doing this kind of collaboration with Stuff. We actually said several times,
“Maybe Stuff should just be our product?” And we agreed, “That’s too simple,
that is too trivial.” And also we didn’t have the resources for two products. So
that went on for a long time, and it was in July, I guess, when we finally launched
Pyra, the app, and that actually got a pretty good, if limited, reception.
People started using Pyra and it was in evolving it that I came up with the
justification for why to do Blogger. That was based on the idea that we were
trying to solve a really, really big problem, which is organizing people’s information
of all types. We said, “That is too big a problem to start with, so we should
focus it.” We decided to focus it on people who were building websites, as a
place for them to collaborate. Then we thought up this architecture where
there would be little mini-apps, and Blogger would be one of those. So, with
that justification (Meg was actually on vacation for a week), Paul and I built
Blogger and launched it while she was gone. Which was a terrible thing to do,
but ultimately a good thing to do—but not a cool thing to do.
Its functionality was really dead simple at first, but it did what we needed it
to do and we already had the script. We thought it would take a couple days—it
turned out to take a week, but we just launched it, while Meg was gone. She
was pissed, of course, rightfully. We launched a whole product, and she’s the
cofounder of the company. But we talked her into thinking that it made sense.
“It will be this little thing that won’t take any effort. We just push it out the door
and it will attract people to our real thing and we can go back to our real thing.”
Livingston: Did it catch on quickly?
Williams: It caught on a lot more than we expected. It was really designed to
appeal to web geeks. It wasn’t a mass consumer product. It was, “If you’re a
web geek like us, you might find this interesting.” It’s good to appeal to the
alpha geeks sometimes. I thought it would be pretty cool if 1,000 people used
Blogger. It didn’t explode at first because it was fairly technical. You had to have
a website and you had to know what FTP was. You had to know a bunch of stuff,
but things that you would know if you were a web geek. We put it out there and
people started using it and the existing weblogs started pointing to it. Like
Peter Merholz (he is credited with coining the term blog), who pointed to it. It
started getting traction and a lot of people who were like the “cool kids” were

Похожие записи:

• are doing it
• doing this kind