We’ve often talked about creating a running feed of what the rest of the team is doing across various developer-oriented sites that we use and then inviting others to see that feed as well. What started as some informal discussion was launched into the world in the wee hours of Saturday morning with minimal fanfare. That idea now has a name: FeedStitch.
What is it?
In brief, it’s a simplified feed aggregator that generates feeds that are designed to be shared with others. That’s it. The key to this being a useful tool relies on it being simple with a focus on sharing. While many sites assume that you want to share feed data as a web page, we think the real value is in sharing in other computer-readable formats like RSS and JSON. To see how easy it is to use, let’s step through an example – we’ll create a feed to stalk keep up-to-date with the FeedStitch developers.
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We posted recently about SpeakerRate, our first official Pointless Project. It was behind a private beta wall, and we invited in a small group of folks to provide feedback so we could make it better before releasing it to the world. Their feedback was great, and some of it was “why the wall?” For this kind of app, the wall seemed to really hinder the full experience.
The most obvious use case for SpeakerRate is this:
- Speaker creates an account and adds her upcoming talk (if it’s not in there already — many are).
- On the last slide of her presentation deck, Speaker adds something like: “So, how’d I do? Let me know at speakerrate.com/[username].”
- Attendees go to speakerrate.com/[username], rate Speaker’s talk, and leave some constructive comments.
- Speaker reads the comments and learns how she can give a better talk next time.
Pretty simple. The problem with the wall was that it blocked Step #3 above. So, down came the wall.
Good ideas and feedback continues to come in, which is helping us make SpeakerRate better. Keep it coming!
In case you missed it, the always inspiring Doug Avery wrote a great post on Viget’s Inspire blog about the design process he went through to create the Pointless Corp. logo.
I was there for the early sketches of hydras, half-amputated fingers, and platypuses (platypi?). The bear-on-a-bike sketch, though, immediately jumped out at all of us. What could be more pointless than that?
At Viget, we usually advise startups not to get hung up with an elaborate logo mark design process. Part of the fun of Pointless, though, is that we can experiment with things without the normal constraints of client work. I must say, when a logo design process goes well, it’s a lot of fun.
Over the past few months — even before we formalized the concept of Pointless Corp. — we’ve been working here-and-there on a project called SpeakerRate. SpeakerRate is a community site for event speakers, attendees, and organizers. We’ve been all three of these at one point or another, and we felt that a site like SpeakerRate would be helpful for each role.
At SpeakerRate:
- Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.
- Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they’ve attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
- Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.
We’ve used it for a few weeks at Viget while we worked out the kinks, loading in some 2008 event data and and a few ratings. One of the things I like about the concept is that it’s a community site that was immediately useful, even with a very small number of users. If it grows and more people are active, great — the value builds over time. But, unlike a lot of web start-ups, it doesn’t have the same “cold start” problem that many community sites have.
As of today, we’ve opened it up to a small group for more feedback and tire-kicking. If you’d like to check it out early, submit your email and we just might invite you in. Either way, expect to launch publicly in the next few weeks. Thanks for checking it out.
As you can see in a couple places on this site if you look carefully, Pointless Corp. is neither pointless nor a corporation. It’s a place where we folks from Viget Labs can get together to build little web projects when we’re not busy with client work. In some ways, it’s nothing new — like most consulting firms, we work on internal and open source projects all the time. In other ways, it’s completely new — it’s a new effort to make better use of our downtime, strengthen our teams, experiment with new technologies and processes, and try out some of the ideas that we can’t help but kick around at the Lab.
What will Pointless Corp. become? We don’t really know yet. We hope it will take us in lots of different directions, and, as the Pointless Man — or, the Pointed Man, depending on your point of view — once pointed out, “a point in every direction is the same as no point at all.” We also hope that you, our loyal blog readers, twitter followers, and app users will share with us your thoughts and criticisms along the way.
We’re looking forward to the journey.