Processing Feature Requests

I mentioned that we treat features differently from bug fixes. Here’s a “Getting Things Done” (GTD) style workflow for how we process new work requests that come in either internally or via customers:

Bug fixes either get fixed and deployed immediately or they go on our task board. All features requests end up on our Kanban board where they are then processed using a 4-stage iteration process that I’ll walk through next:

Ash has a killer blog that helps explain the practical hands on ways to follow the lean startup methodology

The slidedeck below gives you the 101 of such a systematic start-up process by combining the business model concept to shape and structure your business ideas with the customer development approach to test, prove and build them. Check-it out (and don’t forget to vote for the presentation in the slideshare contest!)

Creating Start-Up Success

View more presentations from Alexander Osterwalder.

Ninety-percent of Silicon Valley's start-ups fail not because of faulty product, but because they don't tap the right market and they don't know their customer.

Went to a great Customer Development seminar (#custdev2) at NERD last night . Searching for more content from Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

“The agile practices have to be adapted, shifting the focus somewhat from generating stuff to learning about what customers will want. Most technology start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are making something that there is not a real market for.”

So the lean playbook advises quick development of a “minimum viable product,” designed with the smallest set of features that will please some group of customers. Then, the start-up should continually experiment by tweaking its offering, seeing how the market responds and changing the product accordingly.

The goal, explains Mr. Blank, is to accelerate the pace of learning. “A start-up is a temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model,” he says.

I'm a huge fan of rapid prototypes and iteration with a tight user feedback loop. I think it's especially critical for business focused (vs technical) entrepreneurs who would require outsourced resources to build the product. Most of my innovation has come during the implementation/hacking phase of the project when all the theories and ideas are put to a real test.

I'm also a fan of training new users/early adopters (using real developers/solutions architects) on your tools/process to test your intentions. The sooner the better .. there is always new insight to be gained from testing and feedback.

I've never utilized the formal lean startup process but I've implemented something similar. Does anyone have any recent feedback on the process? What works best for your team?

Hopefully they'll let an old fart like me participate within the Boston entrepreneurial environment. I think the members of Anything Goes Lab are tired of hearing about all my posterous solutions :)

I don't even have a smart phone yet (the service plan price is what kills me). I'm trying to convince the wife to upgrade us to the latest version of the ipod touch (w/ video, camera etc).

Everybody gets knocked down.. how quick are you going to get up!

It's not how you start, it's how you finish. Just Do It

What are your dreams and goals? What steps are you taking towards achieving them?

In the video above, O'Reilly says that he sees Facebook's efforts as exploratory. "Facebook may have some things wrong here, but I'd rather have them trying to explore the space and being useful, [rather] than not trying at all," he says. "They're getting a lot of people hot and bothered...but [Facebook] is becoming more useful...And as long as Facebook is becoming more useful through their explorations, I'm all for them." 

A nice way to broadcast your Blog RSS feed to multiple services. Posterous auto-post already handles this for me and adds videos and photos to facebook fan pages but this is a nice solution for other feeds. Ping handles status updates, micro-blogging, blogging, and photo posting.

What social networks/services do you post to?

WordPress.com allows you to geotag your user profile and posts. That means you can assign an earthly location to your account and to each of your posts.

WordPress.com will soon launch a Geo Search feature that will allow people to find your posts based on their locations. To show up in the search results, you need to turn geotagging on and start geotagging your posts.

I've investigated a lot of machine readable geo formats and Wordpress did a VERY thorough job.. it generates a georss feed (two formats), has an in post geo microformat, and both geo.format and ICBM meta formats on post pages. Now all they need is text based geo format (both lat/lng and geocoding) for emails from non gps phones (like we used for our trip). Currently it relies on geotagged photos from a mobile phone (like posterous).

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No free lunch
Did you ever wonder why almost all of Google’s services are free of charge? Well, now you know. That old saying, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” still holds true. You may not be paying Google with dollars (aside from clicking on those Google ads), but you are paying with information. That doesn’t have to a bad thing, but you should be aware of it.

A good post about the type of data Google can (and is) gathering about your web habits through your usage of their tools. I actually don't have a problem with it and in some cases it can be very helpful, but users should be aware. You can use Google's Dashboard to see some of the information they have collected through your account.

You also have to wonder.. "what's next?". If you use the new mobile maps navigation will your driving data be mined to see which stores you pass each day on the way to work? Google mobile ads are already focused based on your location, will future ads be adapted based on where you drive? I'm torn.. on one hand IF I have to deal with ads I certainly want them to be relevant to be me. BUT at some point it all seems rather "big brother is watching" to me!!

As long as Google remains transparent about the data they are collecting from me I don't have as issue, the minute that changes I'm gone. I only hope there are still other options available when/if that happens.

Looks interesting.. although I've seen some discussion that it will be keyboard and mouse based (not touch screen). Bummer.. I was hoping for some pocket based Chrome OS devices. I guess that's why Google has Android!!

A couple of other sources:

Tech Crunch: Live From Google’s Chrome OS Event

Matt Cutts: Live-blogging the Google Chrome OS event

Anyone got any other good writeups?

I've just updated my various Posterous blog themes to support the new Retweet button. I originally used the Addthis share button to cover everything but there are SO many options that it takes a while to find the service you are looking for. I used the single share options landing page because Posterous doesn't support javascript (yet !!).

While I had the lid off I also added a facebook share as it's own external share button, I figure that most of my shares will come from a couple of sources. With the tight integration between Posterous and Facebook, I have a feeling the Facebook share (with share counts) will be included shortly.

I would LOVE to have post-summary (Read More) support in Posterous. While we were traveling we struggled with extremely long load times just to load/browse the latest content. As a general rule I try to put my "expensive" content after the fold to increase load performance. Forcing the reader to the post page also has a nice side benefit.. improved analytics.

I've tried to balance functionality with the clean look of Posterous in my theme designs. On my community blog I try to use [show more] links to keep the clean initial look, while allow allowing easy/direct access to the desirable content. I'd love some feedback on community blog theme and (non-post) content.. What's missing? What should be removed?

What do you think, is the tweet count really necessary? What (non feed based) services do you use to share content?

PS: I love the Posterous tagline "getting better every day".. it sure is!!

Update to the Update: Turns out you don't need to have autopost to twitter enabled, it was just a corner case bug which has already been fixed (gotta love great support). To use the retweet feature you will need to login to twitter via posterous (only once), so they can tweet on your behalf!!

Update: Looks like you need to have twitter autopost enabled to use this feature. I currently use friendfeed to post to twitter so I didn't have it enabled. I wonder why they can't just leave the RT @username off if twitter autopost isn't enabled. Maybe I should have guessed that I needed it enabled (retweet vs tweet), but I was able to set it all up on my blogs without the necessary info to make it fully work.. that's not dead simple!!

I was going to try and whip up my own but the post.ly url isn't available via the theme elements .. {CurrentPostlyURL} please!!

The first time I saw Cirque du Soleil live, I was in awe at what the human body could accomplish.. this video is another perfect example. In the days of special effects and digital post-production it is amazing to watch someone make something look so easy and natural.

It also makes me feel old, weak and out of shape.. but that's my problem not his!!

Update: Check out the Cirque du Soleil You Tube Channel. Instead of getting rid of said fat @%!, I search for more videos. At least my fingers are skinny!!

Mini-feature: Auto-embed Flickr sets and tags

Hey guys... still got a bunch of bigger things in the pipe you'll hear about soon, but wanted to let you know that now you can easily embed Flickr sets and tags. Just paste the URL, e.g. from the address bar:

Today Posterous announced a Flickr set and tag embed, their first externally sourced image based solution.

I'm not a fan of emailing images to Posterous and then having them auto-posted in Flickr. The meta data isn't used for captions, the flickr caption of all images is set to the blog post title, and the result gives me two sets of photos to manage instead of one. 

I've always felt that you should be able to master your data in the tool that is most optimized for the specific task. With this update Posterous has updated their traditional hub-spoke auto-post model to allow a bi-direction path, images in and/or out of Flickr.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what Posterous comes up with next. This video gives some great hints.

FYI: You cannot use Flickr's email upload to add photos to a set, but you can use the tag subject line option ( tags: cute "black cat") to organize them (for viewing in Posterous). You can also set default tags on all email uploaded images but there is no way to set the order of images using the tag method (you can with sets). I'm a little surprised that I can't add my Flickr Photostream to Posterous and that the resulting feed doesn't include any link or image to give any indication that photos are available (just a blank hole).

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We're also releasing a top-requested feature for our API today that makes it easy to retrieve all Sidewiki entries for an entire domain. With this addition, you can look for new entries created on any page of a website and also subscribe to them via RSS (such as this RSS feed for all Sidewiki entries on the Google Blog). See our Sidewiki API documentation for all of its details.

Entire Domain Sidewiki Feeds (finally)

When sidewiki was first released I was amazed that I couldn't monitor side wiki entries for all my pages in a single location. IF (big if) Google was developing Sidewiki to help me gather more valuable info for my sites, monitoring and moderation of comments are the most critical functions. Most of my pages already have a commenting solution, so I actually don't want people to be able to comment on the Sidewiki because I think it becomes too confusing.

Update: When specifying the feed URL, don't forget the trailing / (encoded to %2F) on your domain name and you might want to include the includeLessUseful=true to really get all the entries.

What is the scope of the comment?

I've had plenty of discussions about this with the Blogger and Google Friend Connect (GFC) teams about comment scope which has gotten me absolutely no where. Imagine you are reading a blog where the main page contains the latest N entries. If someone leaves a page comment about a specific post that happens to be on the main page, it won't make sense later when the post longer exists (on that page). That's why blogs have post comments!! I actually think overall site comments are important and that's why I've added them to a couple of my blogs and clearly marked them "Site Comments". GFC allows you to set the comment gadget scope to site or page but doesn't visually differentiate the two (again confusing). With Sidewiki the scope is the entire page (or selected text on the page).

Full URL issues

The Sidewiki uses the FULL page URL to scope the comments, which adds another layer of complexity. When I clicked on the blog post to check out the sidewiki entries, I did it from Google Reader, which came from feedburner, which had all the extra ?utm_source params. Well guess what? That's considered a different URL, so I get a different Sidewiki entry than if the parameters were removed (ah and some entries actually appeared). It's worse than that, if someone clicked the Blogger comments box (URL#comments) they'd get a different SideWiki too. Blogger's built in share appends additional a tracking parameter ?spref=xxx, and Blogger's Next Blog function appends ?expref=next-blog, even the javascript # .. ALL are treated as different Sidewikis for EXACTLY the same content!! ..Now do you understand why you need FULL domain entry monitoring and that "just check each url" WOULDN'T work?

Before you go suggesting that Sidewiki just strips the URL parameters, a lot of dynamic sites use those parameters to generate unique content per parameter set. #fail

An Opt Out Option Please

If I use Blogger, I have three commenting systems available to me; Blogger's own, GFC and Sidewiki. It's already painful enough to monitor/moderate two (especially since GFC doesn't have a notification service). An opt out option is important, otherwise the Sidewiki could turn into another unmoderated, spam riddled Google commenting system. I want an easy way to disable it!!

Actually I want an opt in option. Why should Google be allowed to drop another commenting system on my content without my permission? If the examples above are any indication, it will only be confusing to everyone; contributors, readers and page owners.

Hey Google, Comments Are Social

I must say that I am slightly confused with Google's Social stategy with respect to comments. There's Google Friend Connect, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Sidewiki, and Google social search (Orkut too). Both GFC and Google Reader have closed commenting systems and Sidewiki isn't integrated into existing Google solutions (when it could/should).

GFC seems to be Google's modern version of a commenting system but some very basic features are missing or broken; follow on notification, a central dashboard for all MY comments (on all sites) and moderation (currently broken and confusing). When a link is saved, it points to the page and not my specific comment, so I first need to find the gadget and then find my comment .. just to see if someone has replied. uggh!! My own activity stream disappears after 13 days, so I can't even use it to monitor my comments.

Most of my non-geek friends don't generate a lot of content (blogs, tweets ect), but I would be very interested in what they had to say (in their comments) about the websites they visit and blog posts they read. Will comments ever be considered as part of Google Social search?

I would love a central place where I could browse and search comments from my social graph and monitor discussions about my content.

What are your thoughts on the sidewiki updates? Or Google's Social strategy?