Twiddla vs. The Snow

If you're in the US (or sunny Ecuador like me at the moment), you might not have noticed that England is buried under a dozen feet of snow right now. Everything is closed. Roofs are collapsing. It's pretty much exactly like the plot of The Day After Tomorrow.

Worst of all though, schools are closed and the poor kids have nothing to do but build boring old snowmen and sled down hills.

Except for the kids in this guy's class. They get to play with Twiddla all day. Here's a replay of the lesson.

People have been using Twiddla in the classroom for a long time now. We even give out Free Educational Accounts to anybody who asks for one. We're all about helping the kids of today, on the theory that they'll be wearing suits at some point in the future and needing a kick-ass web conferencing tool like ours.

So yeah, we're glad to help out. If you have a snowbound class of your own someplace in the UK, be sure to let us know and we'll hook you up with the tools you need to keep your classes going.

Fun with TwiddleBot!

One of the reasons I dig working on Twiddla is that people keep finding strange and different ways of using it. I mean yeah, most people fall into one of the 3 popular use cases (education, business, and screwing off), but every once in a while we'll stumble across a little group of people using it for something truly wacky.

Like D&D.

Early on, we noticed a thriving little subculture using Twiddla to play role-playing games online. I guess it makes sense when you think about it. We let you scribble over anything you upload, move stuff around, chat, and talk to people online. That's everything you need for a night of gaming. Cool!

Being geeks that we are, it's never enough just to watch folks finding cool things to do with Twiddla. We're happy to blow off some paying work to convert these random kids into true fans. So now if you look carefully, you'll see some Gaming functionality that snuck in while nobody was looking. Observe:

That's right. I just rolled some dice inside of Twiddla.

One of the cool things about writing software is that you can make it do whatever you want. So now, TwiddleBot (whose usual job is cleaning out the sandboxes from time to time) will do things for you if you ask nicely. Throwing dice is just one of them. If you're bored, maybe you can figure out some of the other stuff he can do. If you're feeling helpful, maybe you'll have suggestions for new things he can do. Possibly even things that are helpful, rather than distracting like this one!

100,000 Meetings!

By the end of today, Twiddla will have hosted more than 100,000 Web Meetings over the course of its short life. Check it out if you want. Start a new meeting now and I bet it will give you a six-digit room ID. We're pretty stoked.

Imagine if, instead of hosting Meetings at Twiddla, all of those people had to travel across country just to meet face to face. Imagine the fuel savings alone. Better still, imagine they all had to travel overseas. By sailboat even. And imagine if, when they got there, they couldn't find a cab and they had to walk for miles or possibly even steal a horse just to get to that meeting. I mean, what would you do with that horse once you got there? You couldn't keep it. You'd have to kill it, right, just to cover your tracks?

So even by a conservative estimate of 3 people per meeting, it's probably safe to say that Twiddla has saved the lives of at least 300,000 horses this year alone. Now that's something to be proud of.

Thanks to all of our devoted supporters for helping make this a reality.

How not to talk to the Press

If you've been reading the paper lately, you probably heard the news that we've given up on the business, packed it in and applied for jobs at Dairy Queen. If you've been following Twiddla, however, and seen some of the cool new stuff that we've rolled out over the last few weeks, I think you'll agree that the above statement is not entirely true.

We have, it seems, been misquoted.

We did an interview with the New York Times recently about our fast product turnarounds, and the fact that between the two founders of Twiddla, we've been nominated for (and won) SXSW awards for two separate products in consecutive years. That's a pretty cool feat, and certainly one worth reporting.

Somewhere in the course of that interview, our man Ben was describing the roller-coaster ride that tech startups such as Twiddla tend to follow as they move from concept to prototype to successful product. It's best visualized in this chart that I'm redrawing from memory after having seen it on the whiteboard at YCombinator's office in Stanford.

Basically, every startup in the world follows this growth curve (with the exception of those that never make it onto the radar), and we did too. Winning SXSW gave us a ton of media attention and enough web traffic to choke a wildebeest. Naturally, that faded quickly enough and we were forced to stand on our own merit. We iterated rapidly and made lots of improvements to the product in the hopes of attracting and retaining users that stumbled across the site. After a few months, we started to see the fruits of that labor, as word-of-mouth traffic, blog traffic, and Twitter referrals came flowing in. Here we are a year later, and we've grown to the point where our average Monday traffic is roughly half what it was that day when the entire population of Japan checked it out, and real people are paying real money to use the thing.

In short, we're doing amazingly well.

Anyway, back to that interview. Naturally, reporters like to make their stories interesting, and they absolutely love controversial quotes. Especially if they have a great catch phrase like "Trough of Despair". So in hindsight, it seems obvious that after hearing Ben describe that chart, we'd get quoted the way we did. Never mind the part where (in the next sentence), we went on to talk about how great it's been now that we've climbed out of that trough. That would just add to the word count, and really, nobody cares about that part.

So I'll close with the advice that everybody who's ever talked to the press will tell you (and that we neglected to heed last week to our own peril.): Always expect that everything you say will be quoted out of context. Find a way to craft your sentences so that each one of them contains all the context they'll need to stand on their own. Don't be afraid of reporters, but keep in mind that their goal for the interview may be different than yours. You want to get your message out. They want to tell an interesting story. If you're smart, you'll make sure that the interesting parts of your story just happen to be the parts that make you look good.

Introducing Presentation Mode

"How many people can be in a single meeting?"

We get that question a lot when talking about Twiddla. Here's the answer we tend to give:

"How many people can use a single blackboard?"

The idea here is that it's really more of a social issue than a technical one. We've had 200 people in a single meeting, and the server handled it just fine. It was a complete mess though.

I guess another way of looking at it is: "How many people can you get onto a single conference call?" And that's where it starts to get interesting. The answer to that one is "As many as you like, provided that everybody is polite about it." And there's certainly evidence to support that view. I've seen conference calls with a couple hundred people listening that worked just great.

Twiddla, however, works a bit different. It's FUN. So much fun that people sometimes forget to be polite. When you land in a meeting, the first thing you notice is that your cursor turns into a pencil. So naturally, the first thing you do is scribble something. We've seen this happen often enough, and it makes for fun demos when the audience discovers that they can simply type in the URL they see on the screen and hop in. Of course, this is why we've learned to make our point in the first 15 seconds of any demo, since it will immediately turn into a scribble-fest as soon as people start piling in.

That's probably not the best thing to have happen if you're trying to use Twiddla for a training call, so today we're releasing "Presentation Mode", in all of its boring glory. Try it out when you get a chance. You can now declare yourself Benevolent Dictator For Life, and give yourself the sole power to change pages and mark things up. The other participants in your meeting will get Chat and Voice, and that's about it. Hopefully they'll behave themselves so that you can get some work done.

10 Zillion percent better at UI design

At the request of some of our users, we spent the better part of a day building a Snap-to-Grid feature, and a little library of UI controls that you can drag onto the canvas in Twiddla. To be honest, I didn't think it was that big of a change, but wow, was I wrong. Suddenly, mocking up user interfaces is, like, easy!

Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Press release for Twiistup 2008

Twiddla (www.twiddla.com), a free, no-setup online collaboration tool, announced today that it will be showing off new features at the upcoming Twiistup (www.twiistup.com) event on July 17th. Twiddla is one of 11 companies invited to “show off” to a sold-out audience of technology-, media- and entertainment-types at the annual Los Angeles event. Twiddla is a web-based platform that helps distributed teams meet virtually and collaborate in real time by providing tools to create mark-ups of live Web sites, uploaded images and documents, or a blank canvas. In addition to an advanced chat feature, Twiddla offers an opportunity for collaborators to speak with one another via PhoneFromHere.com. “We are very excited to be sharing our new features at Twiistup,” said Benjamin Satterfield, Co-founder and CEO of Twiddla. “We developed them in response to user requests and we think they will enhance the experience of Twiddla significantly. We’re looking forward to the community’s response.” “With factors like the increasing number of geographically-dispersed teams and the high cost of gas, the need for easy and effective online collaboration tools has never been greater. Twiddla is the solution for anyone who wants to meet and collaborate online without enlisting a tech support team or needing a big corporate budget,” said Satterfield. “It’s painless, it’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s free.” Twiistup is currently sold-out, but photos, blogs, and clips from the event will be available on their website after the event.

Demo Girl gives Twiddla a Nice Walk Thru

http://flash.screeniac.com/twiddla-dg/twiddla-dg.html?TB_iframe=true&height=590&width=1050 DemoGirl worked with Twiddla on the linked video and created a great intro tutorial. Thanks! While some new features are older ones fixed, this is still a good walk thru of the app's features.

Twiddla Demo at NYC Tech Meetup

Hey, No Joke! Benjamin Satterfield presents April 1, 2008 at the NYC Tech Meetup in the new IAC building in Manhattan with fellow speakers:

1. Steve Rosenbaum: http://magnify.net
2. Oliver Hurst-Hiller: http://DonorsChoose.org
3. John Pavley: http://exchange.conte
4. Mark Ghuneim: http://www.trendrr.com
5. Ben Kaufman: http://kluster.com
6. Ben Satterfield: http://twiddla.com
7. Justin Ouellette: http://muxtape.com
8. Nate Westheimer: http://bricabox.com

At the end of the demo, the wifi went down. See, we truly are a disruptive technology! Great to show off the demo with an Apple too, considering they just turned 32 today. Thanks to Nate & Christian for the video and help. And Justin for his patience and great demo as well.

Oh yeah, we won!

If you've been following the technology press lately, you've probably already heard that we won the SXSW Web Award for Technical Achievement last week. We're pretty excited about that, but we've been so busy these last couple weeks that we completely forgot to mention it!

So yeah, we're officially on the radar. 30,000 new users have signed up in the last two weeks, and we're getting a ton of great feedback. Thanks for that! We'll keep you posted (hopefully in a more timely manner next time!)

Peachpit Press, New Riders Interview at SXSWi

Gary-Paul with New Riders, PeachpitTV interviews Benjamin Satterfield about Twiddla.com and it's win at SXSWi 2008 during the conference.

Twiddla at SXSW!

Twiddla has been getting some good attention lately. Among other things, we've been chosen as a finalist at the SXSW 2008 Web Awards. Check out the competition:

http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/finalists/

Real Time Collaboration across a Distributed Team

Twiddla has come along quite a ways in the last few months. That is to say, Twiddla has come along nicely in the last few weeks, after having languished for 3 months while we concentrated on other development.

But now, the project that we originally needed Twiddla for is safely launched, and we have some room to breathe. We also have some interested parties that would like to see us get a product out the door.

Twiddla has a bunch of new whiteboarding features that will make it easier to get your point across in a web meeting. It has support for voice communications now, and a much cleaner user interface. There's a pretty new design on the way for the application itself, and hopefully we'll replace our train-wreck of a homepage shortly too.

In short, we're back at it again. We hope you stick around to see where we go from here!

Looks like we're not getting bought by Google!

According to TechCrunch, Google just bought themselves a Twiddla clone.

Well, clone might not be a good term, since Marratech has been around for a few years and Twiddla is only 17 days old now. Still, if you look at screenshots of their app, it looks awfully familiar...

Now I don't want anybody to panic over this news. We're not gonna close up shop just yet. After all, we have upwards of THREE MAN DAYS of development under the bridge, and it would be a shame to let all of that go to waste. We'll keep plugging away toward our original goal of putting out a team collaboration tool that doesn't suck (and that doesn't make you download or install anything.)

And besides, we could still get bought out by Microsoft!

1000 Signups on Day One!

Before 9:00 Monday morning, less than 10 people had ever heard of Twiddla.com. By 11:00 that night we had 1000 registered users.

Holy wow!

I guess it's all my fault. After all, I did write a little article about it over at the Expat Software blog. But I only mentioned the URL once, way down at the bottom. Who would have thought anybody would read the whole thing?

Actually, most of the credit will have to go to Reddit. The story went up there in the morning and quickly found its way onto page one. Before long, a steady stream of early-adopter type techno-folk were reading the article and following it to the site. They evidently told people about it and next thing you know we had a ton of new users turning up at Twiddla.com.

Uhh… Welcome! (yikes!)

Lessons from Day One

Massive-scale usability testing is quite a thing to behold. As it turns out, Twiddla is a pretty good platform for getting user feedback about the Twiddla experience. Early Monday morning, we opened up a couple "Show and Tell" sessions and invited people to hop in. People would stumble into these sessions at the rate of about one per minute, and immediately start asking the same questions: "Why is the pen so fat?" "Why does it cut the corners out of my circles?" "Whoa! Did you see that??? My line just turned orange halfway through drawing it!" We couldn't have gotten better feedback had we gone to these people's houses and stood next to them.

Barriers to Entry

Around 2:00, somebody came into the Show and Tell and said that we shouldn't be making people register just to try the thing out. Yeah, we'd meant to have a simple "Let Me In as a Guest" button, but hadn't spent the time to build it. This guy had some pretty good points, so I stepped out for about 15 minutes and built the "Lemme In!" button. I pushed the build live and Things. Went. NUTS.

Suddenly we started getting new users showing up every 5 seconds. Of the next 300 people to sign in, only 4 of them bothered to create a username and password. Wow, talk about feedback. Break down that one last barrier to entry and everybody will give your thing a shot. It's too bad that we didn’t open this up sooner, since we had passed our initial user spike and things were actually slowing down when I pushed the "Lemme In" button live. Check out the graphs. I wonder how many people we lost during that peak period because we were asking them to sign up for our service just to try it out. Good lesson learned.

Little bugs bug people a lot

We hadn't spent any time polishing the application before going live. Granted, we didn't realize we were going live, but that's not really an excuse. People picked up on little things and sometimes decided not to dig any deeper. While the feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive, the emails we got saying "Love the Thing!" always ended with "Wish the pen wasn't so big". It would have been nice to get some more feedback along the lines of "What are you going to do about viewing sites that require a login?" I bet that if Twiddla looked a bit more professional out of the box, people might have found some more significant things to comment on.

One Week Later...

Twiddla has gone through a lot of changes this week. Just about every issue that came up that first day has been addressed, and several new features have gone in. The user interface is a little smoother, and the application is a lot more stable overall.

Talking to users that first day gave us tons of new ideas for what to do with the site. Next up will be the ability to view sites that require logins and cookies, submit forms, and basically do a bunch more stuff that it doesn't seem like you should be able to do in a browser. It's about to get good!

Thanks again to the thousand souls that showed up that first day and told us what they thought of the site. We found plenty of things that need improvement, but mostly we got a ton of encouragement from everybody. People seem to like the idea, and it sounds like we're on the right track.

I look forward to hearing more of your feedback as we build Twiddla into a usable application. Keep us steered in the right direction and we can't help but get this thing launched!