PostRank

Since our launch last week, I’ve gotten versions of this question a few times:

Since Joe knows us pretty well, I figured if he’s not clear on our rebranding, then it’s pretty likely other folks might be confused, too. (The @replies to Joe’s tweet query confirmed it.)

So I’ll try to clear up any misunderstandings about what we’re up to.

Yes, the company is still AideRSS, Inc. We have not changed to PostRank, Inc. Or AideRank, or PostRSS, or whatever some witty people may imply. One of the reasons for moving focus away from the AideRSS name is that people tended to stumble over it — misspellings, problems remembering it accurately, and it didn’t seem to clearly communicate what we do.

Our core technology, which powers all our products, is PostRank. It was before and it will be in the future. (But who knows what future innovations our geek geniuses might be cooking up in their wily little brains…)

Because PostRank is central to what we do, and, when we’re asked what AideRSS does, we’re really explaining what PostRank does, we’ve decided to focus more on PostRank, as the technology that we develop and improve, as the power and value behind our products and tools, and as our flagship brand.

Many companies have more than one product, and brands tend to be built around those products. To use another local example, lots of people know what a BlackBerry is, but outside of Waterloo, not that many people talk about RIM, the company that makes them. I’ve even been at a conference with a friend who worked for RIM, and heard plenty of folks say, “Oh, she works for BlackBerry”.

PostRank is kind of like that for us. In the future we’ll potentially have lots of products, some built on PostRank, some perhaps built on future technology we’ll develop.

Our actual products and tools (things we offer that the public can put to work for themselves) include:

• PostRank analysis (which you can do on our website, and which takes place behind all our functionality)
• filtering and ranking functionality for your feeds (which you can do on our website or with the Google Reader extension)
• the Top Posts widget (on hold briefly)
• the PostRank Firefox extension
• the Google Reader extension
• APIs that enable third party developers and partners to integrate PostRank functionality into their own applications.

In the future, engagement analysis (”Engagement rankings in the blogosphere”) will become part of our public toolkit as well, but at the moment it’s mostly just a spectator sport for you folks (and an interesting way to find new feeds to subscribe to).

So, we’re focusing on what drives our work and makes us useful (hopefully). PostRank is a focal point for our thoughts, ideas, and development so that everything we work on benefits our user community (present and future).

And no, I don’t know just yet whether that means our t-shirts will become collectors items, so don’t fire up eBay just yet…

We made it!

After a brief delay from our intended launch time, the new postrank.com is live and in the wild!

We’ve been really excited by the feedback so far. A lot of what we developed came from direct user requests, so we hope it really helpful.

There’s been a lot of discussion already over various feedback, including questions, opinions on how things work now, and suggestions. That’s exactly what we want — we can’t make the site great without knowing what works for our community. Keep it coming! (Comment here, email me, tweet, or hit Get Satisfaction.)

There are also, unsurprisingly, a few bugs we’ve turned up:

• A couple of people have reported issues with logging in/resetting passwords on the new site. If that happens, just let us know and we’ll fix it up.
• There were some problems with lots of PR 1.0 rankings in Google Reader. We’re working on that, too.
• And there was also a really poorly coincidental hardware failure on EC2, so there are some rankings that are a bit behind as we move things over and get them ramped back up. Should be done today, though.

Anything else quirky or weird that you see, let us know.

For those who’ve recently been seeing this message with vexing frequency in Google Reader with our extension installed, we’ve updated the extension version, so installing it will make the fish message go away: update Google Reader extension.

Apologies for any annoyance, though in good news the appearance of the fish did help us figure out the source of an issue, so there was some benefit to the experiment. (Though there was discussion about the value of an error message that actually makes sense and whether or not people would still tell us if that had popped up instead…)

I love talking to folks who’ve had that “Wow!” moment when they start putting PostRank to work, and folks who’ve happily integrated filtering into their information workflows for some time. However, from time to time I still talk to folks who don’t use PostRank or any other information management tools other than an RSS reader (and sometimes not even that…).

Sure, a few don’t manage enough feeds to really need information management tools, but more often these folks do experience information overload from time to time; they just don’t trust the tools to still give them what they want.

I’ve seen their reasoning expressed a few different ways, but it boils to two things, which are actually pretty closely interconnected:

• I don’t want to miss anything
• I like to discover cool, new stuff.

(more…)

Admittedly, going on vacation while on the verge of a beta release isn’t ideal timing. We tried to get it out the door before that, but hey, sometimes circumstances just conspire like the wind against you…

So I wasn’t sure if I’d come back to vast heaps of feedback and bugs, or to tumbleweeds tumbling and crickets chirping. (Did you know I saw actual tumbleweeds at an abandoned ranch homestead in the south Okanagan? Awesome.)

Both of those possible scenarios bring challenges, though, really, given the choice I’d take the embarrassment of data riches. And you have provided them to me!

Ilya has gotten me up to speed on issues and suggestions submitted to date, and it’s fabulous stuff. The collective community really is deliciously smart. He also did a pretty decent Melle impersonation keeping invitations going out, bug fixes processing, and feature requests recorded.

Fortunately for my job security, he seemed pretty eager to get back to his real day job.

We’ve made a few other decisions recently that I think will make our site, and our company presence in general online, even better. It is a bit more work for our designer and developers. Fortunately, we make them prove they have superhero abilities before we hire them.

In any case, keep the bug reports, suggestions, and questions coming. The result will be a site that hopefully fulfills your wildest information management dreams. Or, y’know, just helps you kick ass better at your day job. Which is pretty important, too.

And we are still welcoming those who’d like to be beta testers. Just drop me an email at melanie@aiderss.com. As always, there’s a snazzy t-shirt in it for you…