Did an interview

The guys from video company Viddix (you should check out their site and technology!) did an interview with me for the Dutch site Frankwatching. It’s in Dutch.

Press release

Just a quick update. We just released our press release. This is our fist official international release to the press. We were fortunate that our friends at PressDoc (thanks Stefan!) let us play around with the beta version of their new service.

Getting press is not easy, I know that. Getting a press release on ‘the wire’ in US and UK would cost us circa 2000 US$ one PR agency told us. That’s just ridiculous. We didn’t go for that option obviously, it’s bulk, it’s impersonal and it’s expensive. Not a good combination.

I think getting press is (much like social media) about relationships. I rather communicate directly with our users, but getting press can help of course. Talking to journalists is fun and can be very beneficial to the success of our site. The way I approach them is personal. I know some journalists, but not many. Fortunately, there are so many ways to come in contact with journalist and bloggers these days.

The strange thing with press releases is that I personally have trouble writing them. I’m used to write blog posts, Tweets and email, I can use my human voice. That gets lost a bit in a press release. Maybe I did it wrong, I don’t know.

So, if you know journalists or are one, take a look at the release. But if you want a real story, email me (rutger@spectives.com)!

What’s next for Spectives? Sharing!

We launched 10 days ago. The launch was a great moment, you go from working without an audience to the wide open world where you have to succeed. The mindset changes. It’s harder, but very exciting!

We have gotten some great feedback from users. For example, there was feedback from a Thai and a Russian user that we did not support their languages. We fixed within a day and we are now completely supporting these languages. A stupid configuration error that we should have spotted before. But these things happen and I’m proud of our team that they fixed it so quickly.

Another thing that I noticed is the way I use Spectives. With now over 500+ members I want to know what they are doing, we have to make it more social. That’s why we are planning for two important new features; two features that make sharing and recommending articles easier:

1. We are now designing widgets that make it easier to share collections on your site / blog / Facebook / etc. We really want to hear from you what you would like to see! What should it do? How should it look?

2. Recommending is social these days. That’s why we are planning a way to make every post (every picture) a favorite. Then it will be possible to share favorites automatically (via Facebook / Twitter) and subscribe to a person’s favorites (in a tab) and make a widget from your favorites!

We are designing the features now, and hope to have some prototypes running in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

(Photo credit: furiousgeorge81 on Flickr)

Spectives in the press worldwide

We launched three days ago. We got some good press! Yesterday, every three minutes, someone on Twitter was talking about us. We’re all very excited here. The official press releases are going out next week, hopefully these will get picked up as well. Here is a list we like very much:

• TheNextWeb – Spectives: a new visual RSS reader
• ReadWriteWeb – Invisible RSS Technology in Visual Feed Readers: RSS for the Rest of Us
• KillerStartups – Spectives.com – A Visual Approach To Feeds
• Shapeways – Spectives, a visual RSS reader
• Circuitbreaks – Spectives.com -> Visual RSS
• Squire Morley – Infographics via Spectives

… some Dutch press

• Idealize – Spectives.com verovert de wereld met visual RSS
• Hyped – Spectives.com van Ilse Media is nu live
• Teed – Visueel browsen met Spectives.com
• CoolFruit – Spectives, browsen met plaatjes
• Hoppinger Weblog – Gapminder graphs, YouTube Insights, PDF viewer in Google, Spectives, Graffiti + stopmotion

…some French

• Descary – Spectives, un lecteur RSS visuel
• Externaute – Spectives : est un nouveau lecteur visuel pour les RSS

…some Spanish

• Tecnologiablog – Spectives, el nuevo lector de RSS visual

… some Italian

• Mambro – Spectives.com: un approccio visuale ai feed

… some German

• Web2null – Spectives

… some Brazilian

• Webatomic – Leitor de feeds visual

… and some Japanese

• Ikubon – サイトから画像だけを引き抜いてRSSで流してくれる Spectives – I have no clue what they have written

We just launched!

Ladies and gentlemen, we just officially launched Spectives.com. After hard work, endless discussions, days filled with errors and brilliant insights, we are live! This is a great feeling. I want to thank John and Tim for their incredible work and ilse media for their belief in me and their great support.

The picture above is me pressing the launch button. A nice bottle of Moët in my other hand

Spectives in one minute

We’ve made the first version of the Spectives in one minute video. Tell us what you think.

First screenshots

Here it is! The first screenshot of a collection on Spectives. I’ve taken one of our best collections, the Gossip collection. It aggregates 18 feeds and displays them beautifully. It updates constantly, putting the newest posts on top. Isn’t it great? You can also make your own collection.

Spectives, the story so far

The first idea for Spectives came to me a couple of years ago. I am an avid RSS user, but noticed something was missing. Especially when it came to certain kinds of news and updates. Visual news. In my case it was gadgets. I like gadgets, I like to read about gadgets, but most of all I like to see gadgets. With the RSS readers I used it was not possible to get a quick overview of the images of gadgets. I had to click or go through lots of text to get to the core: the image.

With my limited computer skills at the time, I made a site called Gadgetstart (not online anymore). It took the images from 12 gadget sites and displaying them on a site. That was it. One page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly. Every picture linked back to the original post. Very simple, very effective. It was fun.

So there I was. Having fun on my own with my site.

Since sharing mostly enhances fun, the idea for Spectives was born… (more later).

First feedback

Martijn got to test drive Spectives, he was mildly positive as you can see from his Tweet.

Going into private beta

We’ve worked hard. It is now time to show a selected group the awesomeness of Spectives. Want to join? Please send a request to rutger@spectives.com.