When purely positive feedback isn't always good...

Yes, this is about the Smashwords Tools again with an update.

Over Christmas, the tools went into open beta. The feedback on the tools has so far been either dead silence or positive (I'm ignoring the website, since it's a glorified link collection right now).

While we don't track useage in anyway, our bandwidth stats do show us when someone is using the tools. We have significantly more users than we've had feedback - including a few using multiple copies, so I think that means they are happy with it (?). The same just happened with the alpha we made available two days ago.

The problem is that without feedback we don't know whether to continue development, what direction to take the tools in, whether to create generators or if people are happy with them as they are.

Please, if you are using these, let us know. Even if it's "I've been using this for six weeks without problems" or "I can't make it work for my account." Sure, tell your friends, but please also tell us. What we don't know, we can't fix.

(And if you're waiting for the production version, we can't take the tools out of beta until we've had feedback. That would be irresponsible.)

One very good piece of feedback however came from our error log: without going into details the system fails very safe - unexpected in a beta version.

Embeddable stores
The embeddable version of the mini-site is now available in alpha. This means if you use it live, tell us so we don't start developing on that version!

A demo

Areas which we really need feedback on include: third party links, author data, the myspace link (none of us have profiles to check it works), general useability etc. It's good from about 350px to 650px so it should embed cleanly in most blogs. It's packaged here as an iframe.

Here's the link to find the code:

- http://www.raggedangel.net/smashwords-tools/booksite/index.php

Future plans:
Depends on feedback, literally. Our java coder is stalled because until we know if these are useful there's no point in rolling out an AWT applet. We are wondering about amending the generators to have the "About this widget" link to get more feedback.

If the widgets are useful, then we'll probably wrap them in an "addThis" wrapper to make them easily shareable.

Other projects
Now I'm back to looking at another project, which would be a manually-curated e-book directory, and checking on the Project Wonderful Network Ad I'm trying out.