Sometimes you just slap your head because a very hard problem has such a simple answer.

If you use Digg, you're well aware how painful it is to delete your incoming shouts if you have a large number of friends. And of course, if you're serious about promoting anything on Digg, you'll have a lot of friends. After a week of vacation over the 4th of July, I recently came back to 50 pages of incoming shouts. That's a lot of clicking on the delete button and the "Are You Sure you want to delete this shout?" dialog that Digg so graciously offers.

PMS Social Suite Clears out your Digg Shouts Easy as Pie

If you're a user of our PMS Social Suite you're already aware of how easy it is to clear out your shout queue. Just use the "Manage Shouts" tab to dispose of everything. Click a button, go out for coffee, and when you come back you've cleared out everything in your queue and Dugg everything your friends have sent you.

Except that something broke last week. Digg evidently made a change that invalidates the Imacro "ONDIALOG" command, so the script was getting the "Are you sure?" dialog and waiting for the user to click Ok to delete each shout. Not much fun. Debugging from the Imacro side seems to be impossible. I even tried tricking Digg into thinking that our Imacro script had just sent the Ajax code to delete the shout. Nothing seemed to work.

Forehead Slap

The answer is really easy. All we really needed was a Greasemonkey script that would tell Digg that the confirm button had already been clicked. The script is only 1 line long. It's a little tricky because we have to tell Greasemonkey to run the script in the context of the page and not the browser since if we run it in the browser context we can't overload the "confirm" function the way we want to.

If you don't have Greasemonkey installed, drop everything and go install it right now. Have you been living under a rock or something?

So here's a gift to the Digg Community: The PMS Digg Confirm Ignore Script. Just click the link and Greasemonkey will install the script for you. If you're a PMS Social Suite User, your "Manage Shouts" scripts will now fly through all 50 pages of your backlog. And if you're not using our tool, you can avoid having to click twice for every shout that you want to delete.

I'd like to thank everyone for their testing on the Social Suite with Digg Analytics and Automation. It was, well, interesting. I've done a lot of beta testing inside client sites but haven't really released a program into the wild since before the internet. (Remember FidoNet and shareware distribution? Yikes!)

At the end of the day we decided that it was usable enough to replace the old Digg Friend Finder. Which, given the number of daily users, was a pretty uncomfortable and tricky decision. However, the actual traffic on the free version of the Social Suite has gone up from the old Digg Friend Finder, so mission accomplished there.

Mainly, however, it was quite a learning experience for us in how people use automation software when it's not part of a larger corporate sponsored project.   We clearly recognized that individual or small company buyers had different price and function points, but the variable cost of time and overhead is so much less accounted for in smaller firms that a lot of our positioning was probably not necessary.  Fascinating. 

Social Suite Beta Test Pre-Natal Expectations

I was expecting a LOT of criticism for the UI. I quite like it and it has a lot of technical advantages from our standpoint, but it is not the typical UI.

Not one word.

I was also expecting people to balk at installing iMacros (especially since you have to install the previous version because of bugs in the new release) and running the Suite in its own Firefox window.

Not one word.

I thought there were too many columns of numbers in the Find Friends panel for people to really wade though them. It turns out people ignore the numbers they don't understand or think are unimportant. Fascinating.

We got a lot of good feedback about our documentation and how to help reduce the complexity of what the suite can do. Over the next week or so I'll be publishing some articles to help people use both the free and premium versions of the software.

Beta Test Post-Mortem

This is going to sound strange, but our take homes were:

1. Our target market uses paypal rather than Amex. We were startled.
2. People want videos rather than user manuals. I guess it's the YouTube phenom coming home to roost. I actually find it easier to write a manual. (Yes, I own a typewriter, why do you ask?)
3. We were right to go with value based pricing and to aim for "professional diggers."

Value Based Pricing

There are (broadly) two ways to price anything: cost or value. Walmart prices own-brand cornflakes a price+markup. Apple prices everything at value. The difference differentiates your market.

So when we decided to price the first version of the social suite we tried to balance off users, user time/value, revenue, support costs/expectations, server load, investment timeline, etc. We put a stopwatch on a lot of in-house testing, spoke to the alpha users extensively about the value proposition, and did some magnificent fiddling on a whiteboard.

And came up with a buck an hour.

If you value your time at more than a buck and hour and use digg to drive revenue, then you should be paying us to use the social suite. And our beta testers, as they converted to paying customers, confirmed this observation.

Why Not Charge More?

If you look around, there aren't that many SEO tools that successfully charge an admissions fee. So our goal was to establish a precedent and, as we add value and reduce time/cost we will raise our prices.

If You Missed the Beta

Look, if you were taking a nap under a lilly pad or something, just go to our contact us page and drop us a line and we'll help you out.