Back in April, I wrote a post about how important user feedbacks were to us. I mentioned the discovery of the Get Satisfaction service, which is in its own terms ‘a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.’ (See how it looks when applied to BeeBole).

The service is also a real open debate since companies cannot hide comments from customers nor censor them.

The Get Satisfaction team has recently added a ‘Help Center‘ functionality. It is an open-source PHP application that pushes the integration of their service in your company environment a little bit further, maximizing your possibilities to customize the look and feel.

All this made me very enthusiastic even more so because everything was free.  Apparently this will however change and I have been told the pricing should become public in a month or so. This raises a question: ‘Why should a company pay for a tool that is not under its control?’.

Eric Suez, Community Manager at Get Satisfaction, answered to me like this:

Yes, I know that it takes a little bit of a leap of faith. The idea is that by giving up control you can achieve more authentic dialogue with customers. It’s a two-way street. Companies aren’t allowed to censor conversation, but customers have to come to the table with patience and understanding.

I couldn’t agree more with that. Still, in the best-case scenario, an enthusiastic crowd of users creates the company and the product they like through Get Satisfaction. The company takes notice of it and wants to take part of the process. The company is then asked to pay to be able to use the data’s and actively participate (this is just a guess since pricing is not detailed yet).

As a company, I would have nothing against paying for a great service but I would have an issue with something when I have to pay for it without having a real choice.

Alternative solutions could be a free version with ads (I really don’t like ads) or working with sponsorships (like Netvibes). The Get Satisfaction open-source help center could be downloaded for a fee since it is really something that brings real added value for the company.

I think data’s should be free of use and of charge but facilitating tools such as the Help center or a data exporter can be chargeable.

On the other hand, if you start having a big community in Get Satisfaction, it means that you have a huge success and giving a few bucks per month even if you don’t have the choice will not bother you. It could also mean that your product is so buggy that you should maybe start thinking about doing something else.

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

Collaboration is a key element in the success of a project. In certain cases, at BeeBole for example, it is even vital; Mic and Hughes live in Belgium and I live in India.

While distance and time zone difference might seem an issue, we found that with a set of good collaboration tools, the problems were rapidly disappearing.

Time zone difference even became an advantage since we can’t talk to each others during certain period of the day, which obliges us to focus on our work instead of chatting and recreating the world constantly.

For emails, simple chat features and documents we use Google Apps. It is a free application suite and you can link it to your own domain name. There is a premium version for 50$/user/year that gives you more email storage and some other features.

While emails and chat are quite common today, we really like Google Docs. Each document created can be shared and versions are tracked. We can work simultaneously on the same document without blocking each other or having version issues.

Recently, we also adopted Google Sites (Also part of Google Apps) as internal wiki and Internet file storage. We even use it as a mini-accounting system for expenses, invoices, … but just as a way to centralize information and receipts/invoices.

For project management, we use the free version of Basecamp (from 37Signals). 37Signals provides very simple tools from project management to Customer Relationship Management (Highrise). The only issue I have today is of course the limitation of the free version and the lack of integration between their own tools. I am currently looking at Google Sites as a possible replacement.

For our meetings we use Skype. The video quality is very good (even with the lack of stability of an Indian Internet connection) and the feature is really boosting our discussions.

Since recently, we were still missing some web meeting features, such as presentation sharing or desktop sharing. It is now possible thanks to DimDim, which has proven to be really useful. The screens are still a bit buggy and the performance could certainly be improved but it is open source and there is a free version limited to 20 participants per meeting, which is quite enough for small start-ups. I definitively recommend it as an alternative to the expensive WebEx and GoToMeeting.

If you are using other tools, do not hesitate to share it with us as we are always looking for new ways to improve our collaboration.

In the new flourishing market of Web 2.0 events, we decided to attend the Future of Web Apps event.

It will happen in October (8-10 October) in London at the Excel (in the docks area).

Just like its US equivalent in Miami last March, big names from well known companies are coming: Kevin Rose from Digg, Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch, etc., …

We will attend the conferences on the 9th and the 10th of October.

If you plan to attend the event and look for company while there, just post a comment.

I came across this article this morning. Iceberg comes with an interesting platform allowing everyone to create web applications with “zero code”. Looking at the market, you can find other competitors such as Coghead, Longjump, BungeeLabs, WyaWorks or Zoho.

There is something striking me in all the video presentations I have seen on those web sites, it is the complexity for any normal user. There is indeed the “zero code” approach but you still need to understand what is a web service, that those web services have variables or that you can link those with workflows.

There are a lot of good ideas but I don’t see the point for the following reasons:

1. Users (not technically aware or early adopters) expect you to come with an answer to their business needs and not with a big toolbox;
2. One of the biggest challenges when creating applications is not about building it but listening to the customers and translates their functional needs into automated processes and web screens;
3. Web applications builders are putting high limitation to the developers’ freedom.

Creating web applications is about 4 big steps:

1. A user expressing a need;
2. Translation of the need into automated processes and web screens;
3. Development of the web applications;
4. Fine tuning and adjustments of the web application thanks to the users feedbacks.

Each of those steps requires experience. It takes years of experience to be able to listen to users and translate their needs into ergonomic applications; it takes years of trainings and school courses to be able to develop robust and stable applications; it takes a few tries and feedbacks to get an application right.

My feeling is that those platforms try to address those four steps but instead of empowering each of the actors of the process (users, business analysts, developers) they become some kind of jack-of-all-trade giving average tools for each.

Developers have to choose for a complete framework that will not give them all the possibilities they might expect, users are not guided in the translation of their needs and business analysts need to be aware of the platform limitations.

At BeeBole we have another approach.

We think the right platform should:

1. Let the users decide which functionalities they want to use, without having to think about ergonomic issues and developments.
2. Let the users choose in a catalog for functionalities that are the conclusions of best practices and user feedbacks and created by IT professionals.
3. Let the developers choose the tools they want to develop new functionalities and give them the integration possibilities that wouldn’t create a lock in for them.

I would be happy to have any of your thoughts about this.