magnebergan's dashboard

magnebergan replied on October 22, 2008 02:37 to the idea "Being more transparent about services that does not work" in Secondbrain:

I think that one page that covers all the services would be good.

Updating if the service is working or not is up to the S|B team in my opinion. (there will be bugs from the service provider as well as from S|B's side). Maybe a generic help could be added as well. "if nothing works.. try to remove the service and add it again" type.

Users should of course be able to click a link next to the services that say "I am having problems with this service"..

Don't know how focused your team is on this Lars. But I would suggest to add some ownership of each service to the developers. And frequently keep up with API updates from the services and communicate this within the team to improve quality.

There will be quality challenges with the type of service that S|B is proving due to the fact that S|B is dependent on so many other services. 29 services means 29 ways that stuff can go wrong that you may not have control over..

As the amount of services grow it can not be expected that everything works all the time. I don't think users have those expectations either but being transparent about that is important for quality perception in my opinion..

But keep up the good work S|B team :-)

magnebergan replied on October 21, 2008 01:50 to the idea "Please test and enhance SecondBrain for smaller screens and resolutions!" in Secondbrain:

Which web browser are you using?

What is your screen resolution set at?

(on the pc/mac that you did not see the menus)..

I run a pc with firefox on 1280x1024 or something.. I can see evertything.. might be browser bug..

magnebergan shared an idea in Secondbrain on October 21, 2008 01:48:

Being more transparent about services that does not work

There seems to be many messages on S|B in general about "why is this service not working", "Can not connect to Facebook". And there seems to be a fair loads of posts here as well about it.

What about creating a status page which covers all the services?

Example:

Facebook : Currently working.
Stumpleupon: Down. We are working on it. Fix release expected to be out 1.1.2012

It should be possible to just click on the service to report a problem with it.

I think users would at least feel less frustrated when the see some information on how and why it is a problem with that service right now.

Personally I don't use many services so this is not a problem for me but there seems to be a problem for people whom are service addicts :-)

All the best

M

magnebergan replied on September 30, 2008 09:49 to the idea "Marking a item as read, read later etc" in Secondbrain:

This sounds good Johan :-) I am hopeful!

magnebergan replied on September 30, 2008 04:30 to the question "When will there be an iPhone app for Secondbrain?" in Secondbrain:

Another easier way might be to send MMS messages to a number like 2303 and then get it stored at S|B. I lot of people don't have the possbility to send e-mail or don't know how to set it up. But most phones can send MMS. (a user should activate the service via S|B web.. and then the service can identify by phone number where to store the MMS message)

Could be a possible source of income as well?

magnebergan shared an idea in Secondbrain on September 30, 2008 04:26:

Marking a item as read, read later etc

Due to limited time in my life I sometimes add stuff to S|B that I don't have read but I wish to come back to later.

Could it be an idea to be allowed to mark items with stuff like "I have read this, I want to read this later, I just want to store this for future reference"...

It would be great to get a list of "unread items that you have planned to read". Anyone who wants this idea?!

magnebergan replied on September 30, 2008 02:51 to the question "When will there be an iPhone app for Secondbrain?" in Secondbrain:

The market for iphones are too small in my opinion for giving away a free iphone app for S|B? I think there is better to improve the service as it is now. And have that as a core focus and grow faster rather than going in to "new" areas such as iphone applications.

I have no idea how much engineering effort it takes into creating a S|B application for the iphone. But my guess is that it would take quite an effort (I dont have insight on how the infrastructure of the S|B core application is anyway). So this is plan guessing..

I think it would be more interesting to see other ways to add stuff to S|B via a phone. Sending e-mail to S|B with content from a cell phone as an example. Pictures that you find useful could be added to a certain collection based on topic in email for example...

The market of cellphones that support email is quite huge compared to the "few" iphones in the market..

magnebergan started following the idea "comment can be public and moderate" in Secondbrain.

magnebergan replied on September 29, 2008 02:41 to the idea "Css or theme customize idea..." in Secondbrain:

I think it should be a bit limited. Total freedom often leads to pages which are very hard to read(crappy designers do crappy stuff). A few themes could be great so it is possible to differentiate a bit.

Another thing could be to give the user the ability to move around / disable stuff. Like I don't need see my followers (Seriously I don't use it at all).. And invite friends could also go away (It is great to have in the beginning but after a while I kinda don't use it)..

magnebergan shared an idea in Secondbrain on September 23, 2008 01:05:

Adding notifications instead of getting email

Will S|B go over to notifications in the future? Now I get emails if people comment on some of my stuff. I get a lot of e-mails in general. Could it be a good idea to implement notifications on the page itself (Same style as Facebook has..) ?

Moving information on to the page itself rather than sending e-mails would be great for me. If there is something I would like to comment on, but don't have time right now I could always just check back on previous notifications rather than going through my e-mails again.

magnebergan replied on September 23, 2008 00:47 to the idea "Importing contacts to facilitate more sharing of elements" in Secondbrain:

Can you leak in info on what happed on the product meeting?

magnebergan replied on September 23, 2008 00:40 to the problem "HTML emails renders wrong" in Secondbrain:

This is still not solved for my case Audun. I still get e-mails that renders wrong..

magnebergan replied on September 13, 2008 03:33 to the idea "Drag and drop links" in Secondbrain:

I think drag & drop would also be useful.. I should be at least easier to find stuff that you have added before.

Drag & drop is a way of doing it (more structure in a way).

Another bet is to go harder into the search part of the site. Improving search could also be a good thing that could improve the processes of find stuff. Don't know if Google has any search apis that you could implement on SB? Or any of the competition. Another idea might be to team up with Fast search and transfer or Sesam?

magnebergan replied on September 13, 2008 03:27 to the idea "Importing contacts to facilitate more sharing of elements" in Secondbrain:

Great Audun! Let me know if you want feedback or if there something I can do around the idea.

magnebergan replied on September 10, 2008 07:45 to the question "How powerful are your setup, or do you use any magic?" in Secondbrain:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tra...

Alexa can say something about growth in traffic..

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seco...
compete.com also gives data..

Regarding growth of user base SB stated on their blog that they have 10000 users. There is unknown how many are active daily..

magnebergan shared an idea in Secondbrain on September 10, 2008 01:29:

Importing contacts to facilitate more sharing of elements

Here the other day I wanted to share a article that I have on SB with a college.. I had to look up his e-mail address and then paste it into SB.

What about importing contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn? The contacts should of course of not be visible to other SB users.

Letting users just tick off contacts when they want to share items
from SB would be great. No more e-mail pasting into SB!

My guess is that if the barrier of sharing stuff with people outside SB goes down, the user base of SB will grow quite quickly. SB needs more than 10k users to survive in my opinion..

magnebergan replied on September 04, 2008 01:33 to the idea "Collaborative tagging and descriptions" in Secondbrain:

I guess we think the same then :-)

I would love to review and comment on your draft. Just grab me a SB some day

magnebergan replied on September 04, 2008 01:32 to the idea "Collaborative tagging and descriptions" in Secondbrain:

I don't hang around the SB office :-) But I guess we think the same way about building web apps.

I would love to give you guys some feedback on the draft. I think that type of functionality would improve the service radically. It would lover the barrier of adding new stuff via the browser.

magnebergan marked one of Johan's replies in Secondbrain as useful. Johan replied to the idea "Collaborative tagging and descriptions".

magnebergan shared an idea in Secondbrain on September 03, 2008 00:33:

Collaborative tagging and descriptions

I am getting a bit tired of writing my own descriptions and adding my own tags when I add something via the firefox plugin.

As SB grows it is highly likely that someone else has added the stuff that I want to add. It could be cool to just take advantage on other people's tagging and description. Maybe it could be possible to get up \"most used description\" and \"recommended tags for this item from other users\".

Any thoughts? (did people understand the idea?)