fbFund Competition

I am very sad to say that we lost the fbFund Competition. It is unfortunate. Congratulations to the winners!

We will continue to work hard and Kountr will win the next competition! We have a few speculations as to why we lost:
- It does not have all of the functions of the website yet. We are working as fast as we can to get this completed.
- The application is not very popular yet because we have not published it in the Facebook application list.
- The application was broken for a couple of days but Michael was at work and couldn't fix right away.
- We still don't have the feedback form available on the application.
- We need to make it more sociable, such as notifications.

We have a list of things that we plan on executing next:
- Add all of the functions from the website.
- Add a feedback form on the application.
- Publish the application.
- Continue to market the application.
- Allow users to choose to make some kounts publicly available to all Facebook users.
- Notification when somebody writes a post to a kount.

Michael and I have learned two main things in the process. First, we are a great team. Michael is better at getting us on track at the beginning and I am better at keeping us motivated at the end. Second, we have to continue to market Kountr.

We welcome all feedback on either the Kountr website or Facebook application. You can help us improve Kountr. Let's count the ways to make Kountr better.

Features

I have come up with features that I would love to use on Kountr. When I mention them to Michael he gives me a look. This looks says, "You are not technically a user!" So, I smile and say that it is just an idea. Wonderfully many of these ideas have been requested and implemented. I can only thank our users for giving us feedback and to humbly request that you keep providing us with feedback. I have a number of other features that I would love to see implemented... if only I could give you a hint.

I am not taking the credit for these great features rather, I am grateful that there are others out there who use Kountr like I do. One of the amazing things about feedback is how it can spawn new uses that I would not have imagined by myself. Kountr is reinforcing the idea that a community is much more imaginative than an individual. My, my... brainstorming does work.

Implementing feedback

When we implement feedback Michael and I sometimes disagree on what the user has requested or on how polished the feature should look. These are not huge disagreements but rather require some discussion. At the end of it all, I am always amazed at how two people can see things so differently. We both want to implement what we think the user wants but it all comes down to how we personally would use the feature if we were the user. I hope that we have and continue to implement the users request as close as possible to what they had in mind. As we are experiencing, everybody has a different picture in their head of the same website.

For polishing the feature it is an ongoing debate. I would like it to look polished and work perfectly. This includes the functionality and appearance. Michael prefers to keep it as basic as possible. Michael doesn't want to spend a lot of time on a feature and then find out that it is not what the user requested. I agree with his sentiment however, I would like him to spend a little more time on things so that it is a little more polished. A good example is the iGoogle Widget. It looks and works great on Firefox but the appearance is not polished on IE7. The user who requested it is satisfied since he uses Firefox so, it has been put on the back burner. In fairness to Michael, he has a lot of work to do on limited time. If only I knew how to program and was able to take on more of the programming load...