Building Feedly

Re-blogging… Thank you Jenny. I think I need a cookie now.

Thanks to digg diggest, 聚笑之地, 小飞的足迹 and 自然卷, we now have chinese users. Welcome!

Update Dec 2nd: The problem related to the use of the Microsoft Yahei font has been identified and addressed as part of the 1.2.95 patch. Special thanks to Bo for his help in this process.

We are continuing to trend in the right direction: people read their feedly more often, read more articles and tweet and share more. The only metrics that is lagging behind is the number of annotations.

Next steps: Get feedly 2 out and work hard to get on the firefox recommended add-on list.

Special thanks to all the users who continuously provide us feedback and  help us improve the experience.

Special thanks for spreading the good word.

Nov 10, 2008 at 13:45pm PST.
We melted our servers. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working as fast as we can to get things back and and increase capacity. We will update this post as soon as we have more information.

Nov 10, 2008 at 14:30pm PST.
The service is back up. We are going to try to learn from it and avoid the same problem in the future.

Quick poll: as part of our clean up process, we have been walking through the stream of feedback we have been receiving on twitter and get satisfaction during the last 4 months. One open issue/snake is the confusion between “feedly recommend” and “google reader share”. One way to address this issue is to rename “feedly recommend” into “feedly share”. The benefits are 1) we leverage the mindshare built by google reader, 2) share takes less space than recommend in the UI (specially in the coming sidebar). The downside is that it will be a little less intuitive for first time, non-google reader users (which is our ultimate target audience - hopefully one day!). I am thinking that we should try the rename and listen to what people say. What do you think? If you have a strong suggestion one way or the other, please leave a comments or shout @feedly on twitter.

Update: Thanks for the feedback both here and an twitter. We decided to experient with the change as part of patch 1.2.68. We will listen to what people say and what types of questions new users ask and report back if we learn anything interesting.

Not a lot of blog activity over the last couple of weeks. No, we have not been blown out of the water by the financial crisis (yet). We have been heads down, coding, fixing bugs and preparing for some of the changes and enhancements we will be rolling out in November.

Note: It is vacation time for some of us so the level of responsiveness might drop a little bit over the next week or so. But the team will continue to listen to http://www.getsatisfaction.com/feedly in case you run into a P0.

We decided to spend one more day and try to polish some additional rough edges: new dahboard UI and new source navigation on what’s new and the river, new screensaver and a couple of other minor UI adjustments. You should get all these as part of 1.2.44 next time you restart the browser.

We just pushed out the 1.2.38 patch set. It fixes all the bugs reported against 1.2.37 over the last 5 days.  You should get the patch automatically next time you restart the browser. Although we are working on a couple of new features, we are also going to give a big push in the next 4 weeks to polish out bugs, speed up the start time and try to reduce the memory footprint. If you run into any rough edge, please shout @feedly on twitter or post an issue on get satisfaction, we will try to response to every request in less than 12 hours.

(Special thanks to romulo, psykik, orjan, phil, yanick, vsl, genuis boy).

I read this post on Fred Wilson’s A VC blog yesterday about DonorsChoose and found the initiative very interesting: targeted at helping teachers and kids, based on specific projects and powered by a fraud-free delivery mechanism. It inspired us to try to do something. So we did. We took a few hours today, mapped some of the most visited feedly blogs who participate to the DonorsChoose program and wired them into feedly.

For example, if you go to TechCrunch, AllThingsD, Engadget or Scobleizer in feedly you will see that their Donor’s Choose widget is now embed in the location we have reserved for their ads. We will also rotate randomly their widget on the What’s New Page and the feedly category pages.

This is what it looks like:

We have pre-wired ten of the most visited sources in feedly. If you are a blogger and participate to DonorsChoose, email me your id and the URL of your blog and we will wire you in as well. If you have never heard of DonorsChoose, you might want to read Fred Wilson’s post…he might inspire you to help.

We just finished the clean up work we started a couple of weeks ago: in 1.2.32, we migrated out z.feedly.people. The result is that feedly does no longer create any tags in Google Reader and recommendation feeds will no longer polute the all category. The migration will happen transparently next time you restart your browser. Time to call this snake dead and focus on beta 2.

The service we are using for our content distribution (fileburst) is having some reliability issues. This unfortunatly translates into css and image files being periodically not loaded in feedly. If you are part of the users experiencing this problem, we appologies. We are working on addressing this problem and hope to have a solution in place by the end of the week end. We will update this post as we make progress.

Update Saturday 3:30pm PST: Fileburst seems to have addressed the issue. Everything should be back to normal. We are going to continue to learn from this and create a backup plan in case it happens again.

Update Monday 8:00am PST: Fileburst seems to be having problems again and despite their best effort, does not seem to be handling the load. We will be migrating part of the resources to a new service. We should be done by this evening.

We are spending a few cycles this week to improve the integration between feedly and Google Reader. This includes removing all the feedly tags from google reader. Tonight with 1.2.30, we made a step in the right direction by migrating z.feedly.favorite, z.feedly.seeded, z.feedly.annotated and z.feedly.partial. Next: migrating out z.feedly.people. This should all happen transparently under the cover.

Next time someone tells you NO, just watch this video and persevere. Entrepreneurial spirit at its best.

We just pushed out 1.2.28. Here is a list of the changes included in that new version:

• New layout in the what’s new and category pages.
• New recommendation logic (applied to cover, what’s new and header section of the category pages).
• Progress of the correlation of duplicates articles and recommendations (you can see some of the results of this in the wall).
• Better people search+follow experience.
• Unread only option checked by default
• Improved Google Search overlay

We hope that you will like it. Just shout if you see any regressions.

The team has been busy coding. We will be releasing over the next few days some small UI changes to a subset of the user base. These are related to a set of significant changes we are preparing for the October iteration. The over arching theme is to reduce clutter, compress information and remove duplications. The first set of experiences we will be running are going to be on the “What’s New?” and “The River” pages. If you bumped into one of them and do not like what you see, let us know through twitter (@feedly) or through email edwink@devhd.com and I will forward to the design team. Thanks!

A few people have been annoyed by feedly patching itself too often. We discussed this issue at our Friday team meeting and decided to make a few changes:

change #1) we reduced the size of the patch from the initial 500K to 250K.

change #2) patching will be limited to one patch per week during the beta process (and one patch per month once feedly is out of the beta process).

change #3) once we are done with the beta cycles, we will have a knob to turn off the automatic patching.

We hope this will address most of the concerns which have been raised so far. Please let us know if not.

Thanks to this tweet,

we are starting to see some Norwegian users on feedly.

Welcome and looking forward to listening to your suggestions!

(Thank you erikso)

On behalf of the feedly team, I would like to thank all the people who took some of their precious time and contributed reviews on the Mozilla Add-ons site: Thanks to your help feedly graduated from the experimental status to the public add-on status! Let’s continue to make a little bit of progress every day!

If you have 38 minutes, here is an interesting video:

3 thoughts come to mind:
1) what a come back!
2) this is the exact type of transformations Yahoo needs
3) Larry Ellison has not changed much in 11 years.

You have probably heard about TraceMonkey. If not, I recommend that you read these 3 excellent post about it: Brendan’s Roadmap Update, John Resig’s update and Ajaxian’s article. As pointed in the 3 articles, this is a very promissing development and will change the playing field.

Specifically for feedly, it means that we are going to be rewarded for having chosen to implement streets and the feedly client in Javascript. Let me explain: everytime you load a feedly page, somewhere around a 100,000 lines of Javascript code start executing - involving both content aggregation, service integration, caching, content analysis, filtering, layout, etc. etc.. Thanks to TraceMonkey, all this code is going to be traced and just-in-time compiled and run much much faster. The nicest part is that all of this magic happen transparently (both from the developer perspective and from our users perspective).

If you want to experience some of that, simply install one of the latest 3.1 firefox builds and run a 1.2.x version of feedly on it.

Mozilla team: you rock! (I wish Mozilla was a public company…)

I usually do not use this blog for personal use but this is a cause that is very close to my heart and I try to do everything I can to help.

I am writing this post to increase the awareness of a fund raising event organized by Abilities United (formerly C.A.R.).

What is Abilities United?

Abilities United is an organization which supports and promotes the achievements of people with developmental and other disabilities so that they can continue to be valued members of our communities. What they really are is an amazing group of people who help day-in and day-out small kids with development delays and disabilities. They are amazingly kind, patient and generous, to both the kids and their parents. They make a real and lasting difference in the life of the people they interact with, in ways which are difficult to describe using words.

What is this aquathon/fund raising about?

It is about helping them continue to do what they already do so well.  It is a way to participate in their cause. It is a way to say thank you. It is a way to help kids with disabilities.

How can you help?

I understand that this year the economy is not really helping and you are probably already solicited for a lot of other important causes but if you can here are 3 ways you can help:
1) You can create a team and participate in the event.
2) or you can support Janel Astor’s team (Janel is the directory of the children’s development services).
3) or you can let other people know about this through a tweet or a blog post.

If you can afford it, even a small donation can add up and help them reach their goal. If you do, please email me at edwink@devhd.com and we will try to see what feedly/DevHD can do to try to match that.

Thank you!

Nice to see the feedly+tumblr integration in action: http://clipotech.net/. Two options: 1) simply highlight and select the create tumblr quote action or 2) create multiple annotations and generate a tumbr post.

During the Collaxa funding process, we got the chance to meet with Nico Nieremberg. Nico is an excellent architect and an experience entrepreneur from whom I learnt a lot - despite the little time I had the chance to spend with him.

One of the lessons learnt was to force yourself to step back and analyze in depth how you are different: take your team, get in a conference room with a white board and create a list of all the differences you can think off between you and your competition. Once you have the list, determine which ones are measurable, which ones are defensible and which ones are creating the most value to your customers.

Every time we go through this exercise, it helps us get all on the same page and have a clearer picture of where we want to spend our time. Simple exercise but very useful.

Version 1.0b4.50 is out. You should see 20-35% performance improvement depending on the number of sources you subscribe to.

We are in the process of merging in some important changes as part of the “getting ready for beta 2″ process. Please expect a little bit of turbulence between now and next wednesday (hopefully we are getting better at that process and it will be less shaky than last time. Have a great week end!

Turbulence

Over the last 6 weeks, quite a few people reported some frustration regarding using feedly due to the fact that the magazine like experience was making scanning less productive. These murmurs were usually coming from more sophisticated users who love RSS because it allows them to absorb and process more information. Although it is not our core audience, we decided to invest a week and re-design our “all” tab into a more productive “river”.

This evening, we pushed out 1.0b4.44, which included the first iteration of that river:

• Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
• Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand the full content (including ff, digg and comments) inline.
• Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
• Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling
• Summize-like notifications when new articles are published.

We hope that this is a step in the right direction and it will address some of the frustration of people who like the design, recommendation and sharing capabilities of feedly but did not want to give up too much productivity in exchange.

We will probably spend a few more cycles on polishing the river next week-end so if you run into any bugs or have suggestions on how to improve the river, please shout!

Thank you,

Edwin

Jason Calacanis has a very good post about demos.

Here is a summary:

1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds

2. The best products take less than five minutes to demo

3. Leave people wanting more

4. Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do

5. Understand your competitive landscape–current and historical

6. Short answers are best

7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death

8. When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line… only!

9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to…

10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15 min early

Updated: Here is a link to a version from Dave Winer. A document he published in 1991!

Getting a lot of questions regarding keyboard shortcuts. Although they are a little hidden, feedly has some existing support for keyboard shortcuts. Press ? to see the list. Here is a screenshot:

Although I am personally not a keyboard person, my favorite is gg: a simple way to search and navigate around sources and categories:

Note: One of the members of our team is a big quicksilver fan so expect to see more in this area (as well as better integration with the searchbox so that less technically savvy people can also benefit from some of these features)

Thank you to “feedly, organiza tu Google Reader de forma vistosa” and welcome to all the Spanish feedly users.

Thank you to “Feedly: потрясающий RSS ридер «газетного типа» на Google Reader API” and welcome to all the russian feedly users!

We are back in the trenches preparing for beta 2 so please expect the blog to get quiet. Please shoot at @feedly on twitter if you run into any problems. If everything goes well, we should be back out in about 10-15 days.

If you are a bloglines user, read this blog and would be interested in a small experiment we are about to run, please send me an email to edwink a. devhd.com. Thank you!

We would like to publicly thank Sarah for her Read/Write Web review of the feedly+google search experiment. It inspired quite a few people to kick the tires, sparked some interesting conversations and generated a lot of positive vibes all over the globe.

Got the chance to meet with Nik and get a braindump on the TechCrunch tablet project. The project is ambitious but I think that they did a good job scoping it down and they are making good progress on the hardware side. I also think that he has a good understand of some of the important issues around virtual keyboard, gestures and the importance of having not only a browser but something open and extensible. After listening to Nik, I got the feeling that he/they are trying to create a community to build android for the tablet.

Nik gave me an image of the software stack. I am going to try to get up to speed with it and see if there is anything I can do to help in there firefox vs. webkit decision.

PS: The TechCrunch “Offices” have one of the nicest Oak tree ever!

A lot of people have been asking in one way or the other for a more productive, river-like view in feedly. Something simpler, with better unread only filtering and easier to scan. We are going to take a couple of days and see how far we can get on this. Will report back on our progress on Monday. Have a good week end.

Update: We found a couple of interesting ideas around this theme: 1) better, faster and smoother scrolling, 2) ability to inline in-place the entire content of the article (including comments, digg information and friendfeed information) and fixing the bug preventing users to select unread only in the entire content inlined view. We addressed 1). We will incrementally push 2) and 3) out over the next week or so. Thanks to all the people who provided suggestions!

I love it when users start contributing to the product: SLAX has created a complete and great looking dark skin for feedly (there are screenshots of what the skin looks like on his website)

This is awesome: 1) we are going to see what we can do to integrate it back into the product and 2) we are going to work with SLAX to understand how to simplify the skinning process.

@SLAX: Thank you!!!

A few people have reported on twitter, friendfeed and getsatisfactions issues regarding accessing feedly. We are looking into the problem and trying to track down the root cause of what seems to be a DNS issue. Sorry for the inconvenience. We will update this post as soon as the problem is resolved.

Update: July 31st, 12:40 am. This problem seems to only impact a small percentage of the users so we are still not sure if it is caused by an issue by our name registrar or if it is a replication problem. We are working on changing our name registrar. We are going to look at this problem again tomorrow morning. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Update: July 31st: 10:10 am. We decided to transfer our registrar and DNS server to your main registrar (the one we currently had to use because we bought the domain from seems to have some broken parts). The turbulence might therefore continue until the domain transfer is complete (they mentioned 1 to 7 days). People have reported 2 work arounds so far: 1) if you use OpenDNS you can temporary switch back to the DNS of your internet provider, 2) if you are technically savy you can manually change you host file with 88.191.18.64 www.feedly.com

Update: July 31st: 11:21 am. Transfer completed. DNS server changed. The change should replicate in the next hour or and everything should be back to normal. Special thanks to DNS expert (@davidu) for reaching out!

Update: July 31st: 12:04pm. the new DNS server information have replicated across. OpenDNS is now resolving feedly.com correctly. We should be back into clear skies. Sorry again for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!

Note: It is important to note that this did not have anything to do with Open DNS. See comment from David.

Here it is: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080730/mozillas-john-lilly-speaks/ John is definitely the right CEO to get Firefox and Mozilla to new hights: He is super smart but he also understand why open is important and why usability matters. A unique blend. Just what is needed to drive the mozilla team I think and foster open innovation.

We followed dep’s suggestion and built a dig extension for streets and integrated both the number of diggs and the last 10 comments into the article view. Here is an example:

feedly+digg integration in version 1.0b4.23

If you are a feedly and digg user, please let us know what you think.Thank you to dep for the suggestion.

Based on hoshposh suggestion, we enhanced the feedly+friendfeed integration to allow you to publish directly to your friendfeed rooms:

(Note: the friendfeed APIs are some of the nicest out there. If you are looking at designing a set of REST+JSON APIs for your service, I would recommend that you look at what the friendfeed team has done).

Updated: 1.0b4.22 was enhanced to allow suport for private rooms and includes a fix which allows users to publish more than one annotations.

We are going to put the feedly servers off for 2 hours to do a database upgrade and some schema changes. If everything goes fine, feedly should be back up by 9:30pm PST. Sorry for the inconvenience and have a great week end!

Update: 8:05pm PST. All the services are back on and available. Everything should be back to normal.