Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Visit Atiki, originally added to eHub on Oct 11, 05.

eHub Interviews Atiki

Thanks to Pierre Stanislas, creator of Atiki for this email interview posted October 24, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Atiki: Atiki is a personalised prospective search tool: you chose keywords you are interested in, our service continuously scans feeds from around the web (websites and blogs) and sends you the results either via e-mail or to a personalised RSS feed (so you don’t need to subscribe to multiple ones). In order to organise your search, you can also group several keywords under the same tag. You are free to share you personalised RSS feed with others.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Atiki: I realised that more and more people find it difficult to keep up to date on
information for 3 main reasons:
1) it’s impossible to manage / read more than 25 RSS feeds in a day
2) you often waste some time on reading posts that are not related to your areas of interest
3) until now, you only had a bunch of tools that monitor billions of feeds without actually going “straight to the point”, plus these tools don’t have the cool tag feature mentioned above :)

Atiki was designed to address these issues: it saves time and improves productivity. You get the news you’re really interested in, and you don’t have to manage a huge list of RSS feeds because Atiki does it for you (how lucky you are!).

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

Atiki: I do have a day job, so Atiki takes a lot of my personal time… But it’s worth it… I hope ?

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Atiki: For the moment I am the only one working on this. Some friends of mine also give me useful advice from time to time. My background: I graduated from a French engineering school 3 years ago.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Atiki: Well… as you may have noticed I’m not so good at this. I try to keep it simple and fast, that’s all.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Atiki: PHP + MySQL + PERL + XML

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Atiki: Basically, users “want some more” ! (shouldn’t have seen this Oliver Twist movie yesterday). Seriously a feature that was most requested at the beginning was the ability to see the results in a RSS feed. Now that’s done, I guess improving search relevance is the second most requested feature. People who have some ideas to submit can always do it via Atiki’s blog (http://www.atiki.com/blog/?p=63)

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Atiki: Mainly western Europe + US. I also start to have a few visitors from Asia now…

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

Atiki: What would make me happy is that people find Atiki useful and actually use it on a daily basis. It might take 6 months, or even 2 years…

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Atiki: Time management.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Atiki: User feedback.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

Atiki: A business model ? Not really. The idea is to listen to users, build something they like. Then maybe I’ll have a business model.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Atiki: Atiki has currently a few thousand users.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Atiki: That I got interviewed by Emily Chang. Hey mum, I’m on eHub!

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Atiki: Incredible. Amazing. At last, the web is connecting people, not only web pages. Each time I discover a new web app I feel like a 10 year old kid, that’s refreshing !

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Atiki: Netvibes, del.icio.us, Ning

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Atiki: Just enough :)

Thanks to Pierre Stanislas, creator of Atiki for this email interview posted October 24, 2005.

Visit Atiki
Originally added to eHub on Oct 11, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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