In Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and British/Australian/NZ English, LEGO is an uncountable noun like "rice" or "sand". The Danish LEGO company used to advocate this usage by printing the following on their sets:
"Dear Parents and Children
LEGO® is a brand name that is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely appreciate your help in keeping it special by referring to our bricks as "LEGO Bricks or Toys" and not just "LEGOS". By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand that stands for quality the world over." [1]
So the singular form is clearly the manufacturer's intention, but "Legos" is widely used in North America and is just one of those words that grates if you haven't grown up with it. For whatever reason I have the same reaction when the Poms say "kit" instead of "equipment".
> For whatever reason I have the same reaction when the Poms say "kit" instead of "equipment"
This is interesting, and one I’ve never noticed.
Would you say “the drum equipment has been set up” vs “the drum kit has been set up”? Or more in the sense “the kitchen has been equipped” vs “the kitchen has been kitted out”?
Probably the latter in both cases. I'd still use the word kit to denote something that comes disassembled that you need to put together. It's more like when someone describes their new phone as a "nice bit of kit". Ugh!
The word LEGO wouldn't exist if not for the company. The wikipedia article actually doesn't say the full story about how the name came to be aka "leg godt (play well)" => LEGO came from a "naming competition" that the founder made and which he ended up winning.
The company would like that the word "Legos" isn't used as it implies that "Legos" are plastic interconnecting bricks of any manufacturer, including the ones that just blatantly copy even the newest LEGO sets.
The plural of Lego may well be Legos, but Lego is the system not the brick, so unless you've got a plurality of systems, it's gratingly wrong to call Lego bricks Legos.
Please relax. Even the company said they don't care. They're supposed to be fun, we don't need the syntax police. Now, please hand me that bendy-twoey.
Programmers being very nitpicky about syntax is kind of a thing.
US-Americans just get super defensive if they get called out on doing something different than the rest of the world. Sure it is not a big deal and I don't care about respecting the trademark of the Lego company but you can still accept that Legos is wrong. You are free to call it whatever but it will sound very grating to an international audience.
The unfortunate thing about that is that it's wrong. I don't mean the usage, I'm British so I'm firmly 'lots of Lego', but it's obviously a noun. Using it to describe a brick etc. doesn't preclude that. (It's 'attributive', or 'adjunct'.)
In “SQL Server”, “SQL” functions as an adjective modifying “Server”; its not unusual for what are normally nouns to do that, distinguished only by position(e.g
, “hat” in “hat rack”.)
Wikipedia says [0] 'adjectival noun' was 'formerly synonymous, but now usually means an adjective used as a noun'.
Regardless, it's not an adjective, much less 'always' - it's always a noun; sometimes used attributively ('adjectivally' if you like) / as a noun adjunct, such as in 'Lego bricks'.
Hi folks, I posted this > 4 months ago, but we've been through a couple of pivots since then.
I'm really happy where it's landed now and think the response has been much better this time around.
Smidge allows you to have quick and easy video conversations with customers from inside your app.
As a web user, I'm tired of seeing chatbots and chat widgets everywhere. If I want to read something, I'll read the docs. If I want to ask a question, I really just want to ask a person and get my answer as quick as possible.
As a founder, it's so hard to get customers into a conversation. We spend so much time deflecting them to KB articles and bots that we've lost the ability to engage with them 1:1 and that's what https://smidge.app is intended to do. We funnel users to the right team member and tee up a call instantly in-app.
Would love feedback whether video is a thing for folks (particularly early stage where you prob don't have a success team yet). We've found quick 5-minute conversations to be incredibly valuable.
We had this problem with our product (BugHerd) and built a solution for it. Our success rate was ~1% and we thought we could do better.
We created a JS embed that you install in your web app. It allows you to segment your users and place a call with them from within your app (using webrtc). Unlike email/calendly/zoom square dance, Smidge has a 17-20% success rate to call. It's been huge for us and we're now opening to beta. Would love feedback
(Screensharing, "request a call" and page/user calling coming soon!)
Looks good!
But it's unfortunately just another "non-self-hosted" solution. Which is of course not your problem. But if you really like to offer privacy to your users, like us, we need a self-hosted solution, so no calls goes to or over foreign servers. Even the loading of the app itself is a problem.
Yeah I can understand that. This early version requires calls be routed via a server, but being webrtc it can be P2P. We'd like to provide recording and transcription in the near future (with the appropriate user permissions).
Down the track I believe we can deliver a self-hosted solution.
Yeah, I mean, it is not a problem to have a server, it just must be ours. :) And paying for a self-hosted solution is also not the problem. We just cannot give up our users privacy, so all the request needs to go to our domains and servers.
You can also use Smidge without sending us any PII, but obviously segmentation will be limited.
Also in the next couple of weeks, with just a user id, you will be able to place a call directly from Zendesk (for example) without us knowing anything about the user.
Yep absolutely. You bucket users on your end and just pass through the user Id and the segment name. Then mirror the segment as call groups on our end e.g. segment='high value'
This looks very promising! Do you think it is a good idea to install the development environment in a lxd container and run it in production? Because I could not find any documentation for self-hosting it. Just the heruko docs..
Hey, I'm currently working on installing this for our company as internal tool. I wouldn't know. But yeah, I'm kinda doing the same and maybe using dokku/ledokku to manage my own heroku-like infra
It is a nice project, but the docs need some love. You can also hire premium support for 30usd/month directly from the creator of the project, which I'm sure would happily help you with your prod deployment!
You have also development docs on docker / ubuntu / mac / win!
We don't show the user anything until you call them (so as to not interfere with drift/intercom etc). When you call them the current UI is like a mobile call UI.
EDIT: we are working on user initiated calling as we speak (it will show availability of support staff/CSRs)
As a founder, I’ve always found it hard to find customers willing to have a conversation about our products. The vast majority of users ignore chat apps and don’t respond to emails, but we keep using these tools because it’s cheap and easy to implement. It’s a habit, but it’s becoming less and less effective. I talked to dozens of other founders and found the same problems over and over again. We talk to customers during pre-sales and during support, but that’s about it. We talk to solve and sell, but rarely to learn. I wanted to do better. So I came up with Smidge.
Smidge is instant 1:1 video chat with users from within your app. No email, no Calendly links, nothing for your users to install. Just quick easy conversations.
You install our JS in your web app and we start keeping track of who is active in your app. When you want to talk to a customer, you simply click the “call” button and we robodial users one at a time until someone answers. It sounds intrusive, but in our experience, the users of BugHerd have loved it. It’s easy for them to decline or ask to be called another time (if they decline, we won’t ever call them again). If you optionally provide user meta data, you can create call groups to segment users into buckets. Helpful for getting your CSRs on to high value clients or helping people through onboarding.
We’ve been using it on BugHerd and the response has been pretty great. Previously we’d send out an email with a Calendly link, and out of 2000 odd emails, we’d get maybe 10-20 people on to a Zoom call. So < 1%. Smidge’s success rate is around 15-20%. That means within about 3 minutes of sitting down, you’re on a video call with a user. Until now that’s never been possible (unless you collect ph number at sign up). Our product team now typically talk to 1 customer each per day. That adds up to 250 customer conversations per year that simply weren’t happening before, and it requires no planning, just some spare time to make a call.
Very keen to get some more folks trying it, and of course I’d love your feedback. I’ll be watching here, but you can also email me at alan@smidge.app
Coming soon:
- recording/transcription to help you get insights into ProductBoard or Dovetail.
- Request a call with a specific user from a link (to allow you to hook that into Zendesk, intercom or other support apps).
- Page groups (so you can get CSRs to call folks on certain pages)
I know GIFs are not exactly an "important social good", but I do like the idea of keeping RightGIF independent. We definitely want to integrate with Teams of course, so there will no doubt be conversations to be had there :)
Yeah, privacy for us has always been #1. It means we will need to monetise, but all indications are that teams are willing to pay a small amount for that privacy. We have the benefit of not wanting to get rich.
As majority owners, we certainly could have continued to run the company indefinitely as a "lifestyle business" (and there's not much anyone could have done about it). But my belief is that if you take investment you have a responsibility to those investors to return their capital come hell or high water.
At the time, we didn't entirely know whether there were still growth opportunities or what else we could try if we kept going. But we knew we wanted to keep trying. Some of our investors wanted out, and we gave them (and all the other investors) the opportunity to sell their shares back to us. It means everyone who wanted it got their money back (which for an investor is not actually a very good outcome, but better than $0), and we got to keep the company. I'm appreciative of them allowing us to do it.
Words have meanings. Some words have multiple meanings, but many people will think of the most common meaning when encountering a word outside of any context that would imply otherwise.
