I am certain that Talk Digger would not be what it is without its users. In fact, I owe everything to them. They spread the word about Talk Digger everywhere. They also give their feedbacks about the service: what they like, but even more important: what they didn’t like and what they would like to be able to do with it.

When I sit back and check the evolution of Talk Digger, I am confronted to a reality: I didn’t really develop anything, my users had! This is a fantastic story that I will remember all my life.

The first version of Talk Digger was the implementation of an idea: a meta search-engine that compare results of linkback features of certain search engines. That’s it.

Then something wonderful happened: I started to talk with the new users and started to find how they were using it, how they saw its utility, how it could be and couldn’t be good at.

The evolution of Talk Digger by users:

1. The first post about Talk Digger.
2. The first thing that a user suggested for Talk Digger was a Bookmarklet. The idea was great: users were able to know who was linking to a webpage in a single click, on any web browser.
3. Following this, a hardcore and now evangelist of Talk Digger over LiveJournal called Ivan A. Illyn told me how he was seeing Talk Digger: a way to find, follow and join conversations evolving around a specific URL. Talk Digger was born.
4. One day I was talking with Anouar El Haji over Skype, and then the idea of broadcasting the results of Talk Digger using RSS was born.

The version 1.0 was complete and working. I done many mistakes with that version, the service matured and I wanted to reflect that maturation by a totally new user interface and functionalities.

Then the version 2.0 was born. I thought about the new user interface, the new design, and the new and improved architecture. Then users come up with some more ideas:

1. I sent a pre-release for testing to a couple of old Talk Digger users and Tom Sherman came up with some ideas including the Page Rank feature.
2. Jeff Nolan suggested creating an option to exclude results with the searched domain name.
3. Bora Ung came up with a new slogan: “You Talk, we Dig!”.
4. Recently, David Jones suggested creating a feature to be able to see where the article came from: then the regional view option saw the day.

All these incredible ideas came from Talk Digger users. The only thing I have done is to read what they had so say, to ask them questions and to develop them. It was by blogging, skype, email, or phone.

Finally, hundred of users spread the word about Talk Digger everywhere on the Internet.

So, what do you think that Talk Digger would be without its users? The answer is simple: nothing. Talk Digger would not be anything without you, the users. I can’t thank you enough for that. In fact, since the new version of Talk Digger, the number of unique users per day doubled. This result has only been possible with my interaction with Talk Digger users. It is something that I will remember all my life in my professional career.

Technorati: Talkdigger | users | cooperation | business | development | team | communication | sharing | ideas
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