- Apr
- 25
- 2008
You talked, we listened
By: Robert Dempsey | Tags:You’ve given us feedback and we have listened.
My goal with whatsupinruby.com (and the other what’s up sites we will be releasing) is to get rid of my RSS reader. To do this, I need the site to do two things:
- Tell me what people are talking about in a given context
- Take me to those conversations so I can learn more
Whatsupinruby.com does the first, but frankly falls down in the second. The issue is our approach. Rather than our results being a list of the latest posts on the topic (in this case Ruby and associated technologies) it spiders all things Ruby and returns Google-like results based on links, keyword frequency, etc. While that is what we built and what I originally asked for, that is not what I want. What I want is a list of sites that are talking about the conversation item I am interested in (i.e. ruby, rails, memcache, etc.).
Another point of confusion (again caused by me) is the search box and its prominence on the site. The real reason for the site isn’t search (which you can use Google for) but rather to be kept up to date on the latest conversation. The prominence of the search box takes away from that in a big way. We are changing that.
We are currently updating the site as follows:
- Updating the site design to give prominence to the conversation items rather than the search box
- When you click on a conversation item it will auto-search rather than putting the search term in the search box
- Results returned by a search will be a list of the latest blog posts that are discussing that item
- Even more to come in 1.0
What do you all think? Will that make what we are doing more or less relevant to you all? Will the updates we are putting in place help people to understand our goal? We’d love and welcome all of your feedback.
Our goal is to put out the improved whatsupinruby.com by early next week.
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One Response to “You talked, we listened”
On April 28th, 2008 at 8:38 am Steve Reeves said:
This sounds as if it could be really cool for something we’re planning. Basically we want to have links to external services on our dashboard. Some of these will be user defined, other will be sponsored links.
A posts aggregator should be a really interesting value add, once we can persuade our users they can benefit from understanding blogging.
The biggest problem here is the blogosphere is full of crap. If you can sort the good from the bad and ugly, that’ll be great news, for everybody.
Steve