Graphsy Blog

I had an update ready a few days ago.  Originally this was going to add undo/redo functionality.  I know I said layouts were going to be next, but then my wife played with Graphsy for a bit and pointed out that there was no undo and yet there was an auto-save.  That made it difficult and punishing to try out different things.  So I put together the undo feature, which was surprisingly not that difficult.   That was a few days ago.

As I was getting ready to release, Robert Scoble wrote a post about sucky websites for startups presenting at DEMO.  This caused a whole lot of hoopla.  Lots of people got pissed with him for speaking his mind and called him mean (using different words).   Well, true or not, it got me to re-evaluate Graphsy’s front page.  I think it has gotten a LOT better than what it was when I first started it, but I took this opportunity to compare mine to the ones featured at DEMO and adjust accordingly.  You’ll now notice a link to try Graphsy without having to sign up, as well as a really quick demo video of some of the features.  This video has no voice over and moves at a nice, steady pace.  I think it could be better, but I unfortunately don’t really have the time right now to improve it.  Hopefully that will spruce up the site a bit and make it more presentable to others.

Just my few cents about Scoble’s post.  When he called out all of those startups, I expected people to jump in and defend them, but not the way they seem to be doing it.  His comments weren’t particularly constructive, but they were clearly his opinion.  I thought people would pipe up and say that they disagreed with him when talking about a particular site.  Or engage him and try to start a conversation.  Scoble seems to respond to constructive comments and people who want to know his opinion.  But everyone seemed to attack him personally, as if speaking his mind against startups was some kind terrible offense.  I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but in grad school the culture is to attack everyone and everything they do.  I’m used to presenting and having people call me out on minute things I missed.  The goal is improvement and critical thinking.  It’s nice to get people to say nice things about your work, but if the goal is to improve someone needs to point out the faults.  If no one says anything, that just means they don’t care.  I wonder just how much traffic Scoble drew to those site when wrote his post.  I know I clicked though each one to check it out.  Not sure if I would have done that had he said they were good.

Anyway enough of that, just want to finish up with thanks to Robert Scoble for making me take another look at my front page and hopefully making it better.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under blog, graphsy, opinion, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.