Today, I began my Sunday morning like many others, make some coffee, walk my dogs and settle down in front of my computer to read my Sunday morning news and catch up on the the articles that I wanted to spend more time reviewing from earlier in the week. Unfortunately, “Oops… an error occurred. Please try again in a few seconds.” is the only thing that I get as I go through my reading list. I am not here to knock Google Reader, rather to take a better look at what tools we count on everyday that make our lives easier. It helps me keep up with the 100+ blog/news feeds that I count on to stay connected
Google Reader is not the only RSS/XML reader available, I know, but any tool that we use to make our lives easier are great, until they don’t work as they should.
Unlike many products and services don’t offer resources, Google Reader is a great tool that has a blog and a forum with a group discussion email to allow you, the user to find out what is happening with the service and provide feedback for them to improve, find out how people use the product to improve it for you and other users and allow multiple ways to access others that share the same interests.
Aside from my angst about the current functionality of this tool, I look a bit deeper at what I can learn from this. Let’s start with a few questions:
What do you offer?
How do your people use your product?
How do users let others know about your product?
Do you offer a place for your users to meet others that share their interest in you product?
Are you continually improving your product for users?
How do you know?
You do not have to be a multi-million dollar, Fortune 500 company to achieve this. There are things that you can do, without a programing team. Really, you can build an online community on services like SpicyPage, MyBlogLog and others. Open your ears (and your email) to let your users communicate with you (not just to you). Of course, you can build a blog for announcing new changes and get feedback from your users.
Find out what your users want and do what you can to give them what they are looking for – this is what will make you and your product successful.
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