Good Morning Silicon Valley: Reader arrives weakly

Good Morning Silicon Valley is a really funny, offbeat look at what is going on in the Wild West. This article examines the new Google Reader, an RSS aggregator.

I set up a number of feeds by hand to test it out, and for a beta, it works pretty well, but of course it's far from perfect. As others have noted, it is a bit slow to load up, and I have gotten some strange javascript errors. That being said, I think that the approach of releasing software in beta and continually refining is definitely the way to go. Repeated customer feedback will shape the tool far more effectively than any developers or product marketers sitting in their cubicles discussing what they think "the market" wants.

This is one huge advantage of web-based software. You have the flexibility to do this. It is much more difficult when the customer owns the hardware, pays an IT staff for maintenance, and of course, when the application is mission critical, like a financial consolidation system. Still, I think there are principles from this type of development methodology that are certainly worth adopting for the larger companies that sell packaged software.