You're holding my Google Reader account hostage.

This problem hit me hard, too. I'm a habitual early adopter, and habitual evangelist for cool apps like this. The integration experience left me really upset. I'll try it again soon, but the req for a code prior to my being able to access my reader is incredibly frustrating. Thanks for fixing the problem quickly.

i echo glennisaac's experience and the origial post's.

Really, this is by far the most bizarre sign-up process I've ever seen.

I'm a software architect that's been working on the development side in software for 10 years. I've worked for big companies, and I've worked for startups, and I'm well familiar with making trade-offs in design and implementation.

The reason I'm so angry over this experience is that there is no trade-off. What value for current users of the system could AideRSS possibly eke out of the broken and cryptic sign-up experience I describe in my original post above? What functionality are you not able to provide your current end users by allowing me to request an invite in a simple and straightforward way?

Basically you're saying that AideRSS *had* to force me to install an extension and then either uninstall it or live without Google Reader, out of loyalty to the users you've anointed with an invite key.

The truth is there's no reason for this mess. In your previous reply you mentioned streamlining your user experience. You need to address the root cause and "streamline" the personnel that allowed this turd to be pushed out the door. They spent far more time and effort putting together this Byzantine and broken "solution" than a simple invite request would've required.

In responding to my problem here, you could take a page from Google's book. No one's perfect, and occasionally the mistakes are big. Instead of trying to placate users burned by this like me, how about immediately replacing those pages with a big "mea culpa" message until you can put out something ready for prime time?

Just send out the invite codes and that will fix it - or take the advice of severoon. I've uninstalled the script so that I have access to G-Reader again. You should see the bad press you've generated on Twitter. Have you seen it?

Marshall Kirkpatrick's review of your product on readwriteweb.com was huge and sent a lot of people your way. You need to do some instant damage control and quite possible quit telling us to wait.

This could be your fatal error.

We're killing the auth token cha cha completely and will get a new version out ASAP.

http://getsatisfaction.com/aiderss/to...

dude what the fuck.

I echo the initial message.

I cant login to my google reader account?? where do I get the code you need to release your hostage?

--

I swear im gonna blast this over the social media world if you dont fix this for me today.

VERY UNHAPPY USER.

Jesse Thomas
// jess3.com

Jesse

ping me at jeff@aiderss.com and I'll get one to you ASAP.
j

I only hope that your company properly recognizes and rewards all those developers that are now no doubt working like slaves to compensate for someone else's bad design and management decisions.

I read the link--any news on when this functionality will become available? Presuming your offering works like the video claims and it actually does solve my information overload problem, I'll become your best friend and advocate. Just don't let the designers and managers that did the invite thing anywhere near it and it should work out.

(Just to be clear--my problem was never with the invite process, per se. You'll remember that GMail used an invite process that I understand and was totally fine with. It's the specific implementation of this invite process--one that forces users to commit to your company far more in the form of time and energy than you're willing to commit to them in the form of functionality--that bothers me here.)

Glad to hear these people taking you to task in a detailed way, though I wish they'd be a bit kinder in their feedback -- everyone thinks they have to yell and scream on the interwebs, it seems. Also glad that you're on it with a response right away.

It was a very bumpy, awkward signup for me, and after install and multiple re-starts, I continued to have CPU spikes and memory leakage. Loading of AideRSS in my BoingBoing feed in Google Reader was quite slow. I've disabled and uninstalled the extension for now; will try again tomorrow. I hope it's not a hard-to-trace conflict with one of my other FF extensions -- are you aware of any incompatibilities at the moment?

Nevertheless, I am very excited about the promise of your product. For me, having PageRank will work well with some of my many feeds. AideRSS looks great visually. I'm sure you ppl will be improving it rapidly.

Repeatedly the screencast sound was distorted, both yesterday and today -- please check it out.

Dude, Jess3, do you have a tiny clue as to how rude you sound? Take a deep breath, refrain from threats, chill, please. It's not all about you. I had a hard time, it's not going to ruin my day, and you can see from their words & tone that they are willing to work on it for you and everyone. I'm glad the first guy wrote a detailed list of his problems, but a little empathy and courtesy always go a long way. And be sure to throw these guys a few bucks if it does eventually work for you. Meanwhile, don't try to tear down their work, k? It's not perfect, cut them a little slack.

Per http://blog.aiderss.com/2008/04/02/go... and the discontinuation of the much-hated invite-only system, marking this problem as solved.

You did it!

Like I said above, if you could solve my information overload problem, I'd become one of your biggest fans. Well, I just popped over the Google Reader and saw that the extension kicked in and is working.

It definitely helps--there's still some work left to do as it's a little slow. Then again, I did hit it with a group of feeds that get 30-50 posts each per day and has thousands of posts back-logged, so it's better to wait for the ranks to pop up than plow thru them myself.

Besides faster loading, I'd like to see irrelevant posts collapse into a "..." row that I can click and expand should I want to see all of those. I haven't had time enough yet to check the accuracy of the rankings, but it's a usable tool and I'm happy!

It took a few false starts, but in the end, you guys came through!

Yes, you got it exactly. When I select the "Best" setting, 95%+ of all the feed entries go very dim--which is exactly what I want, only the top 1% or 2% of items should be shown when I pick "Best".

The problem is that it often results in a full screen of dimmed entries, maybe one or two lit up (and that's in list view--in the expanded view I'll scroll several screens of dimmed entries before seeing the first post worth reading). So there's a lot of scrolling.

On the other hand, I get that the add-on can't load the rankings for thousands of entries to determine which ones to show while I wait...the perceived performance would be awful. As a compromise, as the page loads it could collect together runs of low-ranked items into a single row ("... hiding [xxx] items - click to expand ..." where [xxx] counts up as more items are added to that run). So I'd see...

... hiding 14 items - click to expand ...
[10.0] Really important and interesting post
[9.3] Pretty high ranked post
... hiding 32 items - click to expand ...
[9.6] The sky is falling!
... hiding 12 items - click to expand ...
etc.

This way I see more of the items I'm interested in reading in one screen without having to scroll. Obviously, I'd also need a way from list view to click the title of a post I'm interested in and be able to read it while the add-on continues doing its thing below.

Or, I could click one of the "..." rows, and it would immediately expand to show me all the items that were collapsed. Later, there could be a couple of different areas of the "..." row to click to expand just the Great posts, or everything at or above Good, etc. This would be something like:

... hiding 26 items - Expand Great+ | Expand Good+ | Expand All ...

I realize this a tricky problem tho while still keeping good perceived performance. Short of the add-on being able to periodically log in and pre-process my feeds before I even visit Google Reader, I'm not sure how to fix that. (Maybe I can port my feed list over to my AideRSS account so the processing can be done there periodically and the add-on consults the cached ranked items?)

sev

I still get this authorization thing with the greasemonkey extention. Is this solved for that method too?