You may have noticed that FrankenFeed rarely works. For quite some time it worked fine. We had over 40,000 users merging more than 600,000 RSS feeds. Then someone built a bot to attack the system. Suddenly we were merging several million feeds bogging down the system. We would shut him down and then he would pop back up again from a new IP address. Finally, we stopped trying to stop him, but let the system bog down to a crawl (basically not working). We figured that eventually he would go away when whatever he was trying to do (Google SEO we think) stopped working. He didn’t go away.
Rodrigo began work on a new version that would prevent various types of abuse that we had seen in the first several months of use. He completed his work this summer, but we never got around to bug testing it. Today one of our clients needed the public version functioning for a project and we made the decision to launch the new version (in true alpha) immediately. You will need to recreate your feeds (sorry about that ~ but surely you were not actually using the system since it didn’t work constantly).
We will report here on the blog regularly on the new system and let you know what we are working on. In the meantime, enjoy FrankenFeed 2.0.
Certainly click-to-call has limitations and risks for abuse, but implemented correctly it can offer clear advantaged for certain web service providers. Contrary to some reports, Google’s click-to-call was not pulled (it is still functioning).
Integrated into web based services such as Salesforce.com, Mailroom (woot!), Basecamp ~ our Podcall functionality can offer unique social interactions and services previously difficult to implement and afford.
Yesterday I had an interesting call from a prospective Podcall customer and a feature we had previously not announced came up. While we provide the phone system, network interconnection and API hooks we don’t necessarily have to provide the minutes. If you want to negotiate your own wholesale minute rate we can simply connect to your provider and let you pay them directly. No need for us to markup the dial-tone costs. (our pricing for North America is currently around 2.5 cents per minute)
Earlier today we announced that we would release the source code to several web applications built and hosted by the company in a post titled, “Opening the Source at Big in Japan.” TechCrunch even picked up on the idea. The source code is being released using the GPL.* Each tool was written using Ruby on Rails. If you review the code you will note that each tool was built at a different time. See if you can guess which tool was first and which was last. As promised:
The repositories can be accessed either by browser or via the svn client. The svn username is “anonymous” and the password is blank.
* To be clear, it is our intent that anyone who modifies the code MUST release those modifications publicly. If you modify the code for use as your own hosted service we require that you release the modified code. Get it? There is some confusion about this point in the open source community. The license explains that you are required to do so if you distribute or publish the code and some argue that a hosted application does not constitute “distribution” or “publishing” of the code and as such you are not required to release the modifications. We understand the confusion, but want to be very clear, for the purposes of our license hosting the source code for other’s use constitutes distribution or publication of the binary code. This is detailed in the source code files as well. Enjoy!
To help promote our Fancast service, Fox has been running short promotions on its various channels. Jeremy Pepper IM’d me this afternoon after he saw our promo on Fox News. To see the promo visit Fancast on YouTube.
After our initial launch for Nip/Tuck, users told us that our registration system was annoying. We took their comments to heart and relaunched last night allowing users to simply request a call without creating an account. Now all you need to get on the show is a phone number, email address and a name - no password or registration necessary. Users now get “instant gratification” and that is a good thing.
Fancast Before UI Simplification.
Fancast After UI Modifcations.
According to INC Magazine, our PodServe solution is best for podcasting. To be honest, we have not been investing much time in our free tools. Instead we have focused our attention on the enterprise market for white label versions of the tools. Our latest project is for a major television studio and their hit series. PodServe, with Podcall functionality, will allow their cast, crew, directors and writers to interact directly with their viewers.
We need to remember that much of our ‘paying business’ comes as a result of the free tools we launched last year. I personally will make an effort to keep our free tools. In the meantime we will take the praise from INC and redouble our efforts. Nice that we are sitting between two heavy-hitters like Yahoo and Six Apart. Here is the scoop:
Weblogs Work is now part of Big in Japan! It took us a year to determined that weblogs do in fact work, but they are simply one social media tool a business or agency should consider. As a result we have decided to consolidate the Big in Japan and Weblogs Work brand into one with a renewed focus on helping businesses and agencies build turnkey social media programs by providing a broad spectrum of social tools including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums and feeds. Don’t worry, the Weblogs Work weblog won’t go away, it will continue to provide a place for the Big in Japan team to blog about social media. Can you believe it has been a year?
On April 12, 2005 I wrote the first Weblogs Work post titled, “Business Blogs the next big thing (that is already here)!” In July we began offering ‘blog consulting’ services to small companies. We also started having our programmers build various tools for our consultancy to effectively host shared and dedicated, single and multi-user blogs. Soon our clients got larger and our projects more complicated. Our programmers started building even more customized tools like elfURL, PodServe, FrankenFeed, InstantFeed and SocialMail. We even created a brand for our social tool effort called Big in Japan.
Almost ninety days ago it became obvious we had a choice to make. We could build an agency and expand our social media consulting practice or we could change our focus to exploit what we were already uniquely positioned to provide. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan are both brands owned by Spur (the holding company I manage). Spur also owns an IT support brand called Architel. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan had been stealing resources (data center space, servers, programmers and engineers) from the very start and it became clear we were very good at building, customizing, managing and supporting various social tools. Very few companies had the experience and resources to do what we were doing on a daily basis.
Just before the 4th of July we bit the bullet and decided to refocus our offering to provide agencies and brand managers enterprise class social tools complete with hosting, management and day-to-day support. Here is an example of our most popular offerings:
Want to learn more? You can reach me directly at 1+214.550.2003 or just send me an email. We look forward to hearing from you!
Alex did a great job of talking about PodServe and all the Big in Japan apps today at the Under the Radar event held at the Microsoft HQ in Silicon Valley. We got some kind words from Mssrs. Arrington & Clavier and had lots of good conversations with companies interested in hearing more after the presentation.
The best feedback so far is that PodServe was a ‘Best in Show’ winner after all the audience votes were tallied tonight. Not only did we ‘win’ the love of the crowd at our panel on podcasting, but PodServe was one of the top vote getters among all the apps demo’d today. Said one respondent: “I’d buy that.” Now that’s what we like to hear. Thanks, Debbie Landa and all IBD Network team for inviting us out to present. We also did an interview with Irina Slutsky, which I’ll link to once posted.
Rock on, Big in Japan team.
We are taking down all the Big in Japan apps this weekend in order to pump, (clap), them up. Crazy demand is pushing us to bulk up the environment for PodServe, SocialMail, InstantFeed and all the other apps. We’ll have them up by Monday morning.
Companies make mistakes all of the time. For example, Big in Japan printed shirts for this month’s issue of Valleyschwag. They never got a chance to see the shirts before Thor shipped them and learned from a subscriber that they were see through. Ouch! This did not seem to mind the TechSlut, but Mierla was not to impressed. What if your users were so excited about your service that they took the time to fix your mistakes?
This afternoon I noticed a few new pictures tagged with biggu on flickr bubble up on the SocialMail footer and clicked through. Turns out Mierla, not deterred by the mashup goofup ‘remixed’ the shirts. She documented her effort on flickr:
You send out free t shirts because 1) t shirts are fun & you are fun and 2) people will put them on, snap a photo and post them to flickr. And because you really want to be the skinnycorp boyz when you grow up.
Alexander & I have been working a lot lately on all the Big in Japan tools. Lots of changes to PodServe, revamping FrankenFeed in Rails and with the new user experience tweaks we’ve been doing to all the tools, and launching the remaining tools. (Note to self: doing ten apps at once is not a good idea.) We posted up SocialMail for a bit of feedback, and we’re getting it.
What’s SocialMail? It’s a tool that lets you get any email as an RSS feed. Now, for non-geeks, that means you don’t have to keep piling on your Inbox just to stay connected with people. For me, and perhaps for many of you, email is just not as effective anymore. If I’m out for half a day, my email piles up so much that I’m not as effective in paying attention to things. I’m managing most of my projects through various Basecamps, and getting feed updates on new actions and such.
You can use SocialMail to:
I’m sure our users will come up with many more things, but we’ve started the ball rolling. Read Alexander’s write-up or check out what TechMeme is tracking on this new tool.
We are huge fans of Valleyschwag. (In fact, I have just checked my mailbox three times this afternoon hoping that they made a rare double trip to my house just to drop off my new t shirts.) This edition of the the schwag-by-mail club includes a Big in Japan shirt we did: summer versions of the Mashup t-shirts we did around the Web 2.0 show last year. As seen on actual rockstars like Nivi.
ShopSavvy Coverage -
