As a web application development team I’m really excited about how AJAX and related technologies are allowing us to make the web experience simpler. As I’ve blogged about before we recently launched the blogmailr.com service. One of our goals was to make sure that we didn’t assume anything, i.e. what blog you used or how technical you were (or were not).
With AJAX we setup our form to ask for the pieces of information that every blogger knows: the URL and login information for their blog. No questions for the “metablog API” URL or other technical details. The cool part is that we do a client-side callback and figure all this stuff out automagically (I love that word).
Surprisingly it took us about 4 or 5 iterations of this screen to get to this point. The feedback, “it’s so simple to use” has been great.
In many ways BlogMailr is a big experiment to test some new ideas, development principles, and SaaS opportunities. We’re hard at work on our next product right now. It’s our first opportunity to take a lot of the ideas we’ve preached and put them into practice. We’ve already built version 1 which we’ve been using internally since June and will officially roll out in early 2007: Universe. It’s a new simpler way for businesses to manage customer relationships. More details to come…
