Louis Gray today said fav.or.it was Not My Favorite, and I really like that fact. We have built fav.or.it from the ground up to be the future of making the blogosphere accessible for the masses this means making some compromises for our more technology savvy users.
The first of these is that we are not a ‘personal feed reader’ something Louis seems to miss completely. fav.or.it is a community and so anything that gets added to our list of feeds we aggregate becomes available for everyone to read, so yes we have a very restrictive set of conditions on what can and cannot be added.
These include not allowing partial feeds because it breaks the user experience of having a single site to interact with. Requiring you to click out of the reader is beyond the audience we want to attract.
I presented to a packed room of techies yesterday (at thenextweb) and put forward the idea that we must grow our audience by making the blogosphere easier to access for my people like my Dad. He reads a forum on various niche topics but is incapable of reading or interacting with the blogosphere – this is a sad inditement of the technology that surrounds what we all do, we want to make it more accessible and if that means we take some flak in the short term then fine.
Features
Louis also managed to completely ignore the revolution that we have made in several technology areas.
- Conversation tracking across the blogosphere
- Meme-Tracker starting page
- Identity management across a large range of external sites
- Support for data portability (APML)
- Most advanced sharing system of any reader – including the concept of collaborative sharing
So Louis I am happy you do not want to try out service again – you missed the point completely and I doubt you will ever be able to have the imagination to see the future that we see.
Hi Nick
Congrats on the demo in Amsterdam – hope you continue to get big interest and strong uptake!
If I can offer an unsolicited word to the wise, having been through the process of evangelising a new product myself and been subject to a barrage of both positive and negative opinion, it would be this: don’t fight back against your critics. Instead, bite your lip, listen to what they have to say, and respond objectively. Engage, discuss, persuade, adapt and acknowledge product weaknesses. Never show arrogance or defensiveness – you simply can’t win that way. Humilty at all times
Best
Kyle
We have been working really hard with our community inside fav.or.it – we have an internal feedback system and some of the early criticism was much much worse than what Louis said, we listen we worked hard and now the feedback is great.
Louis missed the point and chose not to interact with us before shouting out in public – he can do that, and I responded how I felt at the time (maybe at bad idea) – but we will always listen an engage with those however much of a critic they are – but doing it in public was just a poor attempt on his part for link bait (it work)
This does point out an interesting issue, and a possible conflict. As you’ve stated, fav.or.it is a product that is targeted for the masses. Yet the people who are more likely to beta test a product and comment upon it are people who are non-masses. Therefore, the beta testers have to be educated on the purpose and target audience of the product.
Perhaps one can say that Louis missed the point of the product, but one standard rule of business is that “the customer is always right.” If I need to communicate a message to someone and that person doesn’t get it, then it’s *my* fault that the person didn’t get the message. My two cents.
Ontario, it is a very good point, and it is very hard for us to balance between making sure we have functionality that currently is ’sexy’ that gets us coverage and trackion within early adopters – which then gets us links + SEO – to then start attracting traffic from a wider audience who then need a simple interface and access to the content they want.
All we can say is that we are trying our best to make it good for both, it has power to do things with feeds that no other reader can do, but we have restrictions as well, it is a difficult balance.
I made the same mistake when I first heard about fav.or.it
It’s ironic, but it’s easy to miss the point when you’re a geek
Nick, I begged here for an invite and you provided me with out. THANKS!
However, I have to admit that I really missed the point when I started giving the product a test drive. I understand the desire to make the product a public news reader, not a private one. But, I simply can’t use the product if it can’t, somehow, handle both. I’m not going to be able to use two feed readers. In the same vein, if a sight only offers partial feeds, which I hate too, I can only subscribe to what they offer.
All in all, I’m not sure fav.or.it provides the functionality for the geeks (or I know it currently doesn’t). And, I’m also not sure that it would make sense to the weak internet user. It’s most likely stuck in the gray area that keeps it from providing solutions for either group.
You do highlight some great technology that fav.or.it does provide. It’s just hard to realize those unique features when there are as many barriers to entry for most users.
[...] then Nick went to post on the Fav.or.it blog, but he still couldn’t just address the issues, he also had to insult Louis personally: [...]
[...] for instance). Fav.or.it calls them “slices” in the system. Granted, as Nick Halstead put in his heated response on the fav.or.it blog, the system was designed for “for my people like my Dad,” rather [...]
[...] for instance). Fav.or.it calls them “slices” in the system. Granted, as Nick Halstead put in his heated response on the fav.or.it blog, the system was designed for “for my people like my Dad,” rather [...]
Totaly, I agree Nick, fav.or.it is not a service as google reader, is the one community to find information on context with focus in the social attention. ¿not?
I think that your reaction both here and on Louis’ blog is appalling.
Learn to accept the criticism for what it is, and appreciate it. I for one found the service to be un-usable, and agree with a lot of what Louis said.
Even if Louis may not have taken your “point” to heart, you were way off base when you reacted like you did.
[...] enough Nick Halstead, the mind behind fav.or.it, leapt in with both feet to show that Louis had missed the point, unfortunately the manner in which this was done may not have won him any friends – a fact which [...]
[...] Following my write-up, Nick was understandably frustrated, saying he didn’t know why he gave me “the time of day”, following on with a post titled “Missing the point”. [...]