I use the excelent Bloglines.com web-based news aggregator, and recently I noticed a note of help on their frontpage, however you could only help if you lived in San-Franscisco (I assume for usability testing) and if you accepted money for your time, so that ruled me out on a large scale, but because I’ve been using it for such a long time, love it and can’t live without it and because I have many really good ideas (unbashfully, of course 🙂 on how to turn it (with simple means) into the most awsome KM tool, I wrote them an email anyways asking them how I could help otherwise ;
I’m not living in the Bay Area (or the US, for that matter), nor am I after your money :), but I’d love to be part of the process of making Bloglines better, so if there is a way, please let me know. I’m sure you’ve already got on your todo list things like tagging, content evaluation and textual marking, but I’d like to explore Bloglines as a serious knowledge tool with annotations, text analysis brokerage and various exports.
I just got their reply, which is such a spot-on example of what happens when you go from small and responsive to large and missing the point completely ;
Thank you for your interest in testing new Bloglines ideas. We have received a huge amount of interest and if you could provide the following information, we will be able to better schedule out our sessions. […] 5) which of the following times will you be available to be in the San Francisco SOMA neighborhood for 1 hour for $75 on Tuesday, December 19th? […]
Here’s to hoping that part of their usability testing includes their own reading capabilities and / or systems. 🙂 Customer love is hard to come by, and silly mistakes is often enough to make people look in some other direction to cover their needs. I’m not that easily turned off, though, but it sure is one for the records.