We had a blast last week answering Q&A for about an hour during the first 37signals Live session. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thanks to all 1000+ people who stopped by to watch or participate.
Next Show: Wednesday, August 13 at 11:00am central time
We’re ready for the second show. Down the road we’re going to do more focused Q&As around specific topics, but we want to do another round of general Q&A this time. So please join us at http://www.37signals.com/live at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th. We’re going for the morning so more of Europe can join us. We’re excited to see you there!
37signals Live: New and improved
We got a lot of feedback during and after the last show. We’ve taken some of this feedback and made some improvements.
There were a few issues with the first show:
- Spammers cluttered the chat window.
- The chat flew by so fast that we missed a lot of questions.
- The chat itself was distracting.
We thought a lot about how to resolve these issues. We liked the spontaneity of real-time question asking via chat, but the spamming and general noise hurt that experience.
A lot of people suggested an option to pre-submit questions. We could even have digg-style voting to move questions up or down on the list. This sounded like a good solution on the surface, but if we just had a list of questions ahead of time it would kill the “live” part of 37signals Live. Questions in advance kill spontaneity. It kills the magic. We might as well just record the answers on video ahead of time and play the video later.
What you’ll see: Video & question submission
Here’s what the new on-air screen looks like:
Live video on the left. No more chat, but question submission on the right. Enter your name, location, and your question. A few of the questions we recently answered will be listed below.
What we’ll see: Review, approve (or reject), and answer
Behind the scenes we’ll see:
On the left we have the approved queue. On the right we have the incoming queue. As questions come in, someone else from 37signals (generally Matt) can approve, reject, or edit (fix misspellings, edit so it’s easier to read, etc.) the question. We can also ban the questioner if they’re just spamming. We’ll approve just about anything as long as it’s above the waist.
Once a question is approved it shoots over to the left side in big type so we can see it on a second screen positioned at the other side of the desk. After we answer a question on the left we just click it and it turns dark grey and moves to the bottom of the screen so it’s out of the way.
Excited to give it a go
We’re pumped to give the new system a go. We hope you’ll join us at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th at http://www.37signals.com/live.
Brett Sinn
on 12 Aug 08Is this a proprietary system or is this a third-party app? It looks great!
JF
on 12 Aug 08Brett: We built the question submission/review/approval system over a couple days. The video part is either from ustream or justin.tv (we’re not sure who we’re going to use this time).
Ben
on 12 Aug 08Do you guys have an archive of past session video? I missed the first one and would be interested in catching up.
Bill Litfin
on 12 Aug 08brilliantly simple interface… in fact, this harkens back to the 37Better projects… its 37Better UStream.
GeeIWonder
on 12 Aug 08Looks good!
It might be worthwhile to add some sort of forum for 3rd party discussion somewhere too though. I agree that there was way too many people making ‘clever’ comments and spamming, but in a live Q&A session, a lot of equally valuable stuff goes on for participants after the session, over e.g. the coffee break.
Joga Luce
on 12 Aug 08ditto @Ben
Abdul-Rahman Advany
on 12 Aug 08Jason,
Is the last live session available somewhere?
CCN
on 12 Aug 08Would you consider releasing this as a product? I could find 100 uses for this for my clients!
Ivan Stegic
on 12 Aug 08You guys just keep blowing my mind! Thanks for the candid nature of your show, your willingness to improve and also for the transparency. Common sense running a business: love to see it!
Dave Giunta
on 12 Aug 08This is awesome. Thanks for pulling back the curtain and showing off your process of solving these problems, smartly. Looking forward to tomorrow’s show.
JF
on 12 Aug 08For those asking about the previous show, we didn’t record it but I believe there may be some recordings floating around the web.
David McClain
on 12 Aug 08Wow guys! It looks like a great, elegant solution. Don’t ya just love Rails?! I might have to come down with a 24-hour stomach bug at around 11am tomorrow (central time)...I promise I’ll not be contagious!
Eric Anderson
on 12 Aug 08Found this one. The video is choppy but I just wanted to listen anyway. The video doesn’t add any value for me.
Eric Anderson
on 12 Aug 08Forgot the link:
http://weblog.martincrockett.com/developer/37signals-live-replay
condor
on 12 Aug 08thanks eric!
Joel
on 12 Aug 08Creating a solution for yourself like this then showing it off to everyone is a great marketing tactic, and from a couple comments above, it already seems like it’d be another viable product to add to the 37s portfolio. (I’ve got a client who is looking for a streaming video / live chat solution just like this too.)
Thanks for sharing the process, again.
Joel
on 12 Aug 08Also, I’d have to second Eric Anderson’s first comment above – the video didn’t really seem to add much to the live stream. Maybe even a more interesting background to start with? See you tomorrow!
someone
on 12 Aug 08It makes me sad that you choose to do these when people with a typical 9-5 routine are at work.
someone else
on 12 Aug 08@someone: It makes me sad that you’re a typical person with a 9-5 work routine
Amazing Rando
on 12 Aug 08What is the estimate on how long this session will be? One hour? Two hours? Thanks.
JF
on 12 Aug 08Rando: No more than 1 hour.
James Urquhart
on 12 Aug 08I thought the last Live session was great, but as you noted there were far too many spammers in the live chat. Not to mention the crashes.
Looks like you’ve got most of those problems ironed out for the next session, which is great. Though i think it would be great if you also added the ability for the viewer to directly see whether or not his particular questions have been answered or rejected.
In any case, i am looking forward to this next one!
Chuck
on 12 Aug 08Is there a plan to commercialize your tool for others to use with ustream or iJustin?
Quinn Weaver
on 12 Aug 08This is fantastic news. I really enjoyed the last show, especially the part about corporate form.
One constructive (I hope) criticism: I thought the last show ran too long. You answered a number of silly questions (“What kind of car do you drive,” “What’s in your hair,” et cetera). Next time, I’d embrace the 37signals ethos and keep it short and sweet.
JF says “no more than one hour,” which I guess may mean that you’re on it.
Jay
on 12 Aug 08You guys never addressed Bezos…
Mimo
on 12 Aug 08Looks great
Dylan
on 12 Aug 08It appears your link to timeanddate.com is different to the one at /live. I’m guessing the one on this page is wrong, because it says it starts in 1 minute (for me, in Sydney).
Mimo
on 13 Aug 08Just watching. Without the chat it somehow lost the magic. Beeing able to commenting live is a cool thing to do. Would be great if you would have the chat possibility too. But you don’t have to pick the questions from the chat.
Matt
on 13 Aug 08I would imagine that you could get a nice following with a podcast of some sort on iTunes. Have you thought about converting this ‘live’ broadcasts into a video podcast down the road?
Andrew
on 13 Aug 08Was it just me having problem? Or could everyone else see the actual questions from the Live page? I only saw the name and country part.
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Aug 08Can you guys upload this? I missed it! and the first session too!
Elliott Rosenthal
on 13 Aug 08As you noticed, if people want to chat…they will.
Maybe a seperate place for chat?
Mimo
on 13 Aug 08I later found out that there was a chat possibility. You had to click on the speak box and went directly to the justing.tv site, where you had a chat possibility.
Jacques Marneweck
on 13 Aug 08Thanks for sharing once again. Busy trying to get the audio file of the chat a bit more manageable before uploading (did not capture the video).
Ólafur Nielsen
on 13 Aug 08Can you please upload the video? :) I had some questions but I had to go to a meeting and missed almost all of the session!
Jacques Marneweck
on 13 Aug 08I’m busy uploading a mp3 of the audio of 37 Signals Live: Episode 2
Beth S.
on 13 Aug 08I’d like to thanks Jason and David for this event. It was great to hear what you guys had to say on a variety of topics.
I want to mention that I had a lot of problems with the video connection. It would often go into “Buffering…” mode, but instead of picking up where it left off, it would drop my connection and give a message of “Not currently broadcasting.” I would have to click the refresh button, but by the time it reloaded the program, although the reload didn’t take very long, it was as if is skipped ahead quite a bit, and you were already on the next question. I missed big chunks of the program as a result. This happened numerous times throughout the hour, probably more than 10 times.
I thought you guys would like to know about these issues, because I know this is only the second time you have done a video event like this. When it was working, the sound and video were great, but the dropped connections made it not as enjoyable as it could have been.
Richard H.
on 13 Aug 08Yeah, I couldn’t get the cast to work at all from work (UK based). I kept getting the same message as Beth about “Not Currently Broadcasting”.
Any clues as to when a recording will be available?
Jacques Marneweck
on 13 Aug 08@Richard H:
Go and download a copy of the audio from here.
ep
on 14 Aug 08Decor: +1, Audio/Video: -1, Content: -1 = overall experience -1
A detail that bothered me is not to see the questions of others which killed the openness of the session. It is also useful to see which questions you answer and which you don’t and get a feel of what users want to know. In that sense, session 1 was better except for the spammers and the kiddy comments.
It would be fair if your tool let everyone see all the questions and why not place a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on any of them. I guess you get a lot of similar questions.
I look forward to the next session and thanks for making these happen. Last suggestion: an iCal feed for the upcoming!
Grant Hutchins
on 14 Aug 08Check out http://backchan.nl which was used to great effect at ROFLcon.
Not sure if the interface would work well given the format, but there might be something along these lines that could work.
There is also https://sourceforge.net/projects/questionanswer/ which could possibly be integrated.
Either way, what you’ve come up with so far is pretty solid. I love the simplicity and the attention to the fact that different types of people will be using the interface.
Steffen Hiller
on 14 Aug 08I love this 37s live stuff!
But the last one lost besides some spammers also its live atmosphere.
So, here’s my idea to spice your live show up: ;-) Let people ask their question via their webcam. The viewer sees basically two videos/windows side-by-side, one with you guys and one with the questioner. (When David is in Sweden, it will be 3 windows though. ;-) ) Well, you just hit a key when you answered a question and the next questioner will show up. That’s what I call live!
More fun is guaranteed! (Just imagine when the spammers or anonymous cowards show up with their masks! lol) Actually, an approval system could work here, too. So someone else checks seconds before the next questioner is going live if its camera and sound is working, and if he has clothes on or wears a mask.
The question is what technology makes this possible. I’m thinking of services such as seesmic, oovoo or mebeam here, but not sure if you can do that with them.
Anyhow, I think that would just make 37signals Live a lot more lively!
Alison
on 14 Aug 08I’m curious – could you add the “digg-style voting to move questions up or down on the list” as part of the live session? I thought yesterday’s show was great, but like ep, I was wondering about the rest of the questions.
Also, as someone who does a lot of writing for websites and is constantly trying to impress on clients the importance of it, thanks to Jason for your answer to the copy writing question. If only more people thought like you…
Adam
on 15 Aug 08Missed the cast but intresested in the design of your approval process UI.
The name of people is in red just like reject and ban. Might be good to use blue to remove associations and keep the red buttons clearly as the only “dangerous” areas of the UI
This discussion is closed.