All Posts Tagged 'neighborgoods'
Weeknote 79
For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:
Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.
As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.
Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.
But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.
In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.
We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.
Weeknote 73
It's the end of the year, so as we try to hit our deadlines and move projects forward before the holidays, I have the glamorous job of organizing all of the financial information to have it ready for taxes. OK, it's not really glamorous but it is oddly satisfying.
I held the fort down in Austin, and Ben flew to San Francisco. While there, he met with Micki from NeighborGoods, Scott and Mark from MediaBugs and Amit from Photojojo.
When he returned, we watched the video prototype for the potential future of magazines, Mag+ brought to us by BERG and Bonnier R&D. Sadly the prototype comes at us the same week that the
Weeknote 72
Katie and I went to New Orleans this week to attend Do it With Drupal, a great conference for lovers of the dark Drupal arts put on by our friend Jeff Robbins and his cohorts at Lullabot. I have been wearing one of their teeshirts for years, so it was quite an experience to walk through a hotel convention center and see hundreds of people wearing the same shirt.
Jon Armstrong and I gave our talk about online communities. It went well, and I had a lot of interesting follow up discussions with other attendees. dooce Community makes such a compelling case for the kind of personality filled niche communities I love to build. I really wanted to sell the rewards these kind of sites deliver, so we talked both about the traffic boost they've seen - Jon showed snapshots of his analytics that show the community users spend nearly three times as long on the site as they do on the main blog - and about the emotional outpouring they've seen from the nearly 20,000 members they've signed up in the first month. See this thread, it melts my heart.
I said a few things that people liked and tweetered about a bit. I am always mega-honored when anyone quotes a talk I give on Twitter. This time around it was "When I build a community, I'm hoping it will actually improve people's offline lives as well as online," and When you open up community access to a site you own, you're essentially selling shares in your site."
These choice nuggets are from a section of the presentation where I was discussing the responsibilities we have as purveyors of web services and online communities. The tools we have to measure our impact on the people who use our products focus on anonymized trends and aggregated cross-sections. But the communities we manage are not these aggregates! Each member is a person, sitting somewhere in front of a laptop or holding an iPhone. Each, a person who has made the decision to trust us, that we as software providers are trying to make the world a better place through technology, by connecting them and letting them speak to one another. I believe that the software we provide creates a connection between us and each one of these people, and that we need to respect that connection. So I rant about it!
While at DIWD, we got to hang out with some charming new friends. Kristina Halvorson gave a great keynote about content strategy, and then gave me some great advice about running a small business. NOTHING BUT CLASS, that lady.
We also spent some quality time with Rob Purdie, who presented about his work with The Economist and all of the magic that can be achieved using the Scrum development method. I impolitely complimented his politeness about three times, so I hope he won't avoid me the next time we're in the same city.
Our lovely client, Micki Krimmel was in town as well, presenting about the job of community manager. She gave a great presentation, and it was exciting to see NeighborGoods up on the big screen. If any DIWD attendees are reading, join up to share your old Drupal books with your pals.
In between all of the excitement, I found just enough time to upload the first baby version of Media Bugs to our dev server. After weeks of planning, it's always fun to see the software come to life. Scott has already logged in and posted the first few bugs. Meanwhile, the team at Rumors Studio nailed their deadline and delivered some awesome wireframes for our join project with Helsinki Design Lab.
The only thing I haven't checked off my todo list is to check out the newest version of Flixel. Adam Atomic has been twittering about all the improvements he's made, and I'm anxious to dig in and see what the new capabilities inspire.
I'm off to San Francisco on Monday for a few days of in-person time with our friends in PST. Katie will be holding down the fort in Austin while we prepare to close out the year. Excelsior!
NeighborGoods Launches in LA
According to TechCrunch and GigaOm, NeighborGoods has officially launched in Los Angeles! They've got lots of nice things to say about our work, and we're super proud to have worked with Micki to get this far!
NeighborGoods is built on top of PeoplePods, XOXCO's new social software toolkit. Using PeoplePods means we were able to skip all of the infrastructure building, and instead spend all of our time in product design and ideation. Throughout our alpha release, and now moving into our beta release, we've been able to quickly and easily add functionality to the site simply by creating new "pods" of content and functionality.
PeoplePods will be released under an open source license within the next few weeks! Follow PeoplePods on Twitter for the latest information.
XOXCO's Busy Summer
We have been having an extra busy summer here at XOXCO. Check out some of the nifty stuff we've launched in the last few weeks:
We worked with Total Immersion to create the Go Hamster Go! game to promote the KIA Soul. The game uses augmented reality head tracking software so that you can control the game with your face. We built the Facebook application portion of the game.
NeighborGoods, a platform for community-based lending and renting, has just gone into alpha! Our project with Micki Krimmel, NeighborGoods hopes to make it easier for you to save money by borrowing stuff from your friends instead of buying new stuff. NeighborGoods is built on our PeoplePods framework, and we worked with designer Mari Sheibley to implement Micki's vision.
Speaking of PeoplePods, we've been working with designer Mark Bult to get PeoplePods launched. As soon as we're doing building the new site, the community building framework will (finally) be available to developers.
Finally, we launched a new blog a few weeks ago called Must Share Hair - a place for real people with real hair to share their hair awesomeness with the world. The submissions of great hair have been pouring in, and The Wall Street Journal covered our launch. The blog has already clawed its way up the Tumblr popularity scale, where we are currently the third most popular blog about hair.
Coming Soon: Neighborgoods
XOXCO has been working with Micki Krimmel over the past few months on a really cool project, and we are now getting tantilizingly close to letting you play with it.
NeighborGoods is a tool that will make it easier for you to share your stuff with your friends and neighbors, and to save money by borrowing or renting stuff that you'd otherwise have to buy and then store in your closet. We can't wait to loan you our awesome (but hard to store) collapsible 16-foot ladder!
Sign up to be one of the first people to use Neighborgoods, and follow us on Twitter for tantalizing tidbits of info that Micki will be releasing over the next few months.
