Finally. After a summer filled with long hours, two complete user interface overhauls, plenty of backend headaches, and a lot of soul-searching about how best to explain what we are and what we do - we're ready.
This post comes to you from sunny San Diego as we prepare for DEMOfall09. We couldn't be more excited to meet some of the best new companies in the world and see what they're doing. But we'd be lying if we said the most exciting part of all this is having a product that works and telling everyone we can find about it.
While this is certainly not anywhere near the end of our development, it does mark a big milestone for the company and gives us a great base from which to figure out where we fit in the market, how we can best serve our customers, and where we need to focus our efforts going forward. Whether people love us or hate us, we know that all of the feedback we'll get over the next couple days is invaluable. Whether you're going to the conference or not, we'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email, tweet us, or leave a comment here.
Here's a few of the notable changes we've made:
1) New user interface.
We stripped it, toned it down, and stripped it again. Pinyadda is about providing quality web content to our users, not about giving them a visual feast every time they log in, and this new look give the content you want without any distractions.
2)New homepage.
The new homepage features a module that allows anyone to get a glimpse at the content that's being shared on Pinyadda without logging in. This is the first step in a number of changes we'll be rolling out that opens up the content experience to everyone.
3)Real-time indexing.
We were close before, but now we're there. Content is coming in hot, and we like it that way.
Yesterday was the first chance we all had to really play with the finished product as end users, and I have to say the experience was great (Finished, of course, is a relative term...). Lots of great content, easy navigation, and conversations flowing. We're a little partial, but it's truly amazing to see how far the site has come over the last couple of months. Anyone who saw the original prototype can attest to that.
We flew out yesterday, went for a swim in the Pacific, and grabbed a room at the nicest HoJo we've ever seen to get our internet on and grill each other on the pitch. Today we're headed to the Longboard Bar & Grill to watch the Patriots game (at least one of us will have a close eye on the race at Louden, too) and then it's back to the laptops for all the last minute tweaking and de-bugging we can handle. We'll be posting at the end of each day of the conference to talk about our favorite presenters and give general updates.
A big thanks to all of our team members, advisers, friends, parents, and users. We couldn't have come this far without you. You can follow the conference on twitter using the hastag #demo09. If you're going to be in attendance, you can find us at booth 65.
Showing posts with label DEMO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DEMO. Show all posts
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix
TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?
Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.
Time
RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.
At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.
On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.
Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.
Time
RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.
At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.
On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.
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