CoveritLive listens to users, improves usability
Written on September 11, 2008 – 2:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A company that really seems to get how to handle user feedback is Canada-based CoveritLive. This start-up provides web publishers with a liveblogging widget. The last couple of months, their user-base and reach has been growing, partly thanks to the Olympics and the American political conventions. During such large events, several bloggers and journalists have kept their readers up to date with short Twitter-like messages in a completely customizable frame.
Your will is their command?
Some publishers had some problems though, which they shared via the Get Satisfaction-based support center. Gawker Media, known for e.g. Valleywag, asked for a picture ‘zoom’ feature when there is a larger or higher resolution picture available (paparazzi pics probably). Liverpool Daily Post, liveblogging the production of their newspaper, wanted pictures to be shown in the body of the live blog instead of a popup window. Well, they both got what they asked for.
Private messages
There were also some complaints buzzing around in the blogosphere about private messaging options and allowing other people to update. CoveritLive made a first attempt in fixing this by offering a private backchannel messaging for publishers and their co-publishers. That will save livebloggers a lot of email traffic during conferences and happenings like that.
Solid 2.0 company
I’m not surprised by the growth of CoveritLive, which had 1.6 million unique viewers, 5.5 million pageviews, and 40 million minutes of readership in the past 30 days. As you might have noticed this is not the first positive post I’ve written about the liveblog tool. They’re just a great example of a solid 2.0 company which bridges gaps between the new and old world AND listens to its customers. At least, that’s what I assume. Or do they only listen to top dogs like Gawker?
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