A Little Help from Our Friends
Posted by Kelly Ford on December 2, 2005 09:00 AM
Yesterday we somewhat quietly launched a password-protected ‘Preview Version’ of our Web site and software, and we’ve invited friends and colleagues to try it prior to our public launch in early 2006. (Want to join the fun and volunteer to be a Preview Version tester?)
Notice we didn’t call our Preview Version ‘beta’, even though our previous development version was called ‘alpha.’ Beta just feels a little dated these days. Remember Betamax? Plus, having lapped the roman alphabet, all the hurricanes this year are now giving greek letters a bad name.
Anyway, the point of the Preview Version is to hear from you, our pioneering early users, about what you like, what you don’t, and what we can do better. If it’s a cool feature and you love it, let us know. If the whole thing just seems confusing and makes your head hurt, we’ll probably blame it mostly on you, but really, we can take it.
You’d be amazed how much changed even in the few days prior to yesterday’s launch, often as a result of helpful feedback from friends who aren’t thinking about this stuff 24/7 like we have been. Perspective is great.
As an example: One group of folks we’d like to say a special ‘thanks but so-long' to are the bots we featured on our homepage during our alpha version. The idea was to give some front page credit to our tireless automated Web crawlers who have already tested a million plus Web sites, downloads, and e-mail registration forms. But some workers, particularly those which run on alternating current, are perhaps best left out of the limelight.
So long, troopers. You’re axed from the homepage. Still counting on you for a few hundred million more tests next year though, so back to work.
The end of a brief moment of glory for our happy bots came recently when a friend, quite rightly, noted, “Guys, come on -- regular people don’t associate robots with Web safety. Just illustrate on the homepage how your product works."
Great ideas are so obvious in retrospect.
So, we want to thank you in advance for helping us during this Preview Version period to surface all those great improvement ideas which will be just SO obvious looking back a few months from now.
Already have some ideas or feedback? Please send it to us. We’re listening.
Comments
In looking at the linkages for a number of sites I visit occassionally, regularly or daily, I noticed that there are often "links" that you haven't tested yet.
Am I right that, you want your early users "the pioneers" to bring these to your attention.??
Posted by: John Stratton | January 2, 2006 12:19 PM
Hi John,
Are you referring to the link graphs on our site report webpages or are you referring to sites that say "untested" when you search? If the former, we only list the sites that are the most highly linked to, even though we often know about many other link references. This is primarily just so that the page doesn't look to cluttered and we focus attention on the "strongest" linkees. If you are referring to "untested" sites when you search, we are about to drastically increase our testing rate so you should see much fewer untested sites soon.
Thanks,
Chris
Posted by: chris dixon | January 3, 2006 03:40 PM