It's been just over a week since http://start.com/1 was discovered and the feedback has been fantastic.  We've been responding to a ton of your email (apologies for those who haven't received a response yet) and are working "like hamsters", as my old boss put it, to roll out new features as fast as we can.  Our goal is to get you guys included in the development process as much as possible as we'll be making changes directly based on your feedback.  We're a very small team (2-3 people) consisting mainly of developers, so you won't have to go very far to find someone who's interested in your feedback and will probably be the one actually writing the code for it.   Sound good?  ok let's go.

You guys have been asking for a ton of things, and some of the common themes are: Firefox support, OPML import support, being able to view more headlines on each feed, roaming the page to multiple computers, and getting status on the number of unread posts.  We're also hearing that you guys *love* the fact that this thing is clean, snappy and responsive and, well, we love all those things too! 

Some of you have been asking just what the heck it is we're building here.  Here's what I told Mike Torres, a buddy of mine on the Spaces team who asked that very same question:

"We want the page to be as simple or as full as you want.  If you want a minimal experience with only a search box, you can have that.  If you want a kick-ass RSS aggregator, you can have that as well.  If you want to throw stocks, weather and sports scores into the mix, well heck, you can have that too.  What we are building will appeal to *every* web user, minimal for Google fanatics, a deep news source for news junkies, etc.  And at the same time we won't do the things that drive people away.  We've got a ton of ideas that we just can't wait to prototype, so stay tuned and keep the great feedback coming.  We are definitely listening."

As soon as I finish this post I'll be digging in my heels for the afternoon and working on OPML import support and increasing the number of headlines per feed.  Hey, what are rainy Sunday afternoons for?

Here are some of the improvements we've made since we were "discovered" a week and a half ago:

Start.com/1

• Full Firefox support
• Migrated from cookie-based solution to back-end store for feeds and preferences
• Removed the restriction on the number of feeds that can be added
• Added ability to delete items from My Feeds and Recent Searches
• Title of module is now hyperlinked (oops) and also gets updated if the title in the RSS feed is different
• Show search history in correct order
• Lots of fit and finish and minor cosmetic changes

Start.com/2

• Fixed a few problems with the ActiveX control that were causing boomarks not to be imported (there are still a couple of issues affecting some users)
• Added OPML import support
• Increased performance when fetching from server by making more async calls

We've been focusing a lot of our attention on making improvements to start.com/1 based on your feedback.  We're also working on the next iteration, soon to be released at start.com/3 so stay tuned for that.

See what folks are saying:

http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http://start.com/1/

http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=%22start.%2Bcom/1%22

[Update]: http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.start.com

Disclaimer: Everything here is solely my personal opinion and is not read or approved by anyone (except me) before it is posted. This blog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.