Last night we added a "mobile-friendly" HTML format option for Feed My Inbox. You can login to your account, click on account settings then feed settings to set HTML (mobile) as your default.
You can also edit individual feeds to use the new template. Here's a look at it:
You may now resume enjoying HTML emails on your iPhone or other mobile device.
While we feel very confident in the direction we're headed with Help Scout, we also value our customers' feedback (even when we don't have any yet). So I'd like to hear from you ... in person. If you or your company is thinking about giving Help Scout a good look when launched, I want to talk with you for 10 minutes. Why?
If you can spare 10 minutes, we'll do our best to make it worth your while.
Please fill out the 4-question form here and we'll email you to schedule a phone/Skype call: http://brightwurks.wufoo.com/forms/help-scout/.
Update: Thanks for your interest in the Help Scout beta!! We've gotten tons of response and the form is now closed.
You've probably noticed a trend if you've seen our last couple of Feed My Inbox maintenance announcements here on the blog. To avoid being redundant, today we're announcing a regular maintenance window for Feed My Inbox every Saturday morning from 8am-11am CST.
During this window, real-time notifications may not go out. Everything else (including the site) will continue running in most cases. We won't always use the maintenance window or need it for all three hours, but this covers our bases.
We have to turn off real-time notifications and pause all of our feed polling in order to deploy any database or performance updates, so this is a necessary step when it comes to Feed My Inbox.
Simply let us know if you have any questions about the maintenance.
Over the weekend I was reading an interview with Tim Ferriss and this excerpt really stuck with me ...
One killer feature
When working with startups, Ferriss sees one problem popping up over and over. “The biggest weakness I see is companies getting focused on implementing new features ... They have a viable product that people are paying for and instead of identifying their cheapest avenue for acquiring profitable customers or focusing on polishing the product they already have, they focus on adding ten new features."
“Mike Maples is one of the angel investors I most respect in Silicon Valley. He says the startup that perfects their one feature and is the best at that is usually the startup that wins. It’s not the startup that’s an 8 out of 10 on 10 features. It is the startup that is 10 out of 10 on one feature — that just kills it."
David Cohen touches on the same thing in Do More Faster ...
"If you're early in the life of your startup, do yourself a favor and figure out what one thing you're going to be the best in the world at doing. By all means, don't stop there. Just spend some time to think about how you can cross the finish line and avoid throwing in the kitchen sink."
In a nutshell, this is why we're building Help Scout. We think it can be the best in the world at email ticketing, email collaboration, email for teams or whatever you want to call it. We're passionate about the problem, believe a lot of other people have it too, and believe we know how to fix it. This is what keeps us working hard every day to get it launched.
Designing the Help Scout marketing website has been a challenge that's now spanned more than three weeks. Finding the right voice and brand for this app has not come easily, as evidenced by all the changes since we started this journey.
We've created about 20 different variations of the site so far. Although it might go through a couple more iterations before launch, we're really excited about where it stands now. Below we have 7 of those variations for you to see, including the final one on the bottom.
It wasn't the original plan for the entire site to consist of one page. But as we kept cutting things to keep the copy clear and objectives simple, it sort of evolved that way. For the first version of a web app, few companies need more than a page to make their point. If you need more, you probably should have launched earlier.
1- The plans and pricing are not final yet. I hesitated to show the plans/pricing before finalized, but we're happy to get your feedback now. Again, nothing is final until we launch.
2- The logo continues to evolve. We've had so many iterations of the logo that I lost count, but we're definitely narrowing in. Subtle details of the ribbon and medal have changed, as well as the typeface. We feel like the new type matches the shape of the mark a little better and feels more professional. Here's a quick comparison of the two:
Our creative breakthrough came right before the final comp, when we moved on to design our first newsletter. It turned out to be the perfect medium to simplify, start with a clean slate and come up with some stuff that we loved. It's funny how things can come together when you change the scenery and work on something else.
We're all putting in late nights to keep up great progress ... more to come!
Hey folks! We apologize for the late notice, but will be deploying more performance improvements to Feed My Inbox on Saturday from 8-11am CST. It shouldn't take that long, but emails may not be sent in real-time during that window. We're working on a status blog where we can announce this kind of stuff and get an ongoing maintenance schedule going. Thanks for your patience!
Last week we launched a new section on Feed My Inbox: Tutorials. It includes step-by-step instructions on subscribing to content from the web's most popular websites.
Even if you are an expert, check it out! You might find some new content worth subscribing to.
Also, we've got a bunch more tutorials in the queue that we'll keep updating over time. Of course, we have a feed for it if you are interested: http://www.feedmyinbox.com/listings/feed/tutorials/rss.xml.
We've been living with an updated Help Scout design for the last several weeks and are ready to show it to you today. We got rid of some extra space and gave it the look and feel of a more native email client. Aside from minor details, this is the final UI we'll launch with. Here are 6 new screenshots:
Tickets View
Individual Ticket
Previous Ticket Popup
Ticket Reply
Users List
User Settings
In the last couple of weeks we've also launched two big website updates: an updated pre-launch site for Help Scout and an all-new Brightwurks.com. Brightwurks was a much-needed visual refresh and Help Scout was a lot of new copy. We hope potential customers will get a good idea of our priorities for Help Scout by reading it.
Next week we'll finally be freed up from other projects and hope to be working on Help Scout 100% again. Our team is busting it to launch as soon as possible. I'm hoping to reach out to some folks on our mailing list about trying beta accounts, so signup now!
One of the most in-demand features of Feed My Inbox is real-time notifications. We get several inquiries and questions each week about it. In an effort to be more transparent and better educate our customers, today we're going to dissect what real-time truly means and all the efforts we're making to deliver emails to you as they are posted.
The question we hear the most is, "how long does it take a real-time notification to reach my inbox?" It's a very fair question. However, the answer is more complicated than we'd like. We always have to say, "It depends." This post will cover each dependence, where it might fall short and why.
There are two ways FMI learns about a feed update. The first is by polling, which means our servers go out and manually check feeds for updates and store off anything new. The second is through a real-time protocol. Instead of FMI having to go out and poll the feed for updates, real-time protocols proactively notify us of new updates as they happen.
To understand our real-time notifications is to understand these two methods better. So let's dive in!
As mentioned before, polling is the process of our servers checking a feed manually for updates. On a pretty consistent basis, we can guarantee that a feed will be polled and an email is sent to you within about 5-15 minutes. We're always optimizing our systems and adding infrastructure as needed to keep this number as low as possible.
Real-time emails are delivered slower than the 5-15 minute window when the feed you are subscribed to goes through a middle-man first. So there's the feed, then another service that sits on top of the feed, then your subscription.
Millions of feeds around the world are hosted by a service called FeedBurner (owned by Google). It's a great service, which provides valuable analytics to feed owners about subscribers, popular posts and much more. We use it for the Brightwurks feed.
FeedBurner is what I am referring to as a middle-man. They sometimes take 10-30 minutes to poll your feed for updates and add new content to the feed they host for you. It then takes Feed My Inbox the 5-15 minute window to poll FeedBurner for the update. So a 45-minute delay from the post going up to you getting an email is very possible (although unlikely) in this scenario.
Services such as Google Reader, Yahoo! Pipes and Feed Rinse among tons of others create this same problem for us. Basically any service that serves as a go-between from the original content source to Feed My Inbox can cause delays. They have to poll the original feed, then we poll the middle-man feed. Worst of all, this isn't something we can control. If a middle-man takes 30 minutes to poll the original source, your email will be 30 minutes delayed and we can't do a thing about it. All we can do is continue making our own polling faster.
Feeds that support a real-time protocol solve all our problems, right? Actually, not always. These are the protocols we're using:
This is a nifty little technology. The feed file identifies a "Hub" server URL. You can create a hub, use a community hub or use the hub your publishing software has setup. When the feed is updated, the software generating the feed knows to ping the hub, who in turn pings Feed My Inbox to send out a real-time email.
Instead of having to poll feeds manually for updates, PubSubHubBub lets us know when there is a new post; then we email it out. It all happens in 1-2 minutes.
Hubs such as the ones provided by our friends at SuperFeedr work beautifully, sending updates to FMI almost instantly. Aforementioned FeedBurner supports PubSubHubBub for all their feeds, but we still fall victim to their manual polling before we get the update.
For PubSubHubBub-enabled feeds, we still manually poll them because of slow-moving hubs or middle-man issues as discussed. For whatever reason, sometimes our polling beats the hub. We've seen emails go out at 1 minute, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 1 minute, then 15 minutes. The 15-minute email is when our polling beat out the hub.
RSS Cloud is much like PubSubHubBub, with only one crucial difference. When the cloud (another name for "hub") pings Feed My Inbox, we have to go fetch the feed content. With PubSubHubBub, the ping sent to us from the hub already contains the content; so we don't have to go fetch it. Otherwise, these two are very much the same.
We've had pretty good experience with RSS Cloud, but it hasn't been adopted at the same rate as PubSubHubBub because Google didn't choose to use it. Big sites like Wordpress.com have implemented support for RSS Cloud on their millions of blogs, so it's still worth paying attention to.
Both of these real-time protocols provide an edge that helps us deliver emails faster, but we still have to rely on our polling as well in case they flub up. Usually the results are great and feeds using these protocols can be delivered to our customers in a couple minutes.
I should be clear that Twitter isn't a real-time feed protocol. Fact is, our Twitter integration doesn't even look at feeds anymore. It's too slow and we were sending them too many requests as FMI grew. We use their API to get profile updates almost instantaneously. It's awesome, and very fast (like less than a minute). However, we still do the old feed polling method for Twitter searches and non-profile feeds.
For some of you, I understand this article might be too much information. But we think it's very important to document why feed delivery times vary for those that are interested. Like most things in life, it's not as simple as it may seem on the surface. Our real-time updates are not always perfect, but in our tests Feed My Inbox is still MUCH faster than other web apps trying to do the same thing.
Last week's maintenance included a number of performance improvements and we've been working more on real-time performance this week. Real-time delivery is getting better on a consistent basis. So even if it's not good enough for you right now, check back with us later. Most of all, let us know if real-time isn't satisfactory for you and we can tell you why or try to make it better.
This weekend we are going to be deploying some performance improvements to Feed My Inbox. We do not expect the website to be down at all. However, no feeds will be checked and no emails will be sent during the maintenance window.
Once everything is back up, it may take another few hours to catch up and send all the emails in the queue. No data will be lost and no feed updates will go unchecked. They will simply be delayed during this time.
As a result of the upgrades, some customers may receive a couple duplicate emails. We're doing our best to make sure this does not happen, but want to let you know that it is a possibility. Thanks in advance for your patience as we continue to improve Feed My Inbox!