About to ship a new app
Monday, January 14, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends. 
One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.)
I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product.
I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.
Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.
I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about...
