Archive for February, 2011
The Early Bird Gets … Left Behind?
Feb 10th
One of the fundamental principles of agile programming, and something that’s leaked out in to other less trendy development methodologies is the notion of “release early, release often”. In a nutshell it says you should release your software product quickly and then update it when you have a new feature or two. It’s fundamentally different to the old style approach of releasing an application when it was finished and everything was complete.
On the whole it’s a great way of doing things. It limits scope creep. It allows you to get feedback very early in the project. It ensures you’re moving forward. This is all brilliant. But that’s not to say it’s perfect.
The problem with “release early, release often” is that users often expect to see more than you’re giving them. Someone signed up as a “beta user” still has expectations that the product they’re using is going to work; releasing before your feature set has the minimum number of things required to make your product useful will put off the users who are most likely to be enthusiastic adopters of the product once it’s complete.
Broken things, ugly things, even experimental things are features a beta tester will take in their stride. Missing things though, especially things that limit the functionality of the product to the point where there’s no reason to use it, mean there’s no reason to carry on trying. The user will walk away.
That’s a key problem for a start-up. Coxing users back after they’ve given up on your app is far more difficult than getting them in the first place. I’m not going to mention any start-ups by name, but it’s something I’ve seen several times in the past month, and I have given up on the app each and every time. As yet I’ve not been back. I wish those apps well for the future, but I also know that the start-up I’m a part of at the moment will be learning from their mistake.
January Beta Round-up
Feb 1st
During January I’ve played with a few interesting web apps. From small one-man developer ideas that people are building in their spare time to big VC funded sites there are some exciting things around the corner.
About.me – http://about.me – An online “business card” app. All in all, pretty good. I’ve yet to see whether or not any of these web apps really work as a useful tool but it’s quite easy to use and pretty enough to share with people. Mine is http://about.me/chrisneale
Refynr – http://refynr.com – An app that allows you to see your Twitter stream with a set of keyword matching filters applied. It’s a great idea, but as a Twitter client it lacks most of the features you’d expect. If the technology was built into Twitter.com or Twitter for iPhone it’d be fantastic.
Accelsor – http://accelsor.com/ – An online webpage design tool. It showcases what can be done with some clever Javascript but it’s not particularly usable unfortunately. Certainly not something that’s going to replace Dreamweaver or handcoding any time soon. Fun to play with and quite inspiring though.
Streak.ly – http://streak.ly/ – A to-do list manager that simplifies the process of keeping an action list. One very innovative and exciting feature is the ability to “cheer on” other users of the site to encourage them to keep working on their tasks. Unfortunately, like Refynr, it’s something that I’d like to see implemented in the tools I currently use. The app isn’t good enough to make me switch to it (yet!).
Zerply – http://www.zerply.com – Another “business card” app. This one aims to be more for professionals than About.me, and it succeeds rather well. All the expected information is presented neatly and it even does nice extras like linking to a blog. My Zerply card is here: http://zerp.ly/onion2k
Pinterest – http://pinterest.com/ – To be entirely honest, I still don’t really know what Pinterest.com is trying to be. It’s halfway between a curation tool and a link sharing website. It looks good and it’s gaining traction with a few ‘celebrity’ users but I’ve left it alone since I tried it. Maybe I’ll go back some time.
Qwiki – http://www.qwiki.com/ – Qwiki is awesome. The concept is really simple – take a wikipedia page, put the first couple of paragraphs into a text-to-speech generator, and then play the audio alongside a slideshow of pictures that have been found with a search. For something so simple though it really does a great job. It’s easy to sit and soak up information, and for as a learning tool for kids it’ll be massive. It’s not hard to see why they’ve been getting millions of dollars of investment.
GenerationStation – http://www.generationstation.com/ – GenerationStation is a web app for building an online family tree, but in a way that rather closely resembles a social networking tool. You create a profile for a dead relative to start with, and then hang living people off that. It’s strange. I can see the appeal though. Ancestry.com has been a terrific success and merging that with a social interface is a good idea.
Whoopaa – http://beta.whoopaa.com/ – A tool that lets you manage your lifestreams from both Twitter and Facebook in the same place. It does what it sets out to do but as someone who rarely posts on Facebook it’s not something I find useful.
Infinite.ly – http://infinite.ly – Infinite.ly is a tool for creating “fan pages”. A fan page is a simple website that pulls in content from other sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr, and displays them in a nice and easy to use way. I made a page that worked in a few minutes. There appears to be another side to the app called your “Buzz Feed”, but there’s no explanation about what it does. If anyone can figure it out, leave a comment.
Globified – http://globified.com/ – I love Globified.com. It’s rather similar to Foursquare and Gowalla, but for trips and journeys instead of for every day life. You do all the usual checking in and uploading images, but there’s more emphasis on where you’ve been than where you are right now. The site looks gorgeous, works brilliantly, and actually makes me want to go somewhere just so I can use it properly.
Localmind – http://www.localmind.com/ – Hanging off the back of Foursquare, Localmind enables users to ask pertinent questions of people who have checked into a place you’re interested in. For example, you could ask people who have checked into a bar what it’s like, or ask people waiting at a station if the trains are late. It’s a cool idea but it needs more users. It’s too sparsely populated to be much use at the moment.
