filtrbox blog

As Tom mentioned, we hosted a “bug bash” on Wednesday night and called it PizzaBox, naturally. We invited 20 or so friends to help us test Filtrbox and find bugs, usability issues, etc. Not only was it fun and productive from a QA perspective, it was really educational for us to see so many people using the product at once. The event was a resounding success, and we will definitely do one again.

The recipe we used was simple:

• Invited friends, friends of friends, and colleagues (this provided a good mix of “user types”)
• Relaxed, casual atmosphere (too much structure and its no fun and you are controlling the results)
• Loosely guided testing (we handed out sheets with key areas to test and how to submit feedback)
• Testers brought their own laptops (diverse environments and screen sizes)
• Beer and Pizza (lots of both…)

Why this worked well was simple - everyone who showed up WANTED to be there, and they were happy to play with something new and be critical of it. By having everyone on their own laptops we got to gather test data from 20+ different system configurations, not a standard build like you get in a lab.

We gathered all of the feedback by

1. entering tickets into our bug system in realtime
2. having people email notes and screenshots
3. collecting data “over the shoulder” and seeing their experiences first hand

All in all, we collected as much or more usability feedback as actual product-defect type bugs. Seeing how people “think” and how they interpret the Filtrbox dashboard was really helpful for us. We have a number of areas we want to improve to enhance the overall intuitiveness and workflow within the dashboard.

Thanks to everyone who came out! Filtrbox loves you

If you are looking for a sneek peek at the product or need some help getting your Filtrbox service dialed in, check out the new tutorials on the site.

There are 3 screencasts ranging from 2 minutes to 4 minutes. Topics covered include Filtr setup, Dashboard overview, and FiltrFeeds

http://www.filtrbox.com/video.php

Let us know what else you’d like to see by commenting on this post!

After a several months of long days and nights getting Filtrbox in shape and testing with a tightly controlled private beta group, we are now excited to announce the expansion of the private beta program. We will be sending out invites to those of you who pre-registered with us. Invites will go out over the next few days!

We have gotten some great feedback from our early test users, and have incorporated as much of it as possible into our latest release. We are looking forward to sharing the Filtrbox service with you and getting additional feedback and input.

You can still request a private beta account here: http://www.filtrbox.com/prereg.php

If you have specific questions or comments for us, please contact us here.

Here’s an article that compares Filtrbox with Alltop, two services that are almost polar opposites. Mary Fallon at demo.com does a good job outlining the how different the approaches to media monitoring are.

Info Aggregation Without Aggravation
by Mary A. C. Fallon
Alltop and Filtrbox - the flipsides of next gen news searching
Online information aggregation without aggravation could be the mantra of new products Alltop and Filtrbox – polar opposites in all ways except their simplicity of use.
Alltop is for those wanting to scan top stories on popular Web sites and Filtrbox, now in private beta, is for anyone whose job depends on efficiently searching and tracking explicit information.

Click here to read more

Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital has a great post on the topic of News Feeds and how they are potentially evolving into a “SNMP 2.0″ of sorts. Josh drew some analogies from the world of a NOC (Network Operations Center) where thousands of SNMP traps come into the monitoring systems. The availability of feeds is exploding and bridging all types of online content. We already have information overload issues, so borrowing a few key concepts from the NOCs can help manage all of this.

Josh’s analogy resonated particularly well here at Filtrbox for a few reasons.

• I used to run a NOC for a content distribution network (Volera), and these concepts are quite familiar and in some cases have been woven into the DNA of Filtrbox
• The Filtrbox Dashboard is like the NOC alerting system that constantly processes all inbound alerts and decided which ones need the most attention.
• Filtrbox is ideal for tracking a large volume of information without increasing the workload. Need to monitor another 10 items? You simply create the Filtrs - you don’t have to manually create or hunt down individual source feeds and then process everything in them
• Our interactive Dashboard provides drill-down. 3 clicks or less to get from a high-level activity spike to the source articles behind it.

Part of the discussion in Josh’s post is around feed aggregators like SocialThing! or FriendFeed. These services act as “feed funnels” really - they consolidate updates to your accounts, (and let you post updates centrally as well) and your friends’ accounts on social media services. They address the “too many services, too many updates” part of the problem, but they don’t extract the underlying value in the content or address the broader problem of being able to deal with content coming at you from multiple content domains. If you need to proactively monitor social media feeds, blog posts, and mainstream news for mentions of specific items, you should be able to do this in one place, and with some notation of “tuning”, just like in a NOC where the admins can set the severity level of any given inbound alarm.

Update: While writing this post, I noticed Brad Feld chimed in also with some additional thoughts on the topic.

We’ll be doing demos at TechCocktail Boulder tomorrow night (March 6th). The event is at the Foundry on Walnut and starts at 6:30. Should be a cool event and Filtrbox will be showing off the application and giving out private beta accounts so stop by! We’ll even buy a few drinks, seeing that its a cocktail party and all…