Spritzinc.com
This week’s blog will be short (yay head-cold!) and by short I mean “normal blog length” as most of my blogs end up reaching 800 to 1,000 words. (Lucky you regular blog readers! Newcomers! Here are some links to some of my other blogs!) This week a good friend of mine pointed out a new app called Spritz.
Spritz
Spritz is a program that increases your reading words per minute score by flashing each word separately on the same spot on the page. This allows your eye to stay in one place as you read rather than moving back and forth across a line. At first glance, I was skeptical. After all, reading hadn’t changed much in the thousands of years we have been doing it. (Yes, I am aware there are reading differences between languages.) But technology has already radically changed our day to day lives from those we had even ten years ago. And so, like many of you, my first thought was:
Prove it!
And prove it they did! Or at least made an interesting case for it. At the start of 250 wpm I was still skeptical, at 350 wpm I was intrigued, by 500 wpm I was amazed. Amazed is great way to leave your audience. There needs to be further studies done on long term retention and comprehension of material consumed at those speeds because Spritz saying it’s great and it actually being great aren’t the same thing. But as far as getting people’s attention, Spritz knows exactly what it’s doing. Update yesterday (February 26th) reads: “The actual number of users who learned to Spritz yesterday was over 1.6 million people.” Not too shabby for a product that came out four days prior. This is what it means to go viral. Of course 1.6 million people is a long way from 7 billion, but it is more attention than most new products get, unless your name is Flappybird. Spritz will never get a 100% conversion rate, just as e-readers will never fully replace books. The visceral feeling of holding a book is just too strong. But for now, go take a look for yourself. It’s a neat trick.
What do you think? Will Spritzing become a thing? Let me know in the comments below. Have questions about this or any other topic I’ve covered? Contact me. And as always if you would like more communications content delivered straight to your inbox every week, subscribe!
Truly amazing, It actually works.