Feedster -- Now With Flavor Crystals !!!!

Well I **would** add flavor crystals if I could.  I guess you'll have to settle for:

• A cleaner overall look and feel
• Better search results -- more Googlish, easier to read
• Direct access to the RSS feed for any blog from the results page
• New logo and tag line
• Cleaner home page

Example Links:

• Home Page
• War Home Page
• Sample Results Page

The Thank Yous

And I really have to thank a few folks for help on this one:

• Trinity for absolutely wonderful user interface analysis, ideas, logo enhancements, tagline, commentary and more.  My only regret is that he comes up with ideas faster than I can implement them.  Thanks man! 
• Dewayne for testing the look and feel repeatedly
• Michael for pushing me on human factors stuff
• Apokalyptik for tender care and feeding of our servers
• Brent for being there for feedback and advice when I needed it
• The Amazing US for kind words and patience
• Roland (and at least one other person) for pushing me to add a direct link to a blog's RSS feed from the search results

And I also have to thank those people who haven't said anything specific but have just been generous in their praise, links and comments.  When you have a project like this, hearing nice things make you realize "hey this is worth it even if we aren't making anything from it" (yet).  And even hearing negative things is ok since it tells you what you're doing wrong.  What's that old saw?  "There's no such thing as bad press"

• Brent -- "We agreed that Feedster, Google and Wayback represent the short, medium, and long-term memory of the net. It's really cool how each of these engines orthogonally services its particular slice of net recollection."
• Via Chris from Solonor and GeekGrrl: Actually, I saw this earlier when it was "Roogle" but they seem to have made more improvements than just the name change.
• Sjoerd -- Searching for URLs in Feedster and subscribing to it works great! (Note from Scott -- I actually think this could work better and I'm thinking about it)

Questions

Q: Why didn't you use the  on the results page instead of RSS. 

A: We tried.  Having 1 XML icon on a page is one thing.  Having 10 or 20 + on a page is visually distracting.  Hugely distracting.

Q: Why only two tabs?  Is the 2nd tab really necessary ?

A: Trinity correctly pointed out to us that our original design intermixed actions (search) with content (about, etc).  That's confusing for everyone.  Moving to just the two tabs for now lets us add additional search functions when they are ready without confusing people.  We don't want the Feedster look and feel to change radically from week to week so we're going for an approach where we can introduce new functionality a bit gradually.

12:54:25 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This