Sometimes agile does mean fast cookin'

First of all, we released betas of new Firefox and IE toolbars today!  Beyond auto-detecting feeds and making it really easy to add them, Nick Harris has included some very cool functionality based on our platform.  These versions require the .Net 2.0 platform, but it's well worth installing to try them out.

Second, I thought it would be worth adding some color around Brad's post on the NewsGator blogroll feature.  From my point of view, the story looked like this:

8:58pm - Sitting at my desk responding to the last emails of the day when a new email from Brad shows up.  Hmmm...he's saying we have a cool feature that's hard to find.  I write back an excuse about all the other cool things we're doing and tell him that I am actually planning to write a TypePad Widget to make this easier.

9:16pm - Brad writes back that he's going to blog about this in the next 24 hours...

9:17pm - I go read the developer guidelines for writing a TypePad Widget.  Hey, this really does look as simple as the nice folks from SixApart said...

10:27pm - I proudly send back my Widget code to Brad and go back to getting my real work done

7:42am - I realize I should probably test my Widget (now it probably starts to become obvious why I do Product Management and not things like development or quality assurance...)  Hmmm...there's some problem.  I give our online team a head's up that I've got something brewing and head into meetings

2:38pm - I get some help and realize that I have an invalid API key...hmmm...maybe I should have read the instructions more carefully.  A quick edit and TA DA - working widget!  The folks at SixApart really deserve credit for a super-simple API and, of course, all of the cool Blogroll functionality was actually provided in a single line of code from NewsGator!

So now you can see two Blogrolls over in the right column.  The one with the bold black title is coming from my NewsGator online account - very cool!  And we'll have this available for other TypePad users soon.

Not much of this has to do with Product Management.  And this is another example of unplanned items leading to increases in cumulative flow for our online team (they still need to integrate the Widget code into our site and test it).  But it does represent the spirit of agile in terms of listening to the customer and building something quickly that delivers value. 

We're committed to continuously improving our products through customer feedback.  So back to my first point, try out Nick's cool new toolbars and let us know what you think.

Comments

[Charlie]

Is there a way to create a blogroll from just the feeds in one particular folder in NG online?

[Charlie]

Nevermind.. :)

(That's what happens when you read posts in reverse chrono...)

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/001896.html