CardMeeting Dispatch

Dear CardMeeting ppl,

After I fix some bugs, daily logon counts soon double! Should I be shocked?

... and conversely, when I introduce bugs, user roles gradually halve. I still find the whole effect fascinating, all these completely disparate, unconnected individuals reacting so similarly. I've made this observation before, I know.

My mind strains trying to figure out all the aspects to this. Chiefly, why do users "go away" rather than "bitch" when things suddenly aren't right? I suspect that the answer is, "I'm not paying anything for CardMeeting, so I don't have bitching rights." (Wrong!) Or, perhaps the unhappy flipside of that coin is, "CardMeeting is free, must not be a serious offering ... look it's buggy! Goodbye!" (Noooo, don't go!)

I think I need to articulate some philosophy here. You ARE compensating me when you use CardMeeting! There is no professional organization built up around the product yet. CardMeeting is a "pro-hobby" style application at this juncture. I, personally, put in a good deal of my free time maintaining the software, but it is not where my bread gets buttered. At this stage of development, it's all me.

I say you are compensating me for time on the system because you are serving as my QA department. I rely on you people to tell me what's wrong when my own testing fails to catch problems. I also rely on you to tell me what features are important to you, or tell me when I screw up on a deployment, or tell me when your data is lost (thankfully a rare occurrence so far.)

Email is the best way to reach me (dave@woldrich.com). Please put "CardMeeting" somewhere in the message subject so that my spam filter lets your message get through. I keep all of your emails and regularly reflect on them. If you're not happy or if you see something is wrong please tell me, I can take bad news! I'll fix your bug if the technology allows it, and in pretty short order. My turnaround time on bug fixes is great! Your enhancement requests will necessarily have a lot longer cycle time, but I need to hear about those too.

On this last bug that drove users away, which had to do with system slowdowns caused by a bad applet shutdown sequence, I only heard about it in an aside on a comment on a blog posting regarding CardMeeting. Thank goodness for GOOG, making it easy to poll the interweb for CardMeeting's temperature. Indirect blog communication is less optimal.

So, CardMeeting SHOULD have value for you even though you've paid no money into it. CardMeeting IS valuable, you pour value into it. And of course CardMeeting has value for me for all the reasons it should.

I've thought a lot about how to maintain this value. A lot of it is locked up in reputation and expectations.

For example, when and where are advertisements ok on the website? Or, under what circumstances is it ok for me to send emails? I've collected a zillion email addresses so far, and not sent a single message from that list. This was on purpose, I do not feel it is right or productive to spam people, for any reason. (Well, okay, I have occasionally made proactive support calls, but those were not spam-like in the least.) In this era of http, blogs, and RSS, users can pull any information they need that I have for them, on their terms. And in terms of placing ads on the website, I feel like that's an unnecessary distraction. It just feels very "low rent", especially when I'm talking about selling subscriptions to some paid CardMeeting service.

It's a lot to consider. I've wondered if coming up with some informal social contract or pact might be beneficial. I envision laying out some squishy non-binding set of expectations that users have of CardMeeting and also expectations I have of the users.

Well, that's it. Thanks for using CardMeeting and looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,
Dave Woldrich - dave@woldrich.com