Keeping an Eye on Me

I currently use FeedDemon to read/keep up with blogs. It's a good reader that does the job for me since I am bouncing between machines, locations, etc.

I like this feature:

This pops up, from time to time, we I am seriously behind in reading things.  As I showed this screen clip and explained what it meant/did to various people, I asked for an opinion of why they thought the company put the feature into the product.  I got many different answers ranging from friendly software to 'cute' to perhaps a software limitation of unread items.  All interesting but missing what, in my opinion, was a better (potential) reason.

It makes the app sticky.

Think about that for a second.  By putting this feature into the service, it can potentially prevent me from getting frustrated via the overwhelming inbound amount of reading to do which might cause me to throw up my hands, uninstall it and try something else, etc, etc.  It is rudimentary, yes, but the app is free.  Companies like AideRSS goes after attention and flood of information problem from a different angle, for example.

The lesson/question for you is: How do you make sure your customers 'stick' around.  Lots of interesting/friendly/fun ways to do it.

Comments

[Nick Bradbury]

My main goal really was to help ease the overwhelm people experience once they subscribe to a lot of feeds, but you're right that the "Panic Button" makes FeedDemon sticky, especially since no other feed reader has this feature (yet).

Anything a developer can do to take away frustration will keep customers from switching to another product - and it's even better when the customer *knows* that the product is making an effort to take away their frustration.

[Farhan Thawar]

One of the reason I use Google Reader is that it automatically marks articles over 30 days old as read (ones you don't star). Can't customize like FeedDemon, but a nice feature nonetheless.

[PGuy]

I had the *exact* same problem...with only slightly less unread items.

I use Google Reader, which I like because its widget is integrated into my custom homepage, for which I have both personal and business tabs.

Sadly, Google Reader doesn't have the panic button feature. But I like the interface, and don't want to port all my feeds elsewhere or starred items (sticky).

So I created two effective "tiers" of blogs. I tagged all the "less important/interesting/relevant" ones and they no longer appear in my Google Reader views on the homepage tabs.

I breathe easy and am all caught up on the core reading!

I also do this with emails in gmail, creating a nice label for everything in that gray area between spam and marginally important email notifications (e.g. facebook notifications) that I can read when I'm mindnumbingly bored.

You will be pleased to know, your blog is in the "important" tier.