True Grit - The Official Gritwire Weblog

Gritwire outbound emailing fixed

Ian — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:34:00 +0000

Apologies to anyone who has attempted a password reset in the last week or so. That, along with emails for friend requests and article recommendations weren't going out. Everything is sorted now, so fire away!

New look, new URLs, and lots of new features...

Ian — Fri, 19 May 2006 17:14:00 +0000

As I'm sure regular Gritwire users have noticed, we look a lot different. The home page of our main site, www.gritwire.com, now includes a list of what our users think is the most worth reading on the Web. How is that determined? Check out the page on how we rate.

The original version of Gritwire, which we have been calling the WebTop, is now available at webtop.gritwire.com. We're planning to put out more concepts and cool toys, so we now have a Gritwire Labs Page to keep you posted on what we're up to.

The new version of Gritwire, available at my.gritwire.com, focuses more on the SpeedFeed Reader, and also on space efficiency. Several people had commented that the bottom toolbar took up a lot of room, so we've knocked that out of this version. Definitely looking for feedback, because as you see, we listen.

Features, features, and more features. I encourage you to explore www.gritwire.com and my.gritwire.com to find what's new and interesting. I'll post more about the new features, such as the user gritlists (here's my gritlist), in the coming days.

Gritwire get's 'Crunched

Ian — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:36:00 +0000

Thanks to Frank Gruber for his review of Gritwire in his TechCrunch post, The State of Online Feed Readers. I spoke with Frank earlier this week, running through the various features offered by Gritwire. He didn't mention where the post would land, just that it wasn't going to be on his Somewhat Frank blog.

As happens with a TechCrunch mention, there's been a flurry of signups and postings. I really appreciated this post from a new Gritwire user.

PC Today profiles Gritwire

Ian — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:29:00 +0000

We received a product review in the May 2006 edition of PC Today. The first page of the article is available here: Gritwire Free Web-based RSS & Podcasts

One interesting piece of misinformation is that it suggests we've been online for only six weeks?? A pre-alpha-version of Gritwire was up June '04, which was followed quickly in July with a slightly-less-pre-alpha-version of Gritwire, and the WebTop version of Gritwire was launched leading up to our sponsorship of the Syndicate Conference in December.

Outside of that erroneous detail the writeup is primarily a functional description of our features. We're hoping to fix a couple of mentioned "shortcomings" including reintroducing a feed directory and improving access to instructions...although our real goal is to be easy enough to use that instructions are unnecessary. As alway, if you DO have questions or ideas, you can contact me via this blog, email, or phone.

Tip: Double-clicking

Ian — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:48:00 +0000

Thought I'd throw up a couple tips today for power users.

A quick way to maximize a widget or return a maximized widget to its standard size is to double click the header bar.
Double click on any story in the SpeedFeed Reader to pop open a new browser window with the full story.

We've got some fun new features brewing. Please keep the suggestions coming for things you'd like to see!

Flexible Folder, SpeedFeed, and Quicklink Ordering

Ian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Continuing through the list...

New Feature: Folder and SpeedFeed Ordering

This feature was built into both the SpeedFeed reader and the QuickLinks widget. One thing people had asked us for on several occassions was the ability to order their folders, feeds, and quicklinks. That is now possible just by dragging and dropping on the main interface.

At the moment there's one small bug, but there's a workaround. If you try to drag something to the top of the list, it'll give you an "x" signaling it's not a place you're allowed to drop the item. However, if you just drop it in the second place down, you can then drag the top item below it. Yes, it's not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Rolling Recommendations

Ian — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:45:00 +0000

Apologies on the continuing weather issue. We're debating the merits of two possible solutions and still haven't made much headway on actually implementing either of them...

New Feature: Gritwire Recommends...

If you've seen the WebTop, you've seen our "Gritwire Recommends..." folders. There are recommended SpeedFeeds and recommended QuickLinks seen both when you first get to the site and after you have logged in. There were three reasons we added these.

We wanted to show some of our wares to those of you who have not yet signed up. However, it really didn't make any sense to show you empty SpeedFeed Reader and QuickLinks widgets. Recommendations give you something to play with to get the flavor of what we're up to.
There are still a lot of people who don't understand what this whole syndicated content thing is about. RSS, what? Podcasts, what? By giving some starter info we're hoping that those peole will find the site useful even without understand that it can be customized.
Lastly, there are more random and interesting sources of information out there than you or I or any one person knows. We'd like to use the recommends feature to keep you up to date on what's fresh.

First Impressions

Ian — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:45:00 +0000

Some of the great user experience and design minds of our time have made a point of nailing the first impression. I recently read the following,

"Another aspect of the Mac OS x UI that I think has been tremendously infuenced by [Steve ] Jobs is the setup and first-run experience. I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions...I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user ’s overall experience with the machine,but it ’s the most important one-thousandth, because it ’s the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression." -John Gruber

A complaint we had received was that users didn't know what to do when they first got to Gritwire. Today we changed our login/signup widget to be center stage, large font, and hopefully self-explanatory for whatever option you might be hoping to select: login, signup, or learn more.

New Feature: Anonymous Access

Another addition in this version is the ability to play around with the widgets in the background without requiring a signup first. We hope this anonymous access also helps make a good first impression by showing a potential user some of the tools they'll have in their new web toolbox.

As always, any thoughts or suggestions are welcome. Please especially think about your first impressions when looking at Gritwire. Also, how does or doesn't that match your continued experience?

Site Update

Ian — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 02:47:00 +0000

We've made some changes to the Gritwire WebTop. After a quiet rollout we've been working away at fixing bugs and smoothing out rough spots. I'll go into more detail about the updates in future posts, but here's a quick list:

Anonymous access
Recommended SpeedFeeds
Recommended Quicklinks
Quicklinks folders
Folder, Quicklink and SpeedFeed ordering
SpeedFeed and individual article ratings
Videocast support
Discussion messaging
Weather

Something strange seems to have happened to the weather widget today. We've been able to let the widget directly pull the weather from Yahoo! with no problems for the last couple months. Today the widget can't access it anymore. Our best guess is that Yahoo! removed what's called a cross domain file that allows remote flash files to access content on their site, but we're not sure that's what it is. We can fix it though, and we will do as soon as we can.

As I said, more to come describing these new features.

Thanks For a Great Launch

Ian — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 21:40:00 +0000

Yesterday was a fantastic day. I want to send out some thank yous and address a couple blog posts we've received.

First, I want to say thanks to Steven Cohen. We began a conversation at the PubSub table and he immediate fired up Gritwire and started beating on it. In two minutes he'd found enough small to medium sized bugs that I was sure we were soon to receive a good thrashing on his blog. Didn't happen. We fixed up a couple of the more significant issues within the next couple hours, so when we spoke later in the afternoon I was happily able to show him an already slightly better product. The Gritwire review he posted today is much appreciated. And happily again I can report that we're on top of the problems he's finding--the OPML importing feature should accept files exported from Bloglines now, and we've got some plans to make it a faster/better process soon. Steven, thanks for the post, thanks for the patience, thanks for the bug reports, keep them coming.

Another posting Steve helped prompt can be found over at TechCrunch. Again, reviews are much appreciated, so thanks Michael. Couple notes on the review: images do show up for many/most feeds, sometimes they take a second to display, and we are working on this and other formatting and display issues in the display pane of the reader; alerts should only pop up if someone requests friendship within the network, recommends a feed or article, or if a shared wiki is updated by another user--sounds like we just need to do a better job of explaining what the alert function is there for. The lambasting of the party was great :-) I've got a few simple responses. 1) I'll argue in favor of the economics of the party all day, you'd be amazed how accomodating and inexpensive a bar is when they're offered guaranteed business on a Tuesday night--thank you to The Cellar for their cooperation. 2) We ran demos all night, all of them requested, and the interest and response was excellent. 3) Hmmm...for this one I wanted to say "stop by the party next time before knocking it," but as you pointed out you were testing Gritwire out and writing the review. I appreciate that too much to criticize, so ignore 3. Sincerely, thanks for taking a look at us, and I hope we can address the problems you noted in the near future.

A bit more on the party. Thank you to all who attended. I hope you had as much fun as I did. I hope you learned some more about Gritwire. I hope some of you will be users, and others partners. Please stay in touch.

To those who have posted reviews, thank you again. To those considering posting, please do, and please let us know as specifically as possible what isn't working and what else you'd like to see in Gritwire in the future.

Gritwire Launch Party - Syndicate Conference Attendees

Ian — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:23:00 +0000

Hello to all Syndicate Conference Attendees! Two quick notes:

1) the first step of the directions on the Gritwire Launch Party invite is wrong. Make a LEFT out of the main entrance of the hotel. See the updated invite here: Gritwire Launch Party Invite

2) If you didn't get an invite, you are all invited. See the invite here: Gritwire Launch Party Invite

Open bar. Please come. We're looking for a fun time.

Gritwire Version 1.0 Launched

Ian — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:53:00 +0000

With this launch I'd like to take the opportunity to describe some of the thinking behind Gritwire in general.

A question that keeps being asked is "who is our user?" Are we building this for people familiar with terms like RSS, podcasting, and OPML--the technophiles--or is there some other group we're catering to. A lot of the design decisions that went into this version were based on appealing to the existing RSS user base. We went with a 3-pane layout similar to RSS Owl, added OPML import capability, and there's not a whole lot of tutorial/explanation on the site of how to use it. You have to be fairly familiar with RSS to work comfortably with the site.

There are a couple notable exceptions to presenting this for the RSS afficienado. For example, "what are speedfeeds?" is a question I'm sure we'll be asked. I've been convinced for quite some time that for popular adoption of RSS a more palatable name will be needed than it's current TLA. Several months ago I stumbled upon CmdrTaco's recommendation to call RSS feeds Speedfeeds. Since that time Microsoft has started chattering about "web feeds." I'm fine with either or neither of those, but something needs to stick.

Another potential confusion to a hardcore Internet user is our wiki offering. Some might not even call it a wiki, and yeah I understand that argument. They aren't fully featured, but I think they qualify in the most basic definition.

I suppose there will always be more features you wish you could cram in before a product launch. I'm sure many out there will have feature suggestions, bug reports, and hopefully some positive feedback will make it into the mix. Going forward I'd like Gritwire to be driven more by user input, so please, any and all comments are appreciated.

JIMC Article - Beyond Blogs

Ian — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:32:00 +0000

Attended the Medill IMC launch party last night for the 2006 Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. Ethelbert and I co-authored a short article, more of a primer really, that was included.

The article (primer) can be seen here: Beyond Blogs

The countdown begins...

Ian — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:20:00 +0000

Gritwire is sponsoring the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco this December. Ka Wai and I had a fantastic time attending the New York event in May, and I'm excited we're going to be a part of the next one. Having read "We the Media" (a giveaway at the last conference), I'd be remiss not to start a blog for this project.

Hopefully we'll be able to launch our a non-beta version in advance of the conference, should be able to. Things are likely to be busy in the meantime--so not sure how much I'll post here--but at least it's been started. Countdown to Syndicate II has begun.