launching and evolving - Building Social Web Applications, a book in beta

I'm writing a book for O'Reilly and I'd love you to comment on this outline, see earlier post for more information. Let me know what is missing and what examples you'd like to suggest for the book. Comment below or send me an email me at gavinbell dot com or zzgavin on twitter. Launching and evolving

• The front page needs to communicate in seconds what your app is about
• 20 words and a picture, a compelling use case.
• Offer a demo, but words are better
• Aim is to get people to signup, but gradual engagement leading to signup is also desirable
Launching in "beta"
• The private alpha (non-public) early and often is a good approach to launching,
• start small and iterate it until you are ready for strangers
• Launch when you have something useful, not every feature on the wishlist
• Small applications are easier to understand and for other people to talk about, it does X
• Invite tickets risks / benefits
• Allow limited numbers of people into see your new app
• Can create an echo chamber and thus skew feedback
• Arriving with social context
• Dopplr
• Twitter
• Contact import APIs and their importance in bootstrapping context
• Tools and services for launching and support
• Getsatisfaction
• Twitter for comments and visibility
• Twitter inside getsatisfaction
• A blog
• Mailing lists
• Nurturing the first few hundred people
• Link to me (digg, reddit, del.icio.us)
• Face to face meetups
• Speaking at conferences and barcamps
• Nounification and verbification twittering, flickring etc
• importance of making the community self supporting or sustaining, they should surprise you
• Feature request vs bug management
• Adding functionality
• Watching for demand from the community
• Keeping up with the competition (or not)
• Listening
• Feature led development (featuritis)
• Making useful products (experience led)
• Staying focused and coherent
• supporting emerging activities
• determining what is next
• BIG changes vs features vs maintenance, eg Flickr localization
• Marketing approaches examples
• Word of mouth
• Being responsive on twitter etc
• Eat your own dog food, use your own product from day one
• Dopplr personal report using Obama
• Flickr blog - connect with your community
I'll of course credit any contributions I use. many thanks, Gavin