Bloozle Beta at barCamp Mumbai2

This is probably the first formal blog post I am making on the Bloozle blog. We launched the beta of Bloozler at barCampMumbai2 today! (I had notified about it on my personal blog yesterday)

It was a good session - the turnout was pretty good in spite of the fact that my session on Blogging 2.0 got scheduled as late as 3.30 PM. I did make some efforts to keep up the enthu by distributing some 'cards' with Bloozler and Blogging2.0 written on them (with my contact details) during the second session. Overall - I think people were interested in the concept as well as Bloozle.

So, as a newfangled web app - was the barCamp launch useful to us? I would say Yes and No.

Yes - because our aim to 'release' a beta at barCamp was to get user feedback on whether what we were building was inline with user expectations or not. Also if users did find the concept useful enough and compelling enough to make a shift from their traditional blog tracking apps. We got a 'useful' feedback which we will need to work on.

No - because another intention of the beta launch was to get initial set of users ans start building a community around bloozle. However, the feedback we got suggested a few things to us:

• The homepage is not 'intuitive' enough - it is difficult to understand on the 'first look' what bloozle is all about
• Users are facing some problems with login etc - these are teething problems which we need to overcome ASAP
• Some critical features need to be gapped - like ability to import reading list (OPML files), users must be provided some pre-populated feeds etc
• Some other gaps are around subscription of feeds - we need to build more intelligence in the application so that users need not remember exact feed location (ex. users need not submit http://bloozle.com/blog/atom.xml but only http://bloozle.com/blog/ should work).
  

The verdict - we need to spend a few more months 'perfecting' the application before it goes mainstream. This clearly means we need to increase our team size ... so coming soon "Mission Recruitment"!!