The Saturday after the scan was tough.  The prospect of giving birth to Abigail loomed ahead of us.  The shock of her having died still rested on us.  We were in between the times.  The world had just fallen apart but we knew it was still about to disintegrate further too.

There were a few things we were not prepared for.  My wife could still feel Abigail moving inside her womb (not kicking but moving still) and shefound that very traumatic.  My wife’s parents came up to look after our son the next day when we went into hospital.  They said a few silly things like “it will be easier when you have another child” – that was silly then (we could have a 1000 kids and this wouldn’t be any easier) and it is even more silly now since we won’t have another child.  That said, I do appreciate that they had no idea what situation they were coming into and we were/are grateful for their support.

19 October 2008 (Abigail’s birthday)

I think my faith had disintegrated over these few days.  I had the sense that if it was going to survive at all, God would have to hold on to me, not the other way around.  As my wife and I walked out to the car there was a small sparrow on the roof.  I remember praying sarcastically “that is nice God – not a sparrow can fall without you noticing – well you are going to have to do better than that, a lot better!”

The hardest part for me was driving my wife to the hospital.  We went in for 9am.  I wanted nothing more than to drive in the opposite direction, get away to a beautiful part of the country and take my wife AWAY from this ordeal.  And yet here I was driving towards it.  That was the only part in the day that I was really active, that I decided what happened.  Once we were in the hospital the medics took over and we were on rails really.  We were active but not with any real options, we became passengers.  But here in the car I was the driver – this was my last chance to run away and I desperately wanted to.

In the hospital the staff were great.  Our consultant Paul had come in to kick things off.  He understood my wife’s concerns about the baby moving and arranged a final scan (even though he knew their was no point). It was strangely comforting to see Abigail’s body on the screen one more time.  Still no heartbeat (what did we expect?).  This was a Sunday and I remembered thinking about our church meeting, praying for us – it seemed a long way away but I could imagine their support.

All the midwives took time to say how sorry they were.  They latched on to our language and quickly started talking about Abigail.  Also, I had on the spur of the moment grabbed some pictures of our son and my wife kept looking at them and showing them to the midwives.  It gave us a way of remembering him through the day and dissipated some of the focus off Abigail.  This was a helpful survival tactic and I remembered thinking how impossible this would be if we had no children at all.  At one point in the late morning my mother-in-law was able to bring our son in and we played and chatted with him for a bit.  It was good for him to see Mummy was okay and it was good to break up our day as at this stage there was quite a bit of sitting around.

Once labour kicked in, it got going really quickly.  One of my prayers was that it wouldn’t take too long.  We had been told sometimes it could take days in induced stillbirths.  Once we got down to the labour ward the atmosphere changed  – we were a few rooms up from where our son had been born (one of the happiest days of our lives!).  Now it was all about Abigail (the saddest day of our lives).  The midwives asked how we had chosen Abigail’s name.  I explained about the infertility problems and how happy we were when we conceived.  How Abigail means Father’s Joy and that was our expectation when we chose the name – she would be my joy.  Now we believed Abigail was our heavenly Father’s joy.   The older midwife cried at this point.  She said later she would pray for us and I believe she definitely had faith.

My wife had enough pain relief as there were no real limits to the drugs they could give her (as no baby’s health to worry about).  But whilst with our son (she had had an epidural) with Abigail she could feel her body moving down.  We were both very emotional.  And there was nothing they could give us to dull the emotional pain.  I felt so much for what my wife was going through first and foremost but was also in turmoil myself.

At one point the midwives asked us if we wanted various mementos – photos, lock of hair, crib blanket etc – and we said yes we wanted everything.  They also asked if we wanted to see Abigail the moment she was born or later.  We said we wanted her to be taken away at birth and then bought back once we were ready and my wife had been cleaned up.  This took some of the pressure out of the later stages of labour.

I remember being really surprised when my wife went through the exact same stages of labour as she had with our son.  There was the very emotional tearful stage when she seemed to give up on it ever finishing.  I knew it would not be long at that point.

At 19.16 (Sunday 19 October 2008) Abigail was born.  She came quickly in the end.  As she was being born my wife screamed that she wanted to hold her straight away.  “Give Abigail to me” she said.  The midwife was aware that we were changing what we had said we wanted, but we didn’t care at that point.  Abigail was out now and that changed everything.  She asked “were we sure?  Did we want her to tell us what to expect first?”  Images of horror filled my mind…  I simply said “just give her to us now.”

And there she was.  My wife held our daughter.  I  held my wife.  After a bit of clearing up we were left alone.   We cried.  We examined and cuddled our daughter.  I took a few pictures (I still regret not taking more pictures such as a good picture of my wife holding Abigail).  There was at this point a feeling that the worst was behind us.  We could just relax now.

After all of the scans and grainy images here she was.  I am not sure how much to say here.  Some things are just for me and my wife I think…

On the one hand our daughter was beautiful.  I could see the family likenesses.  Her features were wonderful and intricate and yes she was a girl.  I felt emotions at that, my only daughter wouldn’t get to grow up, wear a princess outfit, have a boyfriend, have her own babies.  So yes she was beautiful.

But death’s mark was on her too.  Her body quickly darkened and cooled.  My parental instinct says she was perfect but my mind knew she was not.  She had died for a reason.  A couple of her fingers and toes were fused together and that made me think the cause must be genetic (not nutritional which was the other scenario we had lived with).  We would await the post mortem results to see if this was the case.

Then came my time for a cuddle.  We later found our she only weighed 625 grams (our son had been 10lb 10oz!  Quite a difference) but she was still bigger and heavier than I expected.  She fitted easily in my arms.  Even as I write these words and remember holding the weight of her… tears are so near.  I cried then.  Throughout the day I had planned this moment.  I knew what I had to say to dedicate my daughter (Father’s Joy) to our Heavenly Father.  (Every night when I put my son to bed after stories and prayers I say what he calls the special words – I said them for Abigail too).

The Lord bless you and keep you, Abigail

The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you my Daughter

God lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his peace, his eternal peace.

I Love you

And I put Abigail back in her crib.  I had done for my daughter in death what I did for my son every single day in life.  I committed her to God, blessed her, loved her and put her to rest.  At that moment I felt secure in my place as her father.

Then I invited the staff back in to take her away.

Seeing Abigail was desperately hard but not as bad as I had thought it might have been.  This was my first personal encounter with death and I think the main feeling to be honest was peace.  It wasn’t horrible or ugly, it was just sad but also peaceful.  I felt God in the room.

With Abigail out of the room we took some time to make some phone calls.  I remember telling our minister with a wierd conviction that even if before conception I had known this was going to be the outcome, I would still have gone through it all.  To hold Abigail and know she had lived and now was in heaven was worth it.  I didn’t regret that despite the pain.  I also had the bizarre feeling that we had been perfect parents to Abigail.  I couldn’t say that for my son where we make mistakes on a regular basis.  But for Abigail we had done everything we could.  OK it wasn’t very much but throughout her short life and on this her birthday we had loved her, cared for her, protected her as best we could and that was all we could have done really.

At one point my wife felt very sick and stood up and suddenly there was blood everywhere.  The staff came back in and sorted us out.  I realised my wife was quite woozy and wobbly still.

Throughout the day we had had two midwives.  One was very experienced, the other very young and inexperienced.  When we had first met the inexperienced one she had been very chirpy and happy and nervous.  She hadn’t recalibrated her expectations to what was happening this day and was acting like it was a normal happy birth.  The experienced midwife took her outside and she came back totally different – very sober.  I wondered what had been said but I can guess.  At the end of the day they were out with Abigail, weighing her, taking photos for us and things like that.  They bought Abigail back in – I think they thought we had not had enough time with her.  I felt a bit undone by this at the time but looking back we should have had a lot longer with her that we did – I wish I could go back now and have another few hours, few days (lifetime !) with her.  So I am glad for that extra time.

At one point I asked the inexperienced midwife if this was the first “sad one” she had done.  She said yes and burst into tears and left us.  I bet she remembers us and Abigail for the rest of her career.  I was grateful someone else felt emotion for our daughter – it was another person who would keep her memory alive.  At another point the senior midwife asked if there was anything she could get us.  My wife, asked though tears if she could get her another heart as this one was broken.  The midwife responded instantly and very warmly by saying that from what she could see there was nothing wrong with the heart she had.

Our Doctor Paul came to see us at one point with Abigail.  He said she was beautiful.  I really thought highly of him that day coming in at the start and the end of the day and just sitting with us for no reason other than to show compassion with us.  All the staff were absolutely wonderful.

Earlier in the day I had picked up a booklet from the hospital chapel.  When we were on our own again, I got it out and read a few pages with my wife.  My heart skipped when I opened the page that quoted Luke 12 v 6-7

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

That verse had top-and-tailed, totally-encompassed the day.  I had said God would have to hold me, my strength was gone.  And he had.

We went back upstairs to the ward.  We spent some time talking through the post mortem authorisation.  We felt it important to know what had caused Abigail to grow slowly and to die.  Would it happen again?  That said, I didn’t feel old enough to be making decisions about whether they could take small samples of organ matter and things like that.  I just got through it by telling myself that this was not our daughter now, she was somewhere else, this was what had been left behind.

My wife and I talked late.  She slept – she was exhausted.  I was mostly awake.

At about 4am I got up for a walk.  My restless wander.  I went to all the places that had dominated so much of our lives those past few months.  The car park we had parked in so many times, the hospital entrance we had walked through for each appointment, the yellow lines that our son had played on during the 20-week scan when everything started to unravel, the room where we had all the scans, the room where we had sat after Abigail died, the drink’s machine which had served me the odd drink.

The hardest place I visited was the entrance to the neo-natal intensive care unit.  I could see tiny babies.  Babies I had felt so sorry for a few days earlier.  But these were breathing babies.  Ours was on a mortuary slab somewhere now.  I saw worrying parents and I didn’t pity them – I envied them.  I had been terrified by this option a few days before but now I would have happily given my right arm to have Abigail in there with all those machines and tubes.  Was that selfish – she was in a better place.  I was sad for me not her.

As I toured the hospital landmarks I was consumed with grief.  All these placed had only a few days earlier represented different possible outcomes.  Some were hoped for, others feared.  Now I said goodbye to each of these scenarios.  I was left with just one scenario, a funeral to plan.  There was nothing to hope for now, only our grief to endure and to survive.  I felt cheated.

I went back to bed.  Hopefully this was rock bottom, hopefully it would all be easier from here.

We visited Dra. Fernandez last Saturday, Little Boy Bun is officially 21 weeks and 3 days. Normal weight and heart beat, Doppler indicated 147 beats per minute but we could not get a second reading since Little Boy Bun kept on turning and turning in mommy.

Thuthumpthathumpthathump

Hear My heart beat

Everything seems to be on schedule, Catrina has been warned to only gain a pound a week for the next 20 more weeks. Little Boy Bun is scheduled to arrive on November 7, 2009. Just five days before my birthday. I think it would be the best gift ever

A few days ago while lying in bed, I think Little Boy Bun kicked for me. I am not so sure though. I think it was a kick, Catrina says my hand was in the right location, but I just can’t say. If you place your palm on Catrina’s tummy you can actually feel her pulse through her skin. It’s like a big egg really. So when I try to feel Little Boy Bun’s kick I can’t tell the difference between Catrina’s thumping heart and Little Boy Buns thumping foot.

We launched feedly on June 2008. We have since then done 280+ iterations and actively monitored and listened to see which ones worked and which ones did not. Here is a picture which summarizes the phases we went through:

A few lessons learned while going through this process:

Lesson #1 – Core community Special thanks to Louis Gray, Leo Laporte, Read Write Web, Mashable and Robert Scoble for helping us launch feedly. The launch helped us get the word out and build the core of the feedly community.

Lesson #2 – Listen Twitter, friendfeed and getsatisfaction allows use to get instant feedback. This was key in June because the initial version of the product did not integrate well with Google Reader and angered a few users. This is key every day because it allows us to determine where the rough edges are and which of the features we push out provide the most value.

Lesson #3 – Simple is beautiful The simpler the user interface and the more chances you have to not loose users over time because of fatigue. It took us about 4 months, post-release,  to get a version which clicked with users. This is an area we still need to improve over time.

Lesson #4 – Performance and memory Street III helped us improve the performance of feedly by 10x while reducing by 5x the memory footprint. Performance + simpler UI were the key factors in increasing user adoption.

Lesson #5 – Measure, measure, measure A couple of month ago, we started to measure in more detail the install/first run/un-install behavior. We were shocked: only 20% of the people who installed feedly actually finished the welcome process. We were spending so much time and energy optimizing the feedly experience but only 1 of 5 would get to see that experience before making a decision. We decided to take a month and change our focus from the feedly experience to the welcome experience, adding better support for non-google reader users, adding better support for german, french, italian and spanish users, adding a simple intro video, providing some default content for user who were not familiar with RSS. It was very painful but the effort paid off: today more than 75% of the user who install feedly finish the welcome process and get to see the full digest experience before determining if they like it or not – and as you can see on the chart, that tuning had a similar impact to improving adoption as the UI and performance changes. Measuring is painful because nobody likes to be told that their baby is ugly but in the long run it is fruitful.

Lesson #6 – Expand the definition of the product One of the side effects of #5 is that it forces you to think of the “product” as not just the screens and user experience but also how you get people to sign up and spread the word.

Lesson #7 – Google Reader is an amazing platform Most people know Google Reader as a very efficient UI for reading RSS feeds. Under the hood, they are also an amazing undocumented RSS management platform with a very clean but stable and powerful set of API.

Lesson #8 – Firefox is an amazing incubation environment Firefox provides a rich standard-based API for building new experiences. Mozilla gives you access to an amazing culture and community. If you are able to work your way through becoming recommended, you also get access to a stream of users. A great environment to incubate new ideas and help change how people will browse the internet.

Lesson #9 – Be patient, iterate, listen, iterate Building something new is not always glorious. You have to be ready to go through months where despite working hard, things do not change right away. You have to be ready to listen to lot of negative feedback and people calling your death. The best way to address this is to be passionate about the problem you are trying to solve and build a trusted core community which can help you validate the changes you are making and steer you in the right direction.

We still have a long way to go but the good news is that it gets easier and more fun every day.

Special thanks all the feedly users: we really appreciate your feedback and the time you invest in helping us grow the user community. Special thanks to Louis Gray, Read Write Web, Robert Scoble, Mashable, Leo Laporte, Corvida for using some of their influence to spread the word and help us get off the ground.

Next: Feedly+iphone!

We want to take a minute and thank all the people who took the time to review feedly in the last 30 days.

Mashable  -  7 Ways to Create Your Own Social Start Page
“That’s the beauty of Feedly – you have to do practically nothing. Feedly immediately knows what you like, links to your Twitter, and even syncs to your Google Reader (Google Reader reviews) and marks anything you read in Feedly as already read in Google Reader. Heck, Feedly does even more – just try visiting Twitter with Feedly active and see what extra features it provides.” http://mashable.com/2009/05/03/social-start-pages/

novovison -  feedly, une petite merveille
“C’est, en tout cas, un beau pas supplémentaire au niveau graphique et ergonomique vers le journal entièrement personnalisé, dont je suis le rédacteur en chef 2.0.” http://novovision.fr/?Les-outils-du-plombier-1-feedly

download blog.it  -  Feedly porta tutti i feed in una comoda pagin
Le 5 stelle su 5 ed i 2000 download settimanali su addons.mozilla.org fanno capire quanto sia apprezzata e apprezzabile questa estensione, un vero must per chi quotidianamente legge molti feed
http://www.downloadblog.it/post/9781/feedly-porta-tutti-i-feed-in-una-comoda-pagina

dustin townsend – feedly 4/26/09
a pretty cool firefox extension that makes google reader awesome! [...] It is absolute genius!
http://www.dustintownsend.com/general/feedly/

IMSpike – The Best 12 Free RSS Readers for Windows, Mac and Linux 4/22/09
Feedly, a newer RSS Firefox extension offers a magazine like display of your feeds thus adapts to your natural reading habits. http://www.imspike.com/Search-Engines/the-best-12-free-rss-readers-for-windows-mac-and-linux/

kiwoo blog – Por qué me gusta Feedly 04/21/09
La razón por la cual me gusta feedly es que a diferencia de otros agreadores, como el mismo google reader, o feedreader, por decir algunos., te muestra los feeds de una manera mucho más atractiva. [...] Me lo he puesto como página de inicio en Firefox (antes tenia la página de twitter, y antes de esto netvibes)
http://www.kiwoo.org/blog/2009/04/21/por-que-me-gusta-feedly/

twi5.com – Feedly – An awesome FireFox addon combining twitter and Google Reader 04/19/09
Feedly is a FireFox addon that combines Google Reader and Twitter to give you all the related updates on a single page in your FireFox browser. http://www.twi5.com/feedly-an-awesome-firefox-addon-combining-twitter-and-google-reader/3354/

ReadWriteWeb – Feedly Mini Learns How to Search 04/17/09
Feedly is not that easy to describe in just a few words. Part feed reader, part social network aggregator , part search utility , and part application, what can be said for sure is that it is completely awesome. And it seems like every month, a new cool feature is slipstreamed into Feedly’s framework that makes it even more useful or interesting.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedly_mini_learns_how_to_search.php

Spector’s thoughts – Why I went back to Firefox — Feedly 04/12/09
Feedly is great for me because my reading habits are not just confined to my 250 RSS feeds found in Greader.  I read many other websites such as the Nytimes, Cnet, Techmeme, WSJ, WashPost, etc. [...]  Until Feedly, I was never able to share (and, why I really like Greader, it allows me to save these feeds) the articles that I read outside Greader.  I would read many great articles that were quickly forgotten. With Feedly, these articles no longer go through my head and then a few days later, leave it.  I have a record of my favorite articles that is kept for posterity.
http://spectorsthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/why-i-went-back-to-firefox-feedly/

Special thanks for all the tweets as well!

March was a good month overall. On the user front, we were able to hold on to the growth we saw in February with the launch of feedly mini. It was also interesting to see that users tend to spend more time in their feedly and participate/contribute more (sharing, save for later, tweet and email being the key actions).

On the technology front, we have been working on improving the dashboard, the welcome process and the digest and fixing as many bugs as possible. The focus is to get ready for the 2.0 release which will be going out in 2 weeks. We also started some early design work and performance test for feedly mobile, using the iphone as the first deployment target but also looking at Mozilla Fennec.

Special thanks to all the feedly users who participate in the design of the product and help us spread the good word.

Next? The next 3 weeks are going to be about getting all the iterations and improvements we have performed over the last 6 months polished and packaged and put an official feedly 2.0 out. More on that and how we hope to engage with the community in a coming post.

Heartbeat von der deutsch-nigerianischen Sängerin Nneka will ich eigentlich schon auf meinem Blog posten, seit ich es letztes Jahr zum ersten Mal gehört habe. Jetzt ist es soweit:

Achtung: Das Video lässt sich hier im Moment nicht angucken… ich gucke, was sich machen lässt, aber bis dahin klickt einfach oben bei “Ohrwurm des Monats”.

Das Lied gefällt mir vor allem, weil ich es sehr innovativ finde. Man beachte z. B. die ungewohnte Instrumentation: in den Strophen der Bass mit dem klimpernden Klavier im Hintergrund, im Refrain dann noch das Schlagzeug dazu – eine ungewöhnliche Kombination, bei der ein Klang ensteht, den ich so noch nicht gehört habe.

Dazu kommt beim Gesang die ständige Wiederholung von Silben bzw. Vokalen (“Ca-ha-han you fee-hee-heel my hea-hea-hea-hea-heart is beating?”), die wohl (zusammen mit dem Bass) eben diesen Herzschlag darstellen soll.

Natürlich ist nicht alles an diesem Song neu und ungewohnt. So geht es in Heartbeat wie bei vielen Liedern von deutsch-afrikanischen Künstlern um die Probleme in Afrika, und auch das Video wurde entsprechend vor Ort gedreht.

Ebenso sind die Akkorde von Heartbeat (bis auf den Basston) nichts Außergewöhnliches: in den Strophen Bm, F#m/B, Em/B, Bm, im Refrain Bm, F#m, G, Em – alles schön diatonisch.

So ergibt sich eine schöne Mischung aus bekannten und fremden Inhalten und Klängen – ein fesselndes Lied eben, das ich mir immer wieder anhören kann und das definitiv Ohrwurmcharakter hat. Viel Spaß damit!

We improved our ranking on twistat from #119 to #50. Not bad for a client that is just used to share articles. We are excited to see an increasing number of users being more active. Our goal for the next 4 months is to see if we can get in the top 30. Thank you to all the feedly+twitter users!

[complete report here]

February was an intense month: we released feedly mini and significantly improved the performance and memory footprint of our underlying street infrastructure. We got some good reviews and thanks to the enthusiasm of the community have been able to continue to grow organically (both in terms of number of active users and engagement).

We would like to take a minute and thank all the people who have been promoting feedly on twitter. Here are some sample tweets collected last week:

Last but not least, special thanks to Robert Scoble and Sarah Perez/RWW for helping us launch feedly mini!

The key themes for March are:

• New iteration of the feedly dashboard and spring cleaning pages to make managing sources easier
• New iteration of the welcome process, targeting users who do not know about RSS or Google Reader
• Increasing capacity of the feedly back end services
• A couple other surprises

Thank you! And please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

As you can see January ended up being a pretty intense month which saw improvements to the feedly home (explore, topics, calais, amazon integration, better friendfeed integration), two iterations of feedly mini and the release of a set of ubiquity commands.

Special thanks to all the people who through articles, reviews and tweets are helping grow the feedly user base, including Tristan Nitot, Frederic Lardinois, Phil Glockner.

baby 2.0 has a heartbeat.  i heard it today for the first time.  for those interested in the stats it was 150 bpm.

and most importantly…  there was only one heartbeat!  

phew.

steph

"Only by the Night" out sep. 23rd

Kings of leon, one of my favourite bands and who i am going to see next month (giggles), are releasing a new album in 19 days- UK.  (20 days in american – hahah) Anyway, you can pre-order the album which i presume yet again will be bottle loaded squezzed southern jive. YAHA. £9.99, (with bonus track and video) to pre-order

What are you waiting for

Time seems to accelerate as we are trying to make sure that our ducks are in a row to launch a more official feeddo invitation program. We have been having usability tests and trying to improve the experience from the time the user arrives to feeddo.com  to the time she will see her first feeddo page. There is still a lot of work to be done.

We also pushed out a few new features:

• new cover UI
• Integration with twitter
• Support for Firefox 3

Our goals for March are to:

• Continue to improve the first 45 seconds experience
• Re-think how people discover and follow their friends (leveraging their existing social networks)
• Improve annotations
• Continue to simplify the user experience
• Introduce the notion of hot topics.
• Improve performance and memory consumption.

We are also going to continue to demo feeddo to (smart) people who are familiar with the social news space and listen to their feedback.

Finally, we have reached out to a couple of people in the management team of pheedo to try to find out if their might be conflicts between feeddo and pheedo. If there are, we might change the name of the project from feeddo to feeddio.

(Thank you to all the preview users!)

Paul Buchheit (employee #23 at Google, creator of gmail and now founder of FriendFeed) has an interesting post on the importance of remaining nimble and listening to customers. I think that the comment from Dave McClure on the importance of being able to measure progress over each iteration is key. There are a lot of similarities our notion of heartbeat and organic development.

(via Louis Gray)

Após algum tempo sem escrever, voltei, agora fora do http://river.tvtel.pt/ já à bastante tempo pensava continuar este novo domínio mas o troca-troca de blog system fez com que isto parasse. Ultimamente com a anunciada compra da empresa onde ainda trabalho e agora de férias criaram um pouco os motivos para que eu recomeçasse a escrever.

Entretanto vou dando um pouco notícias sobre o que andei a fazer, continuação da parte de mailbox’s MX ,backups autonomia e dinamismo do software melhorar a facilidade de utilização, criação de uns novos sistemas de admin em http://dm.tvtel.pt/ com base no cakePHP também no cakephp tenho estado a aprofundar as bases do framework ideias de ver symphony e ZendFramework ficaram por terra devido à falta de tempo.

O mês passado foi um mês dedicado ao pensamento em soluções em cluster mais concretamente o sistema físico e a preocupação da compatibilidade de sistemas de ficheiros em DAS , NAS , Fiber Channel com o Linux. Agora com esse trabalho tendo ficado por terra, virei as minhas atenções para ajudar a organizar um Datacenter e o uso de Hearbeat, para garantir alta disponibilidade de sistemas.

Projectos pessoais estão em curso ( devagar mas em curso ).

Este post serviu também para me centrar um pouco de tudo o que se passou nos últimos dois meses para organização mental digamos.

After a more relaxed Dec 2007, we are back in the trenches, trying to get ready to invite more people in.

A few interesting features:

• New Scrolling Behavior
• Feeddo Cover
• Better Keyboard Support
• Gmail integration
• New column view
• A new welcome experience

The most encouraging news is that we saw a 50% growth in the number of recommendations and annotations.

Focus for February:

1. continue to improve the first run experience,
2. continue to simplify the user interface,
3. allow existing users to send invitations to their friends
4. showcase in the UI some of the collaborative filtering services we have been building in the back end.

(Thanks to Orjan, Rajesh and Cyril for their continuous input)

Sorry for the delay. December ended up being a short but productive months with 14 iterations and lots of new features:

• Digg Style Voting and Recommendation
• Tab Sorting
• Feed Spring Cleaning
• Flickr Integration
• Enhanced Annotation Support
• Yahoo Finance Integration

The number of active users remained in the 60+%.

Our focus for the first part of 2008 is to try to make feeddo simpler and more fun (as well as iron out all the existing rough edges).

(Special thanks to Cyril Moutran for his continous feedback during the month of December!)

We have been back in the trenches, trying to address all the bugs and feature requested we collected on iteration 4. We also pushed out the first iteration of the annotation feature and started to clean up the user interface. The number of active users is slowly increasing back to the 60% range.

Highlight: we wired one more brain into the project so we should be able to expand our scope and speed. We decided to fund/commit to Feeddo for one more year (in December 12th, Feeddo will be one year old already).

Note: Sorry to the people you have been waiting to get in: we wanted to make sure that we absorb some of the existing feedback before we increase the volume. We should be able to add a few more people in mid-December so please stay tuned.

A very big thanks to all the people who are participating to our preview program!

October was intense: 17 iterations in 27 days.

We increased the seeded number of users to 70 (+16). We started to see a drop (-10%) in the number of daily active users so we decided to circle back with them and understand their problems. I think that in a nutshell, people are asking us for 1) a simpler and more consistent user interface, 2) more co-reading capabilities and 3) richer support for non-text feed types (images, video, activity stream etc…).

This month was a confirmation that this is going to be a long marathon with rough fights along the way, so we decided to equip everyone with a 17″ high definition MacBook Pro: if we are going to fight, we want to do it with style!

November is going to be an important month for us: We are going to continue to polish and if everything goes well introduce two important new features. Stay tuned.

As always, thank you to all the preview users who invest the time to kick the tires and provide us feedback!

September just went by. Time seems to accelerate! Here is a status update regarding feeddo:

We invited 30 additional users (the total is now 54 – aka number of seeded users). 54% of them are active – ie use feeddo at least twice a week. 75% of the active users us feeddo every day. The % of active users and % of daily users are our heartbeat. Our goal is to increase the number of seeded while maintaining the % of active > 30% and % of daily > 50%.

We also collected during the month of September a lot of feedback (both positive and negative). So we are back in the tranches working on a new iteration which will try to address some of the biggest issues ( including the inability to configure a category or a feed so that the user that read and scan articles at the same time). We are also trying to re-enforce the aspects people seem to like most: speed and simplicity of the user interface.

So thank you to our early users for their great feedback. More on the new iteration next week!