At the beginning of this month I wrote about why I thought invites for uninteresting webapps could more and more be considered a type of spam. I was blaming both the users that let the app invite everyone they wanted, and the apps that just didn’t keep record of who they already spammed.

Now, there is news of a new webapp named Quechup (I’m not linking to them on purpose) that recently took it to the next level by just inviting everyone in your address book, even if you have told them not to do that. Eventually this leads to a “virus” much like those old school email viruses that spread themselves by mailing everyone in the receivers address book. The app has been in the news quite a lot, and I think it proves some of my point, including the fact that it stupid that people are starting to regard invites as something normal without thinking.

Obviously this new trend shows an even worse trend of people giving their email login details to any random app! People should realize that email functions much like a single sign-on at the moment, meaning that with your email login details anyone could get access to any of your other websites. I hope more people will start to realize that we need to develop and adopt new technologies that will enable apps to intercommunicate without having to share the login details.

(EDIT: Added a sixth point!)

I very often see ’sheep mentality’ - the masses following the masses. The thing is, masses are only intelligent when they make independent decisions. By and large the sheep mentality leads to a single random occurrence being repeated over and over again with the exact same justification:

The other guy did the same thing.

For example, my parents tend to look for busy restaurants as an indicator for quality. I’m fairly sure lots of people do that. I leave the conclusion of why this leads to incorrect quality assessments as an exercise to the reader.

While people on vacation may be excused for not putting too much thought into their dining decisions, (big) businesses doing the same thing is a real headscratcher to me.

One industry that has elevated repeating stupid decisions to an art form is the movie theater industry¹. The vast majority have cramped seats, huge queues, even when there’s no major premiere, an even larger queue at the concession stand, and they are all paranoid about piracy, blaming it for all their woes.

If you’re a movie theater guy, here are 5 6 free tips. You should make millions inside of a month, if people are anything like me and like watching movies in style.

1. Comfy seats

Convert all but the 2 biggest theater rooms (you need those for premieres) into comfy places with separate, somewhat adjustable seats for every viewer and place them only in positions where you can actually, you know, see the screen. Given the speed of DVD releases, HDTV, home cinema sets, bittorrent, and the iTunes Music Store, you’re the most expensive option on the market and unless it’s opening night you better damn well be worth the cost.

Getting stuffed into a corner, skeeved at a piracy ad insulting your intelligence, slowly getting a hernia is hardly worth 8 bucks. Ostensibly people show up for a relaxing night out with a screen bigger than even the best HD tv has to offer. You should probably deliver on that expectation. Given that the vast majority of your customers are repeat visitors, you’d think this was obvious, but for some reason common sense seems to be a precious commodity in your industry. At any rate, personal experience tells me that the vast majority of showings don’t sell out, which effectively means you have lots of seats taking up space anyway. All this will cost you is the price for some new seats. Big deal.

This doesn’t just make sense in general, it really makes sense: It is my understanding that the share of the movie ticket sales for the movie theater goes up the longer it’s been out. In other words, those packed seats, which are useful mostly for premieres, aren’t getting those movie theaters much income. Actually trying to cater to people who want a good experience for a movie that’s been out for a while just plain makes sense. Instead, those get stuffed in the smallest crappiest rooms in a small chair while the whole theater is empty.

The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that they’re all sheep, incapable of a single original thought.

2. Fix the queues

I know the tech savvy crowd isn’t exactly beating a path to your door, but the number of hoops you have to jump through to reserve a ticket is ludicrous, and usually you still have to stand in a long queue instead of being able to scan a card or a printed barcode or some such, or just enter a reservation code on a terminal. With 30 minute queues, people will learn to use the computers. The local megatheater in Rotterdam actually has 1 machine, and 4 out of the 5 times I’ve been there, it was broken. You could try to treat movie downloaders as murderers… Or you just make it a little easier for them to, you know, give you money. The fact that reservation systems usually expect you to show up a full hour early just to get your tickets is another interesting point. It’s a movie, not a ticket for an overseas flight!²

Concessions are another mystery. A long line for concessions automatically means people just plain skip them. Concessions are easy profit for movie theaters - the markup is large and they don’t have to share any of it with hollywood. More importantly, watching a 3 hour movie while thirsty is not a good experience at all. Unlike DVDs, you can’t pause the theater so you can’t just get up and get a drink without missing anything. This leads to…

3. Breaks are good

Only a few theaters add a break to movies. I get that a break is a logistical nightmare, but almost everyone gets more drinks which is excellent profit, and, frankly, I have deep respect for someone who doesn’t need to take a pee break for the recent rash of 3 hour movies that hollywood has been pumping out. Not every movie is 3 hours, so just break those. Or, don’t break premieres, just break showings that are unlikely to be fully booked. There should be absolutely no problem for your concession stand to handle that sort of thing. If it is, have a second stand inside and open it up just for a break. You get both profit AND create a better movie experience for your clients.

4. Some courtesy would help

In the olden days, friendly movie hosts with a lightwand would escort people from the top of the stairs to their seats if they wanted it. Now they stand at the doors doing idiotic³ ticket checks to make sure everyone that walks in has a ticket, eventhough that’s been checked multiple times already. The elderly, the injured, and the generally impaired now get to narrowly avoid tumbling down the stairs or stepping on a bunch of toes as they try to make their way to the seats in the dark. After all, with over 20 minutes of ads and trailers, hardly anyone arrives ‘on time’ when all the lights are still on.

5. Learn Human Psychology

Your average piracy ad tries to equate piracy with theft. This is just plain stupid. If there is a pirate in the crowd, apparently he likes your theater more than his computer screen. Makes sense. So why alienate the pirates in the audience? Calling someone a criminal is a bit, you know, awkard. I saw an intelligent piracy ad, exactly once, which was a recording behind the scenes of a dutch movie production, where the various cast members thanked the camera (=audience) for supporting them by visiting the cinema. More of those please, because positive messages work better - that’s psychology 101. I actually know that the budget of dutch movies is mostly tax money, but the point remains: That little piracy ad actually made me feel better for watching that movie in a theater.

NB: Half of the points in this article were actually raised by Cristiano when we discussed this in the apple store two days ago.

6. Re-run old movies

This bonus point is inspired by danw’s comment on news.ycombinator.com.

Take one of your new comfy seat theaters, find some old movie with a serious cult following (I recommend Blade Runner especially now that the real director’s cut has been released this year), set up a viewing or two, and make sure you set up a little meet and greet with fellow movie watchers either before, or during a break, and leave it there (with a bar, of course!) after the movie’s over. That way, cult fans from all over the place will go watch their favourite movie on your large screen in your comfy seats, paying you handsomely for drinks, to meet new people with similar interests. Play your cards right and you could kick off the new dating fad. And more people dating has got to be good news for the movie theaters. It’s win, win, win, and some more win.

Recently I have been spoiled with invites for so called “private Betas“, so much even that I had to add some of these web companies to my spam list. I simply don’t even want to try out these web apps anymore, because they simply annoyed me too much.

What is the problem? It is that these web2.0 tools have every new user select everyone from their Gmail/Hotmail/YahooMail contact list and send them a mass invite. Not only is this not personal, it can also lead to more than 10 invites for one person. I already received 11 invites for Doostang, an app that I am not going to try, although it might be very useful. (I actually received more that 1 invite from 1 person! Thank you Chakib!)

I seriously like some of the new web apps, but in the beginning of the “invite”-hype it was an honour to get an invite simply because they were scarce. These days, an invite is as common as the air we breath (although I don’t consider air spam!) and I simply consider them spam because they annoy me and I can’t seem to unsubscribe from them. Invites these days are overrated, impersonal, and highly annoying.

So how can web apps change this phenomenon? A couple of things come to mind. First of all I would like to see a “refuse all future invites”-button that I can click to stop (so-called) friends from sending me invites. If I can’t do that, than an unwanted invite means as much to me as unsolicited mail - a.k.a. spam.

Secondly, I think that any product should be able to engage people to make contacts on their own. If people need to make contacts to further enjoy their product, then it will automatically motivate them to invite their friends. And if I get a personal invite from a friend via Twitter, MSN, or email, then creates so much more impact than some automated message. Obviously the problem that arises here is that if your product actually sucks, it makes sense to have people invite their friends automatically as soon as you can!

In the end I realized that any web app that has to use some kind of automated and impersonal invite scheme to got their users to invite their friends is probably a rubbish product to start with. So remember, if anyone send me loads of invites for the same product, I will automatically thank you for the “regard this product as useless”-notification you just virtually generated.