BlogBridge beta is ON!

Here's the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂

"Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going:

  • This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us!

  • One of our expectations of you as beta testers is that you will give us feedback with enough detail that we can do something about it, and a chance to correct problems that you find.

  • We are very interested in your feedback on the feature set and usability of BlogBridge. You can have a lot of influence on the direction we take this application. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

  • Please send your questions and comments to the yahoo groups list so everyone can see the questions and answers. If you haven't joined the list yet, then please do so now as it will be the easiest way for us to keep in touch. You should have received an invitation to the list. If you have not, please advise us and we will put you on the list.

  • We will be putting up a wiki page where we can post standing comments, information, references, help, faq's etc.

Now a few items of introduction to the application (I wouldn't call this 'Help' yet!)

  • The buttons on the left are 'Channel Guides.' They represent collections of Channels (RSS Feeds) which have something in common. Right now, the names of the Channel Guides (e.g. 'Favorites') are purely cosmetic. There are no special semantics there (yet.) In the near future you will be able to add and delete Channel Guides and enable various kinds of 'Automatic Processing' on them.

  • The scrollable region in the middle are 'Channels' (which what BlogBridge calls RSS Feeds.) We didn't call them blogs or rss because the universe of RSS feeds is broader than just Blogs and feeds. We are designing an application for 'mere mortals.' You can add and delete Channels. You can drag and drop Channels to move them around, within and between Channel Guides.

  • BlogBridge comes with a set of default Channels in each Channel Guide. Feel free to change that.

  • The scrollable region on the right are 'Articles' (which is what BlogBridge calls RSS Items.) There are several controls on how Articles are displayed in the Preferences dialog box.

Ok, ready to go?

Here is the link to install and run BlogBridge: [blah blah blah] Please do not publish it to anyone. Instead if you know someone who would like to run the beta, please introduce them to us. If the url gets out we will just change it 🙂 We want to keep this beta to around 20 people until we have a first level sense of how things are and how much work it is to support you all.

After all, our primary mission is to build great software.

Thanks, and have fun!

Pito Salas and Aleksey Gureev"