Friday 11 July 2008

Working on fav.or.it

Wow, all i can say is that I haven't had so much fun for years, despite the shock of having to do a two hour commute each way, working at fav.or.it is turning into one of the most interesting episodes of my life. 

Im actually writing real code again, and you would not believe how good that feels. The crew at fav.or.it are great, and seem to take challenges in their stride, that would have other teams I have worked with scratching their heads, their enthusiasm for what they are doing is infectious. And they are all defiantly "can do" folks.  Nick has a great vision of what and where he wants to go, and we are working flat out to get there. 

And the product is great, in the two weeks I have been there, I have been thrust into the middle of a transformation of the site, what is going to come out the other end in a few weeks will be a top notch enhancement to an already top product. 

I am lucky having just come into the company after everybody has worked so hard to get the initial beta product launched and running, I can now help to shape the next set of iterations of the design.  Already we are adding some very cool features that will give our competitors a run for their money. 

Fav.or.it is kind of unique, on the surface it looks like any other blog aggregation product, but scratch the surface and a whole load of good stuff bubbles up, in fact the biggest challenge we will have is educating people that just because the product looks like other sites, that it is not, fav.or.it's big secret is its a two way portal, it does not just gather-up content for you to read, but it allows you to interact with that content, and distributes your comments back to the originating sites.  No more jumping around using different blog commenting  systems to spread your opinions and observations, you can do it all from one place, and there is more, fav.or.it will track conversations you are having on a host of sites and present them all in one easy to use reader/commenter. 

I used to be an avid digg reader, but since coming to work on fav.or.it I have hardly been anywhere near digg. 

Anyway stay tuned and I will describe some of the cool stuff we are doing with semantic analysis over the next few weeks. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice one Tim, glad that things are working out well and I look forward to hearing more about the updated offering. Think I saw fav.or.it when I was chairing the search panel at Being Digital.

Cooper said...

Good sshare