Thursday, February 25, 2010

Under the hood...

We over the last couple years the main focus of this blog has been to talk about user experiences, features, distribution lesson, cool discoveries and dreaded bugs.

To get a taste of some of the things we're doing under the hood, check out: Marathon's (Hodson's Blog). His current post (Queuing Tweets with Amazon’s (AWS) SQS) focuses on how we're handling sending traffic to the Twitter platform.

This little itsy-bitsy startup is tackling some nice problems!

-Bacon (Mike)

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

So busy, I mean really busy...!

When the BaconMarathon team started working on PersistentFan, one of the philosophies we discussed adhering to was to iterate, iterate, iterate and riff on the initial idea in the public forum. We decided to take this approach to prevent the gridlock of not shipping due to perceived lack of readiness the crippled some of our big company experiences.

To accomplish this goal, we knew we had to focus on two things:
  1. Constantly tweak, add features & fix bugs in quick cycles after the initial launch.
  2. Communicate with our users/fans with what we're up to often via Facebook, Twitter, our blog and on the actual site.
Well... we have been so busy doing #1 that we have let #2 slip, just a little...!

To help catch up with number 2, we're proud to announce following list since launch:
  • Bubble help - While watching the first videos on the site users are presented with bubble windows that show features to educate what the site can do and help explore.
  • If user is not signed in we're still going to save their fan topic to the list in their cookie. If the user comes back again they will be able to see what they have looked at in the past and add to it.
  • Trending Categories (music, movies, TV and born today) were added to give users a great getting started point. Note that these categories are dynamically driven from RSS feeds and will be adding more as we go.
  • Streamlined the rotation of the video experience. This was part of a bigger optimization effort to make our pages load extremely fast. (<-- always on going!)
  • Added dynamic "Shop with Amazon" links per topic. Our thinking is maybe users will want to explore Amazon after watching videos of their favorite topics.
  • Added Google Banner Ads at the top & added Google Link Ads at the bottom. This is one of the monetization streams we're planning to implement.
  • Moved the 'follow us on' Twitter and Facebook links to the upper right portion of the site. We want you to follow us so you can keep up with what we're doing.
  • Increased the size of the overall site horizontally 100px. We're getting ready to add more exciting content to the site.
  • Moved the Share with FB and Twitter buttons above the videos. From your feedback, it was difficult to see how to share cool discoveries.
  • Added a dynamic 'Sign Up' banner to entice users to sign in and get notification features. Users that sign up get a much better experience over time.
  • SEO - Made browser title dynamically display clear English titles
  • SEO - Made all the URLs display in clear English

Take care,
Mike (Bacon)

Note we plan to update the blog on a weekly basis going forward with what we're up to...