Tag: website

Feedly

Since the beloved Google Reader died, I have been using feedly. It is amazing to see how quickly Feedly has been innovating so that the Google Reader immigrants are appeased. The first set of fixes gave an option to make the feed view much denser – much like the Google Reader. This must have made most of the immigrants happy. The next fix was to get the feed list to the left of the page – again to make it look very much like Google reader.

The latest fix that hit me today is the one that I am going to scream in joy about. This is not quite to mimic google reader, but something that has just been designed so tastefully.

I have the feed to be displayed as tiles. I click on the tiles and I get the article, and the escape and it shrinks back to the tile. I scroll down the page looking at the interesting tiles. And when the stories are over, what do I get?

feedly

That blows my mind. Yes, I am done with the feed. Click on the big grey check mark, and it becomes a beautiful green for a second, and feedly marked all the stories in the feed as read. And moves on to the next feed. Just beautiful. Thanks feedly.

 

Plenty of Fish out there – A success story

Recently read this story in Inc.com, about plentyoffish.com, which is an online dating service. This was built by one man Markus Frind. It is one of the largest and most successful websites to hit the web – probably because of the space in which it is playing in. 1.6 billion personal ads. That is a lot of ads. Most of them are paid. Advertisers line up at Markus’s door to advertise on his website.

All this is something that looks like a typical dotcom success story. But the story takes a slightly different route this time. Usually startups are associated with a bunch of hard core nerd type people, who burn a lot of midnight oil. And all the night outs fructify into this beautiful product, which becomes a success. In this case, it is one man – Markus. And he says, he did not work that hard to get this up and running. It started off as a simple website, which served a great purpose, and people just came.

And to keep it running, Markus just did a big upgrade. His staff strength went up from 1 to 3, and he moved out of his bedroom in his apartment.

Free software hosts his web servers. He wrote his scripts to be fairly automatic. The only manual handling that his 2 customer service staff does, is to screen spam and delete inappropriate images. Markus comes in to office at 10AM, and leaves about an hour later. That is his office hours. He has the rest of the day to relax, while the website runs itself, and generates more money for him. He holidays in the French riviera, and just generally has a good life.

Read the full story here.

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