Building Feedly

Entries categorized as ‘Hearbeat’

Heartbeat (February 08)

March 4, 2008 · No Comments

Time seems to accelerate as we are trying to make sure that our ducks are in a row to launch a more official feeddo invitation program. We have been having usability tests and trying to improve the experience from the time the user arrives to feeddo.com  to the time she will see her first feeddo page. There is still a lot of work to be done.

We also pushed out a few new features:

  • new cover UI
  • Integration with twitter
  • Support for Firefox 3

Our goals for March are to:

  • Continue to improve the first 45 seconds experience
  • Re-think how people discover and follow their friends (leveraging their existing social networks)
  • Improve annotations
  • Continue to simplify the user experience
  • Introduce the notion of hot topics.
  • Improve performance and memory consumption.

We are also going to continue to demo feeddo to (smart) people who are familiar with the social news space and listen to their feedback.

Finally, we have reached out to a couple of people in the management team of pheedo to try to find out if their might be conflicts between feeddo and pheedo. If there are, we might change the name of the project from feeddo to feeddio.

(Thank you to all the preview users!)

Categories: Hearbeat

Listen. Measure. Iterate.

February 18, 2008 · No Comments

Paul Buchheit (employee #23 at Google, creator of gmail and now founder of FriendFeed) has an interesting post on the importance of remaining nimble and listening to customers. I think that the comment from Dave McClure on the importance of being able to measure progress over each iteration is key. There are a lot of similarities our notion of heartbeat and organic development.

(via Louis Gray)

Categories: Hearbeat · Software · Startup

Heartbeat (January 2008)

February 2, 2008 · No Comments

After a more relaxed Dec 2007, we are back in the trenches, trying to get ready to invite more people in.

A few interesting features:

The most encouraging news is that we saw a 50% growth in the number of recommendations and annotations.

Focus for February:

  1. continue to improve the first run experience,
  2. continue to simplify the user interface,
  3. allow existing users to send invitations to their friends
  4. showcase in the UI some of the collaborative filtering services we have been building in the back end.

(Thanks to Orjan, Rajesh and Cyril for their continuous input)

Categories: Feeddo · Hearbeat

Heartbeat (December 2007)

January 7, 2008 · No Comments

Sorry for the delay. December ended up being a short but productive months with 14 iterations and lots of new features:

The number of active users remained in the 60+%.

Our focus for the first part of 2008 is to try to make feeddo simpler and more fun (as well as iron out all the existing rough edges).

(Special thanks to Cyril Moutran for his continous feedback during the month of December!)

Categories: Hearbeat

Heartbeat (November 2007)

December 1, 2007 · 1 Comment

We have been back in the trenches, trying to address all the bugs and feature requested we collected on iteration 4. We also pushed out the first iteration of the annotation feature and started to clean up the user interface. The number of active users is slowly increasing back to the 60% range.

 Feeddo November 2007

Highlight: we wired one more brain into the project so we should be able to expand our scope and speed. We decided to fund/commit to Feeddo for one more year (in December 12th, Feeddo will be one year old already).

Note: Sorry to the people you have been waiting to get in: we wanted to make sure that we absorb some of the existing feedback before we increase the volume. We should be able to add a few more people in mid-December so please stay tuned.

A very big thanks to all the people who are participating to our preview program!

Categories: Hearbeat

Heartbeat (October 2007)

October 28, 2007 · 2 Comments

October was intense: 17 iterations in 27 days.

Feeddo Heartbeat (October ‘07)

We increased the seeded number of users to 70 (+16). We started to see a drop (-10%) in the number of daily active users so we decided to circle back with them and understand their problems. I think that in a nutshell, people are asking us for 1) a simpler and more consistent user interface, 2) more co-reading capabilities and 3) richer support for non-text feed types (images, video, activity stream etc…).

This month was a confirmation that this is going to be a long marathon with rough fights along the way, so we decided to equip everyone with a 17″ high definition MacBook Pro: if we are going to fight, we want to do it with style!

November is going to be an important month for us: We are going to continue to polish and if everything goes well introduce two important new features. Stay tuned.

As always, thank you to all the preview users who invest the time to kick the tires and provide us feedback!

Categories: Feeddo · Hearbeat

Heartbeat (September 07)

October 2, 2007 · 4 Comments

September just went by. Time seems to accelerate! Here is a status update regarding feeddo:

heartbeatsept07small.png

We invited 30 additional users (the total is now 54 - aka number of seeded users). 54% of them are active - ie use feeddo at least twice a week. 75% of the active users us feeddo every day. The % of active users and % of daily users are our heartbeat. Our goal is to increase the number of seeded while maintaining the % of active > 30% and % of daily > 50%.

We also collected during the month of September a lot of feedback (both positive and negative). So we are back in the tranches working on a new iteration which will try to address some of the biggest issues ( including the inability to configure a category or a feed so that the user that read and scan articles at the same time). We are also trying to re-enforce the aspects people seem to like most: speed and simplicity of the user interface.

So thank you to our early users for their great feedback. More on the new iteration next week!

Categories: Feeddo · Hearbeat