Arc90 has recently had a run of success with our lab projects. First, Readability hit the net and went absolutely berserk. Seemingly overnight there were dozens of tweets and links to it. Most recently we released TBUZZ and once again Arc90 enjoyed a big jump in attention. You may already know that both projects were the brainchildren of Arc90 founder Rich Ziade. He has an uncanny knack for seeing unfilled needs in online life and dreaming up the right solution. As Readability and TBUZZ were released and started to “blow up” (as the kids say), it’s been fun to tease him at lunch about his new rock star status. “Mobbed by Readability fans for autograph requests yet?” He’s usually a good sport about it.
What you probably don’t know is how Rich’s ideas went from a flash of inspiration to full-featured, robust software. A lot of was due to the development team; they certainly deserve mounds of credit for producing apps that work great and also fit into a bookmarklet. In the case of TBUZZ we had another contributing factor. The “secret” ingredient was a bit of eating-your-own-dog-food goodness: we used our own product, Kindling.
For those who don’t know, Kindling is an idea collaboration web application that helps organizations gather and refine ideas from its members. Submitting, voting, commenting, and moderating ideas are are all key aspects of Kindling. One of the features of the upcoming release is the ability to create a Room, basically a separate space in Kindling for discussing ideas focused on a particular theme. As soon as the alpha version of TBUZZ was released internally to Arc employees the feedback began, mostly through emails to Rich and the dev team. It quickly became apparent that there was a lot of duplication of effort going on, so we created a TBUZZ room in Kindling and directed everyone to submit their feedback there.
This move proved key. By the end of the day several important changes to TBUZZ had been submitted, refined, and approved. As a result of using Kindling, we were able to harness the creativity and expertise of the entire Arc team to turn TBUZZ from a good implementation into a great one, all in the course of an afternoon.
If you’d like to learn more about Kindling check out www.kindlingapp.com.
twitter.com/A3pixitesmunier said:
is there a way to see stats; i.e. the number of clicks after having Tbuzz’ed?
Kamni Khan said:
TBUZZ is great!
Martin Kopischke said:
Yes, TBUZZ is great, or almost: unluckily, it chokes and dies on Umlauts and other non-ASCII characters in the tweet. Which is more than slightly annoying when your tweeting language, by choice or necessity, happens to be anything but English :(.
Chris Dary said:
@Martin – This should be fixed now!
@A3pixitesmunier – Unfortunately not, currently we use the aggregate bit.ly URL which is not split out by user.
Ray Gulick said:
Tbuzz is (was) great! Recently I can’t get it to work. It wants me to login to my Twitter account and give it access, which I have done repeatedly, to no avail.