It’s about quality, happiness and emotions.

It means building slow products putting the users first and, instead of being the conductor of their lives, are a silent observers, a coaches.

It’s all about  being there without altering the experience.

Some services are in the space or moving in the space.

My friends at Path and Evernote are already in that space and with the coming update of jolicloud we will redefine the experience of your personal life. We believe the cloud is a natural extension of our life and that we can help people organize it in way that provide more emotional response and less stress.

I am sure we will see more products coming in the next year.  to start a slow internet product, it should definitely respect these 3 rules:

To be beautiful and feeling personal
To respect the user inner pace, especially regarding notification and virality
To never alter the genuity of the experience or emotions.

if you have ideas of other slow products I would be happy to track them down, please add them in comments.