Second Brain – All Your Content

Just released: Second Brain Video Demo

At Future of Web Apps in London

This week, we're at the Future of Web Applications in London. We were lucky enough to get our own booth in the expo area to demo Second Brain.

We've been working very hard to get our public release ready in time for the event. Fortunately, we were able to release a preview version just in time for the conference. Beta Preview means that it is open, but that there are parts that are not really finished. It feels great to get it out there and get feedback from real users.

Quite a lot of people stopped by our booth, curious to see what we do and what problems we solve. The feature that most people liked was the search and browse in library, embed collections and the public profile page with the content history. People also asked questions about what services we support and many requested Facebook.

One of the things we learned was that we should have some more graphic material on our booth. Even with the demo video on the TV, the booth was a bit anonymous. Also, in order to get press coverage, we need to chase the journalists. They don't just stop by our booth eager for a new story. Next time, I will be more aggressive on the PR side.

All in all, FOWA was a good experience. We got lots of interest from potential users and investors. Now, we need to go back home and work on getting more users, usability and our high-priority features.

New Tag Line - All Your Internet Content

I decided to change the tag line from "Your Personal Internet Library" to "All Your Internet Content". I got the inspiration to do this from Johan Høgåsen-Hallesby who also runs a good Norwegian blog on technology and user experiences called mykaroshi. He's one of the early Test Pilots and has been very helpful with feedback and support along the way.

He wrote me an email saying that we basically have two value propositions: the first being "An interface for all your online content", and the other as a "lifestream" service.

The former immediately resonated with me. I found it the perfect introduction to the typical "What is Second Brain?" (which I have been struggling with from time to time, I must admit). After a few days, it also appeared to me a much better tag line than "Your Personal Internet Library". It is much more meaningful and easier to say - and it sets no limits to what we can do - it's our mission to make Second Brain able to handle all your itnernet content.

Got a story on Digg

I was browsing early morning yesterday and noticed a reference to iPoor  - the iPhone Killer in one of my many feeds. I thought it was quite funny decided to digg it from the link on the page. I was then taken to the submit story pattern on digg - meaning that no one had submitted it before. Pretty cool, I thought and went through the submission process. Pretty soon I had five diggs, then I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the story had 222 diggs and 45 comments - one of them referring to the story having reached the front page.

I learned a few things from this:
(1) Apple and iPhone stories have great appeal on digg.com
(2) Most diggs came at night, GMT, meaning that it is the US audience that dominates the community
(3) Many comments were on the quality of the story - not everyone thought it was any good
(4) Some people claimed the whole story about the iPoor was digg bait since it referenced Kevin Rose (one of the founders of digg.com

I wonder who I can get a story about Second Brain on digg when we are ready to launch - and should it be a serious piece or a funny thing? I'll probably go for the former and hope somebody writes a good review that someone else will submit to digg. It probably won't look any good if it came from me...

Early blog-media coverage

Last week, I had an interview with Folksonomy.org. Michal, their editor, and I, had a chat on MSN Messenger. He was somewhere in California, early afternoon, and I was in my hotel room in Krakow, Poland, late in the evening. It was a new experience to me - and it felt quite 2.0 something to be talking like this with the media.

You can read the full article at their web site.

I did a quick Google for Second Brain to see how we're doing in terms of rankings. We are moving up on the obvious key words like second brain and secondbrain (of course).

Looking beyond the top ten list on Google, I also found two more posts on Second Brain. One was a review from StartupSquad.com - and the other was on wwwhatsnew.com (in Spanish).

More Polos and a Few Statistics

Tomorrow we'll be sending out a new batch of Polos. Those of you who have made an order the past few days should receive it in a few days or so.

I was checking the traffic patterns the other day, and I noticed some interesting trends. It is obvious that now that we have started talking about our service, people are paying attention. We are getting lots of referrals from Polish sites, where we have been quite active in promoting, and, of course, is the nationality of the development team. Yesterday, people started popping in from stumbleupon.com, so it seems that they have found us somehow. We're also getting a few visits from Facebook, where I have created a group for Test Pilots. Still, most people access us by simply entering our URL.

It's fun to watch the stats. But this also reminds me that I need to work more on configuring Google Analytics so that I can start use the statistics to improve the service. We need to see where people spend most of their time, common usage paths and where things are broken.

But the thing I've enjoyed the most the past few weeks is watching the Geo Map Overlay. It shows where our users come from. And I can not help but to be very impressed by the reach of the web. We have users on almost every continent now. It's not exactly a surprise to me that the Internet is a global phenomenon. But I don't think I have really appreciated this fact until I checked the map.

Test Pilots' Polos just shipped

Yesterday I went to the postal office with about 100 Test Pilot Polos, individually numbered to each of you who have ordered shirts so far. They were sent by regular mail, so you should have them in a day or two if you live in Norway. If you live in Poland or outside the EU region, it will probably take a few more days.

I hope you enjoy the shirts - they should earn you some bragging rights. If you think you look good in it, it would be fun if you sent me a picture with you wearing the shirt - I could post it on the blog or something:)

The orders keep ticking in, so I will send out a new batch of shirts next week.

This evening I hope to make another update of Second Brain. It should be less buggy everyday - and Bartlomiej, my Flex developer promises to have the mind-mapping ready on Monday.

Presentation at IT Grill

This Tuesday, we presented Second Brain at Grill IT in Wrocław, just a couple of hours east of Krakow. Grill IT is an initiative of janmedia.com. They invite people to present ideas, experiences and companies to local Internet professionals. The turn-out was good, about 40 people present.

We had a few stressful last minute bug fixes just before the presentation, but everything worked fine on stage. The feedback was good and we got a few questions on our strategy. It seems like many people want to integrate their contacts from other services somehow. This is a good indication that the social web creates new challenges in maintaining contacts and users' social presence - an obvious challenge for us to solve. But I also stressed the fact that we won't develop this functionality ourselves, but focus on finding others services that we can integrate in Second Brain.

The full presentation will probably be posted on their blog in a few days. After the presentation, we enjoyed a few beers in the bar and it was great meeting all the enthusiastic participants and talking to the other presenters. Web2.0 has definitely caught on in Poland as well.

We invited everybody to sign up as Test Pilots and we've already got about 20 or so new applicants and some nice blog reviews on Second Brain (in Polish, will link to them soon). We'll activate them after tomorrow's April release.

Private Beta Launch Breakfast

Thursday the 22. of March will be a big day for the Second Brain Team. We have been working on this for almost a year now, and finally we're going to do the first public presentation of our baby. At at 08:00 am we are going to launch the Private Beta at a breakfast event in Oslo.

We are sending out invitations to people that we know around the Making Waves network that we think may be interested in this type of service. We want to solicit their feedback and establish the first user community.

If you are on Oslo, Norway on this day, and you'd like to take part in this event, please just e-mail us and we'll put you on the list. The schedule is as follows:

Where: Making Waves' offices at Christian Krohgs gate 60
When: Breakfast is served at 08:00. The demo starts at 08:30, and we'll wrap it up around 09:00/09:30. 

We'd love to see you there:)

Promoting Market Adoption

I really enjoy Guy Kawasaki's entrepreneurial spirit and advise. Not long ago, I finished his "Art of the Start" book, and it is one of the most refreshing books I've read on start-up'ing and everything related to that. His teachings are quick, short and simple, but at the same time the inspire you to dare to create some meaning in the world - not just money. And this is something that I can appreciate. Highly recommended reading - for anybody starting anything (his words).

In return for this free promo I will allow myself to reference a good piece of concrete advise that I found on his blog: "The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption" So the point is - don't try this at home (if you want people to start using your service):

1.  Enforced immediate registration.
2.  The long URL.
3.  Windows that don’t generate URLs.
4.  The unsearchable web site.
5.  Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks.
6.  Limiting contact to email.
7.  Lack of feeds and email lists.
8.  Requirement to re-type email addresses.
9.  User names cannot contain the “@” character.
10. Case sensitive user names and passwords.
11. Friction-full commenting.
12. Unreadable confirmation codes.
13. Emails without signatures.
14. Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer.