Luke Janssen
Jumping off stuffArchive for March, 2011
You don’t need email addresses – the app IS your identification.
I have two apps that I use to find chords and lyrics so that I can play new songs to my baby Lucia in the morning. One is ‘Tabs’ from ‘ultimateguitar.com’ and the other is ‘TabsCrds”. I never use Tabs (in fact I just deleted it) because when I open it I am asked to enter a user name and password.
Many clients ask this too. “can we get their email address”. Why? apps is personal. The mobile is a personal media device. When I go into TabsCrds and search for a song and save it under ‘my Tabs’ they ARE mine. I don’t need to log in to get to them. As far as whoever built the app is concerned, that app IS me.
If they want to send me more interesting stuff to buy they can send me a push notification into the app and ask me. They don’t need my email. If later I post something to facebook or twitter from within the app then they know my name and a bunch of other information. But don’t ask me for it.
Unique IDs are changing. Facebook is much more personal than email and doesn’t change whereas email addresses often do. Apps themselves are unique too so why get email. When clients say that they ‘want to collect email addresses’ because of some KPI they have to ‘collect more email addresses’ I often ask why?
With the Economist iPad that we produced, it makes sense to be able to identify them because if you have a subscription you get the iPad version for free. But unless there is a benefit like that you don’t need their email. You already know who they are because they have the app. All you need to do is track their behavior so that if you can add some more value to them (i.e. sell them something they will like), Behavior is the key piece of information, not their email address.
