Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Long time no posts here, thanks to Mento I have switched very much to link blogging, but if you happen to be interested in the stuff I write, feel free to follow me at FriendFeed.

Today I learnt an interesting fact about interaction with developers: if you as a product manager want a feature implemented, do not talk to the developer first, write a specification and a mockup first. If you skip writing the specification first (which can and will be changed afterwards) things can turn against you.

In our new web content management product we will have quite powerful support for tagging (that can be used in a folksonomy-like way, as categories, as a taxonomy and even as a thesaurus, as I said, quite powerful). I did specify the conceptual model, the content model, created some mockups (for another product that will use the tagging feature) and discussed with the developer how to implement the tagging user interface.

Together we refined the original idea I had for the user interface, given my general experience what works in AJAX web UI, and his more recent experience with the particular widget framework we are using, examined a set of model application that already implemented some of the metaphors used and came up with a simple, but powerful (and extensible) solution. I knew what the developer would do, the developer knew what he should do, everything was fine and I rushed to the next item in my busy schedule.

Then the unpredictable happened: Schedules were rearranged, priorities shifted, the developer switched to another task, went to vacation, schedules were rearranged again, priorities shifted again, another developer picked up - and knew nothing about our previous discussion and our common mental specification, so he started coming up with his own solution, because he could not use the specification I skipped writing, ran into problems and I had to troubleshoot.

Needless to say, the troubleshooting took more time than writing a helpful specification would have taken, and a written specification would have helped our initial concept discussion as I had to explain less and we could work in a more well-structured way.

Lesson learnt: better specify than sorry!

Well, FriendFeed does not really suck, it has managed to convert me from a naysayer to fanboy (I think writing userscripts and user-css qualifies me as a fanboy) by giving me a communication platform that allows me to interact with my peers, but now that I have your attention, I would like to tell you five things where FriendFeed actually needs improvements. If you are on FriendFeed, feel free to like or comment this post to bring it to the attention of FriendFeed's product managers.

1. no feed for daily, weekly and monthly toplinks: Friendfeed introduced a new feature, daily toplinks only few days ago and while it is insanely cool to have use your FriendFeed contacts as a personal attention filter and aggregator, I do not like the fact that there is no Atom or RSS feed for it. Come on, this thing is called FriendFeed, so you must be aware that there is a thing called feeds in the interwebs.
2. no link-based aggregation: if one person posts a link twice in separate services, for instance directly on FriendFeed via Mento and later to del.icio.us, it will show up twice in the Feed, leading to clutter and noise (not the smart noise we are looking for at FriendFeed) in the feed and finally to a fragmentation of the discussion, as I have to chose which entry I like or comment. As a second example, if someone in my network posts a link that someone else posted as well, we have the same situation: two links, two discussions, two sets of likes. An easy solution would be a add a "also posted at ..., also posted by ..." line next to the list of people that liked a post. This way you could reduce clutter and join conversations that spread across multiple postings.
3. bad recommendations for contacts: FriendFeed is a superb implementation of the "Activity feed" pattern of social networking, but its social networking capabilities are mediocre at best. Example number one: FriendFeed's recommended friends dialog suggests that I should subscribe to Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, Loic Le Meur, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and some of the FriendFeed founders. While I think they are surely great people and I could learn a lot from them, it is too much information to handle (I tried to follow these suggestions, and removed them one by one later). Additionally as soon as they write something that is interesting for someone in my network, it will appear in my feed as well, which is a great feature. The only problem is: the recommended friends page does not make any sense if it is just a list of the top-users at FriendFeed. What I need are reasons to subscribe like: many of my important (measured in likes and comments) friends find them important (measured in likes and comments) as well.
4. not notifying me when friends join: I wish everyone I know would be on FriendFeed. Unfortunately this will not happen and I will also not send an email requesting them to join yet another social network, because I know how distracting this would be for most of my contacts. However, I wish there were tools to make it a bit easier for me: If someone joins who has an e-mail address that was found in my address book before, please inform me. If someone adds a feed or a service that matches an imaginary friend that I created, please inform me. If you can read my address book, why can't you offer me to automatically create imaginary friends for my flickr, twitter, etc. contacts?
5. bad Facebook integration: Like it or not, Facebook is popular. But FriendFeed's Facebook application is a joke. It is simply FriendFeed in an IFrame, but I cannot see which of my Facebook friends are on FriendFeed, I cannot invite them as it is possible with other social applications that offer Facebook integration. Probably the best example for this is dopplr.com which is a champion of social network interoperability. Another point in case that FriendFeed's social networking capabilities need some work.
6. bad customer service at getsatisfaction.com: FriendFeed managed to move conversations from the blog comments to FriendFeed. Some bloggers objected, but that's the way it works. Conversations move and if you would like to take part in the conversation, you have to follow. The best place for customer care (and conversations with users of your product) today is getsatisfaction.com. There is a room for ~FriendFeed at getsatisfaction.com, but FriendFeed is not listening. As I am sure these guys know that they have to take part in the conversation where it happens, and I am also sure they know that customer service is part of the product design, it looks like they do not want to listen, because it does not matter to them.
7. no search for URLs: Early adopters and developers are craving to integrate FriendFeed with their tools and services they use. The main integration point, the most important social object is content and content is identified by an URL in the web, yet FriendFeed's advanced search (and API) does not allow searches for URLs. This means, people looking to integrate FriendFeed with their blogs, using FriendFeed from Yahoo! Pipes or creating Mashups with FriendFeed are left out in the rain.

These are the most important changes and improvements I am looking forward at FriendFeed, not the addition of six (or sixty) more social networks. Improve the features you already have, improve search, improve social networking, improve aggregation and improve integration and I will be happy.

Normally I do not use my blog as a linkdump, I have http://del.icio.us/trieloff, http://twitter.com/trieloff, http://www.friendfeed.com/trieloff and Mento for this, but today I am making an exception and the whole point of my post is read this blog post: Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products. These tips are some essential rules every entrepreneur and product manager should learn by heart. You have to create value and find a way of sharing the created value with your customers (making profit) if you fail either of those goals, find a better idea.