14 April 2008

Next week, sobees will be attending web2.0 Expo for the first time. If you want to see sobees in action, just visit us in the Long Tail Pavilion. We are looking forward to meeting you personally and getting your feed-backs.

11 April 2008

Since the latest sobees release, we focused our development on sobees community services. At the end of March, friendfeed published their API. So we naturally decided to integrate this service into our community, resulting in a quick increase of available services for friendfeed users. It will be part of sobees' next release due for Web2.0 Expo (we will be in the “Long Tail Pavilion”, if you plan to be there, we count on your visit).

After having integrated friendfeed into the sobees community, we decided to build a module providing “friendfeed’s friends'” activities (sobees' community only displays sobees’ friends' activities). The constraints were, of course, the existing sobees platform and design. After one week of development, testing and few design adaptations due to the number of information to manage, the module was ready. Beside a release inside sobees, we also decided to release it as a standalone module for the following reasons:

• We are very interested in getting feed-backs on sobees' design and functionalities; since sobees is early stage closed beta preview, we cannot invite all of you to try it. For this reason we decided to only launch 1-2 stand alone modules to get more inputs.
• There are a lot of expectations for a friendfeed desktop application. Since we had the module ready, we decided to launch it.
• The module can evolve very quickly and efficiently, while sobees needs more resources. This gives us the possibility to be more reactive to your feed-backs (for instance we can propose new skins more easily and then implement the ones you like best into sobees).

Based on the first reviews and feed-backs regarding our module (Shegeeks , mashable , The Last Podcast , comments on friendfeed), we want to bring the following clarifications:

• Our first focus is sobees, we want to position it as a mainstream application. Thus the modules we build are designed for mainstream users rather than geeks.
• The design has not been optimized for friendfeed, we implemented friendfeed in sobees' design with all constraints (sobees' windows sizes and styles). Up to now, we had mainly feeds, widgets, twitter and DIGG. The design was providing a good experience. Based on this module, we have noted some corrections/enhancements we will deliver in the coming weeks.
• We are working with friendfeed API. It consists of a very well-structured feed but there were some trade-offs to be made. An example: the friend list is not provided, that’s why we read the list in the feed and provide the list based on this. This will evolve with friendfeed API evolution.
• And finally we are proud of some technical achievements: reduction of development time, the skin is not just a color change, the pictures are presented nicely in the tray, the updates are very quick (based on Link technology which makes .NET 3.5 a prerequisite)…

We are focusing most of our resources on sobees' development but bTT will also evolve quickly. We have no ambition to make it the ultimate friendfeed desktop application for all of you, but we are convinced it has a place in parallel to other solutions which have been or will be announced. We are listening very carefully to your feed backs.

Thank you.

03 April 2008

You are already 1’000 subscribers for our alpha, this is a great message and we would like to thank you. We are very happy to open up sobees to more alpha testers as we are looking for your feed-backs to make sobees better and adapted to your needs. We currently send 200 invitations each week, so you can expect to get your invitation in April.

We had great reviews on downloadsquad and c|net . But Brad and Josh also correctly mention that we are in early stage. The alpha delivers most of the functionalities we wanted to build in sobees (module download, tabs, search, community, …) but all these functionalities are still in development. Some examples:

• the tabs are slow and will be reworked
• the community will provide people search and more services (we are currently building friendfeed)
• the use of memory will be reduced by a factor of 2 or 3
• the architecture currently prevents direct drag and drop between bDules (security issue), that’s why we have created the tray but we will improve it
• the bDules will be further developed, our intention is to provide much more than widgets; every bDule can provide a real application equivalent in functionalities to a desktop or Adobe AIR application, taking advantage of the design, communication between bDules, synchronization…; as an example, behind the monthly calendar, we want to implement an agenda
• …

On the technical side our roadmap is clear and we know how to achieve it. The goal of the alpha is to give you the possibility to begin playing with sobees and share your impressions and recommendations with us. We would love hearing from you what is your experience with sobees, how we can make sobees more intuitive, what services we should focus on… We will build a feed-back tool inside sobees, but do not hesitate to use our e-mail address This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it in the meantime.

03 April 2008

We received a « Prix d’excellence trophée PERL 2008 » from Lausanne Région .
In this regard, our project was mentioned in L’AGEFI today.