On August 2nd 2007, just over a year ago, I walked through a little tutorial on how to make a Firefox Extension. It was that night I started working on an idea of mine, Read It Later.
I ‘released’ Read It Later a few days later on the 6th. I say ‘released’ because all I did was send it to a few friends and put an entry for it on my website, which was getting about 6 hits a day.
I had never expected Read It Later to reach even 1/4 of what it has. It was created to help me keep track of articles that I wanted to read but couldn’t while I was at work. However, during fall of last year, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and DownloadSquad picked up on the add-on.
Since then Read It Later’s user base as been growing strong.
But during this past year, I’ve learned one very important thing about application development: listen to your users. Luckily, my users talk a LOT. I mean there are over 700 comments on the Read It Later project page. There are so many it’s almost unmanageable (working on a new solution for this, look out in Sept). You guys have provided some amazing feedback and suggestions and without it, Read It Later would be nothing.
The first version of Read It Later was two (obscenely large) buttons with limited functionality and control. Over the past year I worked hard with users to make it better. Because of all of the user feedback and suggestions, I was able to release Read It Later for Firefox 3, which was a huge improvement from the original version. I’m honored today that Mozilla Labs has awarded Read It Later as a Best Updated Add-on in the Extend Firefox 3 Competition.
So this is thanks to all of you who have emailed me, left comments, submitted translations, answered questions, beta tested, and worked with me one on one resolving bugs. Read It Later couldn’t have done it without you!
As you can see (by the users listed below who made each implemented suggestion), I take user suggestions very seriously.
If you have an idea on how to improve Read It Later (big or small), please let me know!
The Big Ones:
Online Access - Manage your list online, in any browser or mobile device. In Safari, Internet Explorer, or an iPhone. Click the ‘Access Anywhere’ link at the top of your reading list for more.
Search - The tag dropdown has been replaced with a search-as-you-type field. It will search through the titles, urls, and tags of the items in your Reading List. Suggested By: Zeke, Praveen
Auto-Syncing - For those of you who forgot to sync your reading list before heading home after work, now you won’t have to. If you are using sync, Read It Later will automatically sync your list in the background after starting up and every few hours afterwards. Suggested By: bds, James, Rob, How to Geek
More Options to Customize Read It Later:
Improved Options screen - The options dialog got a revamp and brings better organization to your preferences.
Unread Items Counter - View the number of items in your reading list. Suggested By: the non hacker, rayphua
Auto Mark as Read - You can now set Read It Later to mark pages as read after opening them. Suggested By: Wayne, the non hacker, Sergio Santos
Auto Tags - Set custom tags to be added to every page you save. Suggested By: Raydancer, Ken
Click to Save Button - An optional button can be added to your status bar to activate Click to Save Mode without a keyboard shortcut. Suggested By: Wayne, Todd
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts - You can now customize your keyboard shortcuts to any combo you like, not just ALT. Suggested By: Mike Harris
The Small Stuff:
Read Offline Improvements - When you are offline, items that have not been saved for offline viewing will appear dimmed out. Suggested By: Praveen
Empty Titles - Pages without titles will be replaced with their url. Suggested By: Dan Gale Rosen
More Languages - With help of the translation team (made up entirely of Read It Later users), Read It Later is continuing to be localized in more and more languages. Want to help?
Read It Later will officially be striped of it’s Beta suffix after one more big set of updates. I’m very excited for what I’ve got planned in the coming update, it will take Read It Later full circle.
The new version of Read It Later with Firefox 3 support is now available!
Read It Later has been completely revamped and hosts a whole new bundle of features including built-in RSS feeds, syncing, offline reading, tagging, multi-language support and more.
Here is the original demo updated to show the new improvements.
Most Importantly: Thank YOU!
The newest version of Read It Later is all thanks to you. The feedback I’ve received has been nothing short of phenomenal. Almost of the new features have come directly from the comments and emails I’ve received from the community. It would not be what it is without you, so keep it up!
Special Thanks to Those Who Helped Beta Test and Translate
The new version of Read It Later has support for multiple languages (with some more I haven’t added into the install yet). The translations were done generously by Read It Later users from around the globe. What can I say, Read It Later users are simply awesome.
As some of you may or may not know, one of The Planet’s datacenters had a transformer explode, knocking out power to thousands of servers and websites.
The Idea Shower’s servers were among the lucky bunch.
I’ve moved the site onto a temporary server but some sites may be slow and may not be fully function until tomorrow.
A few weeks ago, High Society, a ski/snowboard company I’ve worked with over the years suffered a hard loss: we lost one of our team riders to a cliff drop that went tragically wrong.
Out of respect for his family, I will not be mentioning his real name here because I don’t want this post to appear in the search results for his name. For the sake of the article I’m referring to him by the name ‘Tim’.
During the resulting media coverage I noticed a trend that caught my attention.
The day after his death, the opening sentence of an article from the Rocky Mountain News read:
“Aspen native and snowboarder [Tim} liked spinners, bonks and card tricks, according to one of his sponsors’ Web sites.”
That website was ours. And that line ’spinners, bonks, and card tricks’ was taken off of his profile page, which was the first page you’d find after Googling his name.
But here’s the thing. There was a lot more to Tim than ’spinners and bonks’. He was a well respected rider and someone who had accomplished great things in his short life. But you would not know this from the article.
It struck me that journalists are turning more and more to the web and social networks to dig up information about people for their stories. It’s obvious that the author simply Google’d Tim’s name and took out the first bit of information he could find, no matter how trivial.
If you recall the Elliot Spitzer scandal, you may remember the same thing happened in that instance as well. When the identity of Spitzer’s lady friend was discovered, media organizations were quoting her Myspace page and printing photos straight out of her profile.
Now, is that really fair? Or more importantly, is that really journalism? It seems that more journalists, in the effort to be the first to the press, are skipping the interviews of friends and families and turning more to finding out what they can on the web.
The reason I ask if it’s fair: How many of you would like to have your legacy defined by what’s in your Facebook profile?
Take a look at the image on the right. It’s an excerpt from my Facebook profile. Like most of my friends profiles, it’s not exactly on the serious side.
I would hate to think that if I passed away tomorrow that the world would know me by:
“Minneapolis resident and programmer, Nate Weiner liked Rickrolling himself…”
And Tim’s profile on the High Society website? It wasn’t serious. It didn’t mention the things that really defined him. None of the items that were listed there did his legacy any justice.
But why should it? Should we be worried that if we put up a joke that others will take that as our character definition? Or should we expect journalists to be more conscious of the type of content they are sourcing from?
If this is going to be the way it is, should we avoid joking around and keep our content strict?
I would certainly hope not, but it begs the question, if people were to write about you today and used to the web to research you, what would they find? And more importantly, would you want others to read it?
I’ve made some new updates to the recently launched Twitter tool Intwition.
Story Titles
The first update was the biggest request: To resolve page titles, rather than just showing urls in the popular lists. If you peek at the homepage and New Item Finder you’ll see this now in action.
Stories That Come to You
Second, you can now have items that reach ‘popular’ status sent to you via Twitter. Just follow @Intwition and whenever a new story crops up, it’ll show up in your public timeline. Also note you can also subscribe to the RSS for popular items.
Better Spam Filtering
With anything of this nature, spam happens. I’ve been tuning the algorithm to remove this from appearing on the home page and I’ve been having some good success. There is still one big part I need to add to it, but you should not see much spam on the front page for now.
As always, your suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Are you fluent in a second language outside of English?
I’m looking for volunteers to help translate about 100 words/phrases for the upcoming Read It Later release. This is one of the most demanded features for the new version and I want offer everyone the same ease of use, no matter where they are in the world.
If you are able and would like to help out, please drop me a line via email or in the comments below.
Thanks!
Update: I’ve added Read It Later to BabelZilla so that it’s MUCH easier to translate and manage translations. If you’d like to join Read It Later’s translation team, check out Read It Later on BabelZilla.
I just signed up for FriendFeed to see what all the hubbub was about and figured this is a good time to mention how to connect with me outside of this site.
I’m always trying to network, so if you Add/Follow/Subscribe to me and I’ll add you back.
In my first post on the Idea Shower I promised to post not only my successes, but my failures as well. This is the story of one of those failures.
I came across this post by Eric Reynolds on Problogger. It suggested using a Press Release to bring attention to your blog. After reading this I poked around and found stories of people getting thousands of views and numbers of interviews with media outlets by submitting press releases with the service PRweb. This was the same week I was releasing Tail Report, so I thought I’d give it a go.
When I was ready to submit my release, I was hung up by the first page in the submission process; I had seen a screen like this before. But it was many years ago.
Remember back in the 90’s when there were dozens of services that promised to submit your site to 9,959,942 search engines for the ‘low’ price of $99/mo even though it was something you could do entirely on your own and for free? This felt like the same game.
Needless to say I was incredibly skeptical. But there seemed to be good stories of people having a lot of success. (My optimism will eventually be the end of me.)
I decided, in the name of science and as a boon for my readers, that I would take this as an opportunity to do an experiment, posting my results for all to see. So I decided eating wasn’t important and instead dropped $80 on a press release.
Let the Great Experiment Begin!
To submit a release you need to first select your ‘visibility package’. Each step up costs more money and gives you more features like ‘SEO Wizard’ and ‘PR Tag Clouds’.
$200 will get you ‘Yahoo Site Match 3x’ which is ‘expedited placement in the search engines at three times the $80 level’). I knew this looked familiar!
I went with the ‘Standard Visibility’ package for $80 and submitted my release to post on Tuesday March 11th, 2008.
Release Day
My alarm rings. I am confused. Why did my alarm wake me up and not the non-stop ringing of the phone with news reporters trying to get an exclusive? Surely something isn’t right.
I hop onto PRweb’s site and start looking for my press release.
With the Standard package I assume I won’t make it onto their home page so I drill down into one of the categories I submitted my release to: Technology: Internet
Okay not on the front page there, so I start scrolling down and am confronted with the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen:
Those are page numbers. Not links to individual releases, but links to pages of releases. And mind you, I’m drilled down into a category.
I’ve already started laughing and given up any hope for success here. But let’s see how I did shall we?
My Traffic Stats
By logging in and viewing the traffic stats that PRweb gives me, I might feel like the press release wasn’t all that bad. According to the stats the press release was read 447 times this past week. Not terrible.
However, I’d like to point out that I find these numbers highly questionable. Take a look at my actual press release here. Scroll to the bottom.
At the bottom of the press release, you will see an iFrame to the Tail Report website. An iFrame is essentially a browser window inside of a browser window. It means that by viewing the press release, you are also viewing the Tail Report website. Therefore logging a hit in my stats program (I use Google Analytics).
Using this logic, if this press release was viewed 447 times, I should have received 447 likewise views from the iFrame.
I received 17.
I would understand if there was a 15% difference, but 447 versus 17, definitely makes me wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Honestly I’m surprised I even got 17 (please refer to photo above of 89302804 links for effect)
What to Think
Okay, let’s start with the obvious: There are a lot of factors at play when it comes to the success of a press release or story. The title has to be catchy, the content has to be good, and more importantly the subject has to be newsworthy.
And it’s completely arguable that my press release and Tail Report simply were not any of those things. Even if this is the case, with what I’ve seen, I’m willing to argue that paying to submit a press release online today is simply a waste of money.
Paying to be heard died back with Web 1.0
Let’s consider my $80 ‘Standard Visibility’ package. I chose the low-end package. What would happen if I chose a the top package and landed on the PRweb homepage? How much does that cost?
As you complete the submission process you are constantly prodded to upgrade your release. Each upgrade gets you closer to the top of the release pile. To get on the top of the PRweb homepage, I believe the top upgrade was $800.
This is where I have to stop and say I sincerely doubt the ROI of $800 on a press release in today’s world.
For $800, I am almost certain you could find a blogger with at least a few thousand subscribers who would be more than happy to write about your site. In fact, with services like PayPerPost you can find bloggers who will do it for $5.
In fact, I would bet (though I definitely don’t support this), that for $800 you could pay a whole group of people to pimp your post on Digg, which would likely bring 50,000 visitors and a whole score of blog coverage. I’ll tell you what, you give me $800, and I’ll fly to San Fransisco and personally hand your press release to Kevin Rose.
So What Are We to Do?
Go look at that list of page numbers above one more time. Then go look at the upcoming sections of social news site’s like Digg and Mixx.
There is significantly less competition on Digg and Mixx than there is on PRweb. And you don’t have to pay anything to submit there.
Have you ever tried submitting your site to StumbleUpon? I’ve found that you can get at least 200-300 visitors in one day simply by stumbling your own site. And again, it’s free.
More importantly, who do you know? In preparing this post I spoke to a friend who had great success with a press release last winter. However, he said that the greatest result came from personally emailing the release to local and industry reports that he knew. It was those people who eventually covered him.
You will have far more success with a press release by leveraging your connections than launching it blindly into the masses.
The Final Outcome
The point I’m making here is simple: Paying to be heard died back with Web 1.0.
This is an era where it takes very little effort to be seen. You can send influential bloggers like Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble a message on Twitter and they’ll see it. But if what you have to say is not interesting, they’ll pass right on by.
Don’t spend your money on trying to be seen, that’s the easy part. Instead, be creative and be interesting. If you are, people will find you. Focusing on your content and spending your money on things that make your product or site better will ultimately lead to more results than paying $80 to put your product in a pile.
I’m looking for people to beta test the next release of the Read It Later extension (0.9). It has been revamped to work with Firefox’s new bookmarking system and has several new features which need some proper testing.
Anyone is welcome to try it but I’m looking for people who:
Have Firefox 3 Beta (If not, you can run FF2 and 3 together see below)
Currently use Read It Later at least a few times a week
Willing to give good feedback
Interested? Leave me a comment (and email) below or email me. I’ll be letting beta testers play in about a week.
Note: You can run Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 together on the same machine if need be. Here are some instructions on how to do so: Windows - Mac
