Being a Part of the Conversation
Let me point all FeedLounge users, lovers, and haters to this: Alex King’s del.icio.us log of FeedLounge mentions. When Alex first announced that he was doing this, I was curious to see where it would go: I’m telling you now that I’m very happy with it.
Let’s examine some reasonable motivations for doing this:
- Finding FL praise. This has got to help you at 2245 when you know you’ve still got bugs to quash and energy to do it. I get the feeling that Alex and Scott do what they do because they love it even more than they love getting paid for it; knowing that people love the products of their work has to stoke their fires to do an even better job. [Pause for a moment and consider being married to either of these two. What wonderful women they must be to put up with their husband's slavish devotions to their creative work.]
- Finding FL criticism and bugs. Constructive criticism is good, and sometimes, it comes with bug reports. Sometimes, it’s design criticism that maybe they should address [and sometimes I address it for them if I know the answer]. Not everyone wants to file bug reports on a forum, either [although you can see on the update log that they quash bugs ruthlessly and also log it publicly, which I also think is awesome]. What I really love is that neither one of them seems eager or willing to jump on the hand grenades of the critics, and that FL lovers like me aren’t doing so, either. That said, linking to them is good—you want to present a full face of your product, and doing that means that you want to highlight the faults [even if people are misinformed or wrong].
- Increasing the ambient findability of FL users. I think that FL users are, in some way, looking for a community; with a willful choice of using PunBB, I don’t think Alex and Scott want a community to develop in their forums—and being focused is fine and great, and I support that!—but I think FL afficianados can use this to slowly find each other, much in the same way that Mac users do.
I wasn’t sure that I’d be all gushy about Alex’s log at first, but I really am enjoying it a lot. Thanks, buddy.
Posted January 25th, 2006 in FeedLounge.
Tagged.
January 25th, 2006 at 12:22 pmI think that a community will grow in the forums, but the early stages here are so heavily issue driven that Scott and I need to be more involved than I hope we will be in the future.
:chuckle: Well, I could see a whole fansite forming around it, honestly—whether you host it or not is another matter. Of course, I have opinions about that kind of stuff based on my experience, and my experience may be wholly inapplicable in terms of propriety. :shrug:
January 25th, 2006 at 12:24 pm[...] Of course, not all of the feedback has been positive. Some people strongly dislike the monthly fee1, others have run into problems (many of which have been fixed). As Geof discusses, we’ve been very transparent about everything we’re doing here with FeedLounge2 and we’ll keep working to make FeedLounge the best feed reading experience out there. [...]
January 26th, 2006 at 1:34 am