Mena Trott's Mom

Last night we got back from DEMO Fall 2005 where we introduced “Project Comet,” our code name for the technologies we’re building to be the next generation of weblogging offerings from Six Apart. Apart from the excitement of finally introducing and announcing something we’ve been working on for over a year, I had the opportunity to demonstrate onstage with not only my husband, but my mother as well.

The premise for my mom’s appearance was this: People are always saying that they want to make a product that’s “easy enough for their mom to use.” Well, we want to do something more. My mom knows how to use a computer so it’s not just about ease of use: I want to make a product that my mom actually wants to use.

Here's my introduction to our demo:

I have a question for you all. Why do we think moms are so stupid? I ask this because of that “It’s easy enough for my mom to use” line that’s always thrown around. I’m Mena Trott and this is my husband Ben Trott and we’re the cofounders of Six Apart. We make weblogging software and we don’t think moms are stupid. We think we just haven’t made the product that they want to use.

When I say “mom” -- a grey-haired older woman sitting by her computer, unsure about where she’s supposed to click or even if the computer has been turned on. Well, the fact is I was born the same year that the Apple II was released and my mom knows how to use a computer. So when I say I want to make a product -- or in our case, a blogging service -- that's easy enough for my mom to use, I'm really saying that I want to make a blogging service that my mom *wants* to use. More specifically, I want to make a product that this woman wants to use.

So then I brought out my mother and I began asking her why she didn’t have the motivation to maintain her own blog. Her three major reasons?

• She feels like she doesn't have anything to say.
• She doesn’t want the world to see what she writes.
• She doesn’t have the time to keep up with blogs.

We went through all her concerns and showed how “Comet” addresses them. First, she does have things to say — she emails me and calls me constantly. If she was just to write about the family, she’d have more than enough content. But if she was to write about the family, she’d feel uncomfortable about anyone being able to read it. Therefore, we’ve provided privacy options that let only certain groups read your content. Not only that, but we provide views from the groups she has set up in dynamically driven pages that can be organized by keywords and topics. And finally, we’ve built in aggregation in both the application and the “published” pages.

We’ve taken the stuff we’ve learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with the publishing features of Movable Type and TypePad. And we’ve made it extremely media-rich. Adding photos, audio, books and music reviews, etc... is as easy as dragging and dropping files into your posting screen.

Anyway, there’s a lot going on with Comet and we can’t wait to get people using it. We’ll be talking more about it in more detail very soon.

But back to my mom.

She flew out from North Carolina to take part in the demo and she did a wonderful job. She did so well that she won a DEMOgod award! It was so great to see her go up onstage to accept her award. All of us from Six Apart who were down at Demo couldn’t have been more pleased.

The best part was spending a day and a half with her hanging out with people from work and seeing first hand what a conference is like for us -- she took part in rehearsals and went to meals with us. And since there isn’t that huge of an age difference between her (she’s 48) and some folks from Six Apart, it was easy to joke around and have her be part of the group.

My mom is the best mom in the world and she definitely deserved to be a DEMOgod!