Grillin' with NewsFriends

Today we launched NewsFriends - a free social news application for Facebook.  It's a cool application that lets you choose friends to get your news.  The idea is that some of your friends are likely to hunt down cool news, blogs, video feeds, podcasts, etc and you can just benefit from everything they add.

Launching a Facebook application is tricky, and we sure learned some things today.  But I've already found two cool new feeds from Jennifer and Zoe!

The reason for this post, however, is to bring up an agile development point.  The vision for NewsFriends when it started out was quite a bit different than how it looks today.  In effect, everyone who worked on the project acted as a customer to give input into how the application should work.  It wasn't quite as simple as having a single customer to say "yes" or "no" to a feature, but some of the best parts of NewsFriends came from the two developers - Brad and Noel - talking through how they wanted it to work.

Now that it's released into the wild, NewsFriends will be driven by a larger number of customers.  But I think the first version is a pretty good testament to how well ownership and dialog can shape an application.

If you want to give it a try, just go to the NewsFriends information page to learn more and add it to your Facebook profile.