A case for TagWise

There is not much activity on this blog for a while now. No, no no we are working on paahijen, rest assured :-). It's just the blog where we've not much to say..

Actually, this is an attempt to analyze where does paahijen stand after little over one month. Actually, if one looks at the kind of success a lot of web2.0 apps get in first month, we stand somewhere way at the bottom and we have been trying to analyze what exactly is the problem? Is there a problem at all? Or just we have to wait....

Specifically, I am thinking about 'TagWise' because I happened to look at craigslist today and couldn't help comparing it with 'TagWise'. Few things come to mind -

• First, we've flattened out everything. There is no separate TagWise for 'pune' a separate one for 'bangalore' and so on. We believe thats not how we want to do? Why because when I am looking for a "java job", I'd like to find out all of those and if I am really specific about location, I can just add "java job pune" in my query and thats it. We feel this is what we are used to for searching things. thanks to endless pampering by google. :-)

• We also believed that somehow adding "catagories" - "sub-catagories" could be cumbersome to anyone posting his/her ad. So why not let him /her simply decide how he wants to qualify that by just tagging the post. But we decided lets go a step further and rather than simply tagging it, lets add weights to each tag - so as to differentiate between the relative importance of the tags and these weights could come into play when someone searches for tags. Simply put Tags+Importance = Wise Tags => "TagWise"

• There might be an element of risk that we have taken by enabling Indian languages, a lot of people who are outside India might think this is something for India only and then just stay away for this. But that was a choice we favoured for because, we really wanted "non-english-speaking" people to benefit from it. Of course this doesn't stop for someone in Bay Area to post ad for jobs for his new startup.

We didn't notice before that there are atleast dozens of "indian classifieds" sites and we don't find it necessary to compare again because most of the points of are discussed above.

In short this looks cool to us, but not to the guys who come here to see what it is? May be something we are missing. Really dont know what is that? Else we'd have fixed it already :-)

Bottomline still remains - People are not yet coming here as much as we'd like them to or may be I should just stop worrying about it and better finish up the stuff we are planning to add on 'TagWise' and 'Scratchpad' this weekend.

Back to work!!

paahijen - ScratchPad launched

Not sure, whether any of our users know (and there are not many of them) that there is a way to actually use text in paahijen-Tagwise anywhere in their blogs or emails or while scrapping. It is kind of a hack, that a seasoned user (we being seasoned due to testing TagWise several times on our laptop) knows. But we decided, thats not quite fair.. and so what if someone is not our user, (s)he should still be able to write in english, get output in their language and post it anywhere they like.... We decided, lets fix this for once and for everyone and thus 'paahijen-ScratchPad' was conceived.

And thanks to Pilot (who still shies away from writing blog entries, hopefully since he can write in marathi now that can be fixed) we got it working rather quickly... and best of all.. ScratchPad is live now!!! Right now one can do stuff in 'मराठी', 'हिन्दी' and 'ગુજરાથી'. More languages are coming soon!

checkout - http://wwwpaahijen.com/scratchpad

And yes, just like TagWise, we might have made some obvious errors modelling users on our behavior, so there might be some issues.. Your feedback is most welcome!!!

We Are learning...

It's been little more than a week since 'paahijen TagWise' is up.. and like most of us who do webgiri for the first time, we are keen to check what the response looks like... The usual 'grep'ing and 'sed'ing and 'awk'ing in the access log...

Few things we learnt (which we should have learnt already after the first feedback..)
- Not a lot of users actually check the FAQs
- When users came to 'paahijen' tagwise for the first time, it wasn't quite clear what one is supposed to do with that.. (there were links like signup/signin etc. what do I sign up for? and not a single link to let someone to get started with posting ads.) now that is fixed as well.
- There were some obvious glitches in the way our contents were organized (thanks to legacy.. yes legacy for a one week old baby!)

So we thought about it and decided lets go and fix those things right away -
- Now the Front Page actually shows what 'TagWise' is about ('Free tag-wise advertisements in your language' - a nifty one liner to describe what the application does.)
- We also realized that we confused users a bit more than we should have by having multiple names to Ads - 'post'/'listings'. Now that is fixed and leaves very little confusion. It is "Ads" no more posts/listings.
- Our faq was in a mess (well that was what we thought FAQ should be and not really FAQ) Thats cleared a bit as well.
- We decided to add simple one line tips for users to help while posting stuff on 'TagWise'.

In short, we are learning lessons and yes we hit the first 100 unique IPs as well!! (does that mean much?)

Just before closing this post - I m really tired of asking pilot (Siddharth) to sign up to this blog and start writing.. because he's the one who does bulk of the work!! .... (ok! Atleast sign up!!)