Archive | March 2006

Riya Private Beta – innovative feedback tagging idea

I just got my invite for the Riya Private Beta (thanks!).  I haven’t installed this version, yet, but the coolest part about their beta is this:

4. Bloggers are encouraged to post the good, bad and the ugly. We encourage tagging (well, yeah) and recommend the following tags (so that we can find your post faster and address your issues, if any, quickly):

Good = riyarocks

Bad = riyasobetaithurts

Ugly = riyasux

They are encouraging us to blog about their products AND giving us a way to make it easy to find user feedback ourselves!!!  Here are the technorati searches for each: riyarocks (good), riyasobetaithurts (bad), riyasux (ugly).  Very cool!  So far, the second two are empty in technorati.

New, Major Features Every 4-6 Weeks

As Thai alluded to on his blog, we release changes to the Homestead.com site and the SiteBuilder/SiteBuilder Lite software at an extremely fast rate: our ‘small change’ cycle is every 2 weeks and our ‘big change’ cycle is every 4-6 weeks.  Our release rate is not nearly as rapid as myspace, I guess, but it’s certainly one of the fastest for an established software company with tons of paying small business subscribers.

That article about myspace is interesting because it implies the only reason frequent updates would anger users is if something breaks.  In my experience, many users are also resistent to updates that force them to alter the way they interact with the UI.  In general, we try to add features and update features without forcing users to re-learn the interactions they are already comfortable with.  I wonder if the younger crowd over at myspace is more resilient and more welcoming to changes that force them to re-learn or if myspace has found that they, too, try to keep the common interaction experiences unchanged.