We have shut down the bloozle service and the bloozle project. This blog remains a repository of our work done, memories and lessons learnt. It is no more a living document however.

Tagging - Part 1 of 3

[This is the first post in a 3 part series on the power of tags and how Bloozle
can leverage this feature to your advantage]

Tagging is one of the most ubiquitous features in the online world today.
However, it also remains one of the most under-rated and under-utilized tools.

A tag can be thought of as a personal keyword that you add to any content
in order to "pin" it for future use.(that's what you'd tell your grandmother and
your kids) People tag for the primary purpose of structuring information so that
it becomes easily retrievable and "recallable".

Another way of doing this could be to "bind" all content in a rigid hierarchy.
This could be useful in cases where previous classification has been done and
pre-defined categories exist and you just need to add newer categories. However,
if you are to begin from scratch; there could be a few hassles. The problem is
that you need to have an idea of all the possible use cases so that the hierarchy
is all encompassing and also that you need to devote time to run any content
through all branches of the hierarchy to determine which suits the content best
(one "item" can fall under one branch only). Now, most of us aren't experts on
everything under the sun and neither can we afford the luxury of time. Tagging
emerges as a brilliant way of managing our content and in the process, structuring
information for the better.

People can tag content with whatever comes to their mind and thus spend no time
in "categorizing" it and basically search for the tag whenever they want to
go back to the content. This ability to generate tags on the fly has fuelled
the popularity of sites that have ushered the "Web 2.0 era", namely del.icio.us
and Flickr. Tagging is a neat way to combat the avalanche of information.
Find something interesting? Just tag it "cool stuff" and explore it later.

(In fact, I'm wondering why no one has created a desktop based cool tagging
utility yet. I've seen some, none of which are worth mentioning. Windows Vista's
tagging utility is a good start, but has a long way to go yet.)

The barCamp 3 Mumbai experience

barCamp Mumbai 3 was a good experience. The team got good feedback from many barCamp participants. The interest and enthusiasm shown towards the bloozle concept was very encouraging.

We conducted two sessions: the first one was Short Tale of the Long Tail. Here we discussed the emergence of the long tail concept and its powerful implications. The bloozle concept goes hand in hand with it since we try to address the twin issues of relevancy and quality (in the Long Tail) to deliver the best of blogging and news content to our users.

Our second session was Unexplored Possibilities of Tagging. Here we elaborated on the idea of how a simple exercise like tagging content with some relevant words has potent applications. Tagging leads to powerful content delivery mechanisms like TagFeeds, GroupFeeds and SubFeeds. It might also enable the user to discover and meet people who are writing top quality articles on topics the user is interested in.

Coming to how the barCamp was for us - the best thing which happened to us was the T-shirts - they gave us visibility, recognition as a team and more importantly help build the brand bloozle at the barcamp. Among other things, Kalpesh (K) did a good job by sprinting to the wiki - our presentations were indeed the first to hit the Wiki. Anirudhha, Kalpesh (K & M) along with Aurko (all donning the T-shirt) did good campaigning outside the sessions.

Initially, we felt that we need to include bloozle in the demo session because it looked like demo sessions generated the most interest and were getting the maximum crowds. But as the day went by - we found that people were indeed interested in bloozle - in fact, lot of people kept on following up with us about when our presentations were scheduled (T-shirts helped again here by identifying us). And at the end our sessions were quite well attended.

One more thing which went well of course, was that the idea was understood by most of the people in the two sessions; some pertinent questions were obviously the ones related to the tagging spam, content spam etc.

Overall we think the barCamp was very successful for us in terms of

• visibility
• getting people interested in the concept
• making contact with various people, users and consultants who gave us a lot of input on usability, desirable features and the like. Such valuable feedback is always appreciated.

Our team found many presentations and demos at this barcamp praiseworthy. Barcamp as an unconference has really arrived and keeps improving upon itself year after year. We also found about 100 participants who agreed to be beta-testers to bloozle. Needless to say, we are fired up to make bloozle a useful and valuable service which will change the way we access information on the web.

Are you too interested in bloozling as a beta tester? Then Get invited to bloozle.

Unexplored Possibilities of Tagging

Team Bloozle made this presentation a the blogCamp (held along with the barCamp) yesterday ...

| View | Upload your own

A Short Tale of the Long Tail

Team Bloozle made this presentation at the barCampMumbai3 yesterday ...

| View | Upload your own

BETA TESTING

Beta Testing : The phase that has flummoxed many a great services. Nikhil had presented a Bloozle demo in the last BarCamp and had asked volunteer beta testers to directly register on the site and give feedback - it was an open beta that way. We got some feedback , however not all beta testers were our target audience. More so, so many people tested but almost everyone did it 'on the surface' - the responses were not detailed and hence not much use to us.

Considering this as an inevitable consequence of the exercise, Nikhil and Hemant were in favour of re-employing a similar method to gather beta testers for the vastly improved Bloozle at the third edition of BarCamp in Mumbai. However, I had my apprehensions. We deliberated on the issue and I directed them to Joel's article on beta testing. It was the tipping point in our discussion and then we decided to go ahead with a closed - invitation only beta.

I can't over emphasize the benefits of this technique, but the fall outs could also prove irksome. For example we may not have the critical user density to correctly weigh in the feedback or we may miss out on quite a few of our target users. None of this is a trivial issue. However, what we need at this moment is direct, brutal feedback from our correct target user base so that we can launch the bug free, feature rich version to the world at large in as small a time frame as possible. So we figured this is the way forward for us currently.

However, if you are I-need-to-try-out-every-new-web-application type of geek (like us) , do drop us a mail. You could very well be the maven (early adopter) we are looking for. Now, that I have referred to mavens, I may as well recommend Tipping Point to you! A quick, fun read.

Bloozle Team Marathon Meet

Date: 15 March 2008
Venue: National Centre for Student Entrepreneurship, NITIE, Mumbai
Agenda: Plan for reopening the beta and presenting at the barCamp

Well, it was an unusual groggy Saturday morning for most, waking up at an unearthly hour of 9.30 am!

The Cast

Nikhil and Hemant were the first ones to touch base, followed by myself, Aniruddha and my namesake. Aurko starred in a critically acclaimed cameo (after a long time) and we were also joined by Pankaj later (and Ashish for a fleeting moment). Manpreet & Saurabh were missed. We were also about to have some female company, but for Hemant scaring her wits away leaving the poor thing scampering for cover.

The Minutes

Our discussion track followed the one jotted(painstakingly) by Nikhil on the Wiki.

1. What is to be discussed at Blog Camp and BarCamp?
2. How to announce the reopening of the beta?
3. Relook at features
4. Find out bugs in the site
   
5. Develop a framework for the tutorial
   

Eureka!!
During the course of this discussion, we stumbled upon a truly innovative practice and (what we'd like to believe) which was implemented for the first time ever since mankind walked on the planet. We call it "physical editing of virtual content". Here's a demonstration:

1. Our invention - display a webpage on the whiteboard and make edits on the board!



2. Caught in the Act

While this "physical editing of virtual content" remained a preferred method to discuss most items on the agenda, Nikhil had a unique way of prioritizing features. He first ran through all the features noted in the shared spreadsheet (yeah, as if you didn't know) and then turned off the spanking new projector. We were asked to recall the ones which we felt important and these were ranked on priority basis. Collectively, we noted down all the critical ones in decreasing order of priority ... here are some of the items we jotted down:

1. IE compatibility ( Tests + Rectification)
2. Bloozle button ( To be used to add any post/blog to Bloozle database without logging into site)
3. Chat with Team Bloozle
4. UI/UX Issues
5. Rating/ Tagging widget
6. Filter for sorting feeds
7. Add tag button

Gotta acknowledge the intrepid duo of Manpreet & Aniruddha for taking on these task.

Lunch Break :)

All the home delivery outlets of Powai ahd schemed up against us today. None was ready to deliver to NITIE , Domino's Pizza Hut, Subways , Smokin Joe's included. This led Nikhil to pop the question of NITIE delivery as soon as some poor chap picked up the line on the other side.

Finally, Garcia's was our knight in shining armour, delivering pizzas and lemonades to us starved souls. I think the grub appeased Mucchal's tummy the most as he dozed off into the sleepy realms. Aniruddha kicked him intentionally/unintentionally?) back into reality.

Back to work?
Hemant and Aniruddha left after lunch - Hemant had some work at home and Aniruddha was keen to get back to his vi to punch in more code. The rest of us also took a break and went to roam around the NITIE campus and took a turn towards the Vihar Lake where we spent some time dipping our feet in water. Check out the outline of the hills in the background!





Then we took a longish stroll to the NITIE hostel canteens to have some tea ...

Indeed back to work ...
Finally, tummies filled and minds refreshed we returned to our dark room and projector to discuss the intro and the format of the tutorial. It was a quick and fiery session with everyone throwing in ideas and we changing our formats twice before we completed the discussion.

By the time we ended it was almost 8.30 PM and we all remembered commitments made to friends for Saturday night parties. So we hurried back ....

Feature Prioritizing

Prioritzing the features in the first version/launch is one of the major hurdles that any application/ service website would face. The common wisdom for web based services is to let out the first version with the bare minimum features that would keep a user hooked on and then add subsequent functionality/features around this "core" with the user feedback. Of course , this is assuming that you are able to gain atleast a small, but dedicated user base or fan following, whichever you prefer. Rephrasing Paul Graham from this post, "..your early adopters are fairly tolerant. Your product just has to do something, not everything.."

This approach is the surest (not the easiest) way to dodge the black hole of “feature creep” wherein the developers/creators spend lot of time integrating new “killer features” into the product without having the actual user’s perspective. The end result is that the consumer ends up with a heavily loaded (read complicated) product without having any inkling of what to do with it. Hence, at every stage of development, it is essential to step back and think from the consumer’s point of view. Better still, have actual users testing it all along.

Now focusing on our site, we had already spent quite some time dilly-dallying over our ideal offering and the benefits (I’d call it increased productivity) that our users could potentially gain. In view of the ever increasing competing services springing up, we pulled out all the stops and decided to fix a date and launch with as much as we could accomplish in the time frame. (It’s another story that even this date got postponed, well twice actually).

Agreed that this was not the ideal way of getting about with the launch, but we needed something concrete to go by. Then we sat down and ranked the features that we planned to have on two major parameters :

• Perceived utility to the users
• Effort required from our side in terms of time and manpower

There could have been n other parameters, but for an optimal result, these two or their variants would more than suffice. Once, this was done, it was not very difficult to handpick the features that would form the “core” of our initial offering based on the "points" the features scored on these parameters. The subsequent releases would build upon this and as time and manpower permit, we would be crunching out newer and better features.

This “feature prioritization” problem would be faced by all product/site developers. Joel Spolsky has an excellent post here dealing with exactly the same issue. Additionally, 37 Signals and Newyorker have helpful articles here and here respectively.

Are we there, yet?

Well guys! Its almost a joke among us that Team Bloozle is in stealth mode. We have actually stayed in stealth mode for too long now - its been .. ummm .. what - 5 months since October when we 'unleashed' the concept in front of the barCamp audience. With the next barCamp coming - and we not having progressed much, it does feel a bit bad - but guess that's what happens when you work outside your day jobs.

But anyway things are not very bad, we have done some work - one of them being starting this blog and updating it on and off. We have also created huge laundry lists of the tasks we need to do on the technical and functional side. And most importantly, we have got more people on board - though with everyone working part-time, scheduling and synchronization of work becomes a challenge.

How do we overcome this challenge of 'distributed team'? Well the answer is - knowingly or unknowingly - we use concepts of Agile development. We are currently working on the 4th iteration of bloozle; the first one was made by me in 2006 (it was never released to public), thereafter Manpreet (our tech lead) made one more which was also scrapped as a test version; then came the version which we released in barCampMumbai2 and post comments from initial test users - we are today working on the 4th iteration.

But of course the classical Agile development doesn't suit us to the tee - for example, we all work mostly alone and coordinate over email, chat and phone. Also - we have been iterating (and improving) our versions mostly based on inputs from closed user groups. Even after the barCamp, though a lot of users were exposed to the app - most inputs came from people whom I met after the event face-to-face to get feedback about the app.

But all that's soon to change, we have started working on a 4th and almost 'launchable' version of bloozle and the web app will soon be released to the world and we will start getting 'mainstream' users soon. And of course, then its again a roller coaster ....

Wish us luck!!

RSS is HOT

These days, a lot of action is taking place on the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) front. Quite a few startups have sprung up playing around with feeds, mashing them ,etc to come up with a number of different products/services. We have already seen start ups integrating existing services such as instant messaging, blogging, commenting, etc with the concept of feeds to deliver an interesting breed of utilities.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good article here detailing the major action in 2007 while Jeff Nolan highlights the action most likely in 2008 here. Even Newsgator, which targeted companies with their enterprise products made their desktop readers freely available to the general public. Surely a sign of the of RSS gaining mainstream recognition . Meanwhile, an interesting concept utilizing an individual’s RSS output file (OPML) is Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML). I would recommend these links for beginners.

Coming back to the original discussion, all this action validates our belief that RSS would be the prime source of information(anything that the user is interested in) in the not-so-distant future. This includes social networking updates, blogging and may be even email or any other source of communication. Victor Hugo’s quote springs up in my mind

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

Hope we reach there in time!