We believe that ReadBoard is the fastest way to start conversations on web articles with people you know. If you have ReadBoard Chrome Extension installed, all you need to do is…

1. Select a passage from a web article and click “CONVERSE”.
2. Write your comment.
3. Invite people by their ReadBoard usernames or emails.
4. Click START.

That’s it! All invitees will receive an email to join the conversation started by you on ReadBoard.io.

But is this fast enough? Can we make it faster?

If you notice above GIF closely, I am inviting multiple people to the conversation. Typically I have to type ReadBoard usernames or emails of all the people I want to invite. Now if you are like me, you generally have conversations with a few select people (your team or close friends) and still every time you will have to do this. This is tedious and we decided to solve it.

Introducing ReadBoard Groups — The easiest way to start conversations with multiple people at once on web articles.

With ReadBoard Groups, you make a group of people you commonly have conversations with and loop them all in at once by just typing the @(Group Name) in comment. Here is how it works.

Notice that this time in the comment, I just typed @Designers instead of individual usernames. I invited 8 awesome designers of Digicorp to the conversation with just @Designers. Isn’t this awesome?

Naturally, we are very excited about ReadBoard Groups. We believe it is yet another step in making conversations more meaningful on web articles.

But what do YOU think? In the end, that’s the only thing that matters!

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

Even Faster Conversations on Web Articles was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Conversation (noun)
a talk, especially an informal one, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged.

Well, I am so glad that we have designed ReadBoard exactly for this.

To exchange news and ideas informally between two or more people on web articles.

And slowly but steadily, we are adding more and more ways to do that. Today, taking another step forward, we released “INVITE THEM TO READBOARD” feature.

We believe conversations are fun with people you know and admire i.e. with friends, family, and colleagues. So why don’t you go ahead and invite them for fun (and yet intellectual) conversations on ReadBoard, today.

As soon you login to ReadBoard, you will see INVITE THEM TO READBOARD card. Just click on it.

You can invite people by email or using your Google contacts as of now.

Rest assured, we will never ever SPAM your contacts. If they don’t respond to your invitation in a few days, we may send a reminder or two but nothing more than that.

That’s it. So go ahead and start having fun! :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

Meaning of Conversation was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start conversations on web articles with people you know. It makes you wonder, how did you live without it so far! :) (OK, OK bragging is over.)

But these conversations were by default public. That means, everyone on ReadBoard.io can view those conversations and join if they want to.

But what if you want to discuss something in private with your colleagues or start a secretive conversation with a friend on web articles?

Well, you can do that now with ReadBoard. :)

Download latest ReadBoard Chrome Extension for that. If you already have one, just make sure it is of version 1.0.14 or more.

And this is how it works!

Private Conversations have a little red border on top on ReadBoard.io. No one but you and invited people can see them.

On article page, you see a red icon indicating a private conversation. You cannot share a private conversation on social media.

ReadBoard is making the Web a better place to converse, one feature at a time.

Are you on-board yet?

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

Introducing Private Conversations on Web Articles was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a second post, where I try to find out if I have good enough reasons to build ReadBoard. The first one is here.

So again, let me start with this awesome TED Talk, which taught me,

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

In the first post, I explained that I was tired of losing my conversations on web articles because they all were using different commenting systems (like Disqus, Facebook Comments, Livefyre, etc.). My conversations were scattered and hard to recall. These are public conversations with other web users.

Another kind of conversations I was losing were the private conversations on web articles with my colleagues over email. For e.g. I share a lot of interesting web links with our awesome design and development teams. I am sure many product managers, developers and designers do that.

Now in many cases, I need my team members to focus on specific passage of a web article and express their opinions. So I copy paste the passage in email along with a link and share with team members. This process is slightly cumbersome.

But more than that, it is very difficult to keep track of such conversations after a while. They get lost in emails with other noise. And again they become hard to recall.

So we decided to create a product, which has facility to initiate private conversations with group of people on any web article (or part of it) in a dead simple way.

Do you see yourself using ReadBoard for this particular feature?

Let me know :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I learned from this awesome TED Talk that “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

So let me share, why I decided to create ReadBoard. :)

Because I was tired of losing my conversations with people.

I noticed that every other website used different commenting systems.

There is Disqus and there is Facebook Comments and Wordpress Comments and Livefyre and IntenseDebate and what not? All of them pretty good in their own ways. No complains there.

But hey, where the hell are my conversations, which I started on these systems in last 5 years? Simply LOST?

So one day I decided enough is enough and started building ReadBoard to solve that problem. And today, it is up and running solving more problems than I imagined for a lot of people! :)

But is it a good enough reason to build a product?

Let me know :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

Finding good enough reason to build a product… was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a plethora of content discovery platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, Revconent, and Colombia to name a few.

Their promise to publishers (like slate.com, fortune.com, etc.) is to make them extra money by publishing ads on their websites (generally at the end of every article). And their promise to advertisers (car, insurance companies, etc.) is to reach wider audience with as few bucks as possible.

It’s a great value proposition. Nothing wrong with the business model. The only issue is, it is race to the bottom.

Let’s see how it works.

Advertisers upload the ads in form of content to these platforms. Ads go through a review process and once approved they start showing up on various publisher websites.

And now let’s see what comes out of the funnel.

Slate.com

Fortune.com

ComputerWorld

Don’t remember publisher site of following.

Chicago Tribune

Most ads I see from these content discovery platforms are either link baits, racist or semi-porn. I am sure you see the same everywhere.

So my questions to publishers are:

Are you so desparate to earn those few extra bucks?

Don’t you care about your reputation at all?

Aren’t there better ways to push relevant content on your sites?

And above all,

Where does this lead you?

These platforms are going to push worse ads tomorrow than today as the effectiveness of today’s ads decreases. This is purely a race to the bottom even for the advertisers. Good luck winning that race!

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

ReadBoard is the fastest way to start a conversation on any web article with your colleagues, friends and family.

Content discovery platforms and race to the bottom was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finally, the day has come.

The day to shed all fears of having the right product with all the right features, with a perfect user onboarding process, with a grand marketing plan and a launch strategy. Because that day is never going to come.

A wise guy once said,

We believe him because, LinkedIn is still not a perfect product and yet it is solving problems worth USD 26B! (Awesome job Reid Hoffman. Respect.)

And that’s why we have made ReadBoard open for all after being in private beta for about 6 months.

YES, ReadBoard is alive and kicking! :)

It is not complete (will it ever be?), not perfect (again!), not extraordinary (well, it will be one day) but still it solves a few problems.

It brings the power of conversations in your hand. Yes, YOU the reader. Where would all the writers of the Web be if there were no readers and conversations around their writing?

As Paul Graham said,

“The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do — in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.”

The readers of the Web have a brand new platform to respond and converse now i.e. ReadBoard.

You are no longer at the mercy of bullying online commenting modules; you don’t have to comment at the end of the articles only; you don’t have to share the articles separately in emails, Facebook or Twitter to know opinions of a few people you care; You don’t have to lose the context of conversations; In fact you don’t have to lose your conversations at all in Emails and Social Media!

You can now start a conversation on any passage of the article with people you know without leaving the article. You are never going to lose your conversations and their context again.

ReadBoard’s vision is to build the largest community of like-minded readers and thinkers on the Web. And, today we have taken a first step. However incomplete, it is a step towards the right direction.

I am NOT happy with the first version. There is a lot to do and I know we have done some stupid mistakes, but that is a topic of another story.

And in any case we are here to make a dent in the universe. We are not here to f**king own it!

Thanks DHH :)

I would really appreciate if you can check out ReadBoard.io and give me your feedback to make it more valuable and less embarrassing! :)

You can give it in the comments section here, email me (a@readboard.io) or use the inbuilt feedback module of ReadBoard.

Thank you so much for reading.

If you like the article, please “heart it” so that it reaches more people. It means a lot to me.

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

Since 2004, Digicorp is helping startups build meaningful and usable software products.

The embarrassing first version launch was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well, this is still the easiest and recommended approach to start a conversation on the Web. But it is not the only way anymore.

Now, you can start a conversation on any web article by simply copy pasting the URL.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to ReadBoard.io and login with your existing account.
2. Click on the big round “+” button (bottom right).
3. Paste the URL you want to start a conversation on. ReadBoard will show you the clean (ad free and much more readable) version of the article.
4. Select any passage from the article and click on the small ReadBoard icon to start a conversation.
5. That’s it!

Here is how it looks.

Many of you could not install the Chrome extension because either it was not allowed in your organization or you were simply using Firefox as your default browser. Now all of you can start meaningful conversations on ReadBoard with the people you know or other ReadBoard users.

Hope you like this small but useful addition to ReadBoard. If you have any more awesome ideas like this one, simply reply to this email.

PS: ReadBoard has more than 600 private beta users now. Thank you so much. Here is a link for medium users to directly sign up if you haven’t had a chance to do that yet.

www.readboard.io/signup/medium

Happy conversations!

UPDATE: ReadBoard is open for all since mid-July 2016 and becoming more awesome everyday because of users like you. Thanks. :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

Since 2004, Digicorp is helping startups build meaningful and usable software products.

Yet another way to start conversations was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

become the best place to find the most interesting conversations on the Web.

To achieve this, we constantly have to innovate and make conversations more meaningful on ReadBoard.

So last week, apart from tweaking the UI a bit, we also added few small but useful features to ReadBoard. They make ReadBoard even more enjoyable to use.

Here is a quick preview of those features.

1. People in the conversation

Many a times, there are multiple conversations happening on an article with the help of threaded comments. But no commenting product gives you an idea that how many people are involved in those conversations at a higher level.

With ReadBoard, it is possible now. You can start multiple conversations on an article using ReadBoard’s Chrome Extension. Each conversation is in the form of a “Snippet”. And now, each snippet shows you how many people are involved in a that conversation.

2. Bookmark the conversation

Many a times, you get invited to a conversation on ReadBoard but you may not have time to participate at that moment. And sometimes, you just want to save the snippet to read it later.

Well, you can do that now with the help of a nifty “Bookmark” feature. Check for the small bookmark icon at the bottom of every snippet. You can read these bookmarked snippets later from your Profile -> Conversations.

3. Share it on Facebook, Twitter and Google

Nothing much to explain here. You can share the snippet on social media channels now and ask your friends over there to join the conversation on ReadBoard.

4. Report Abuse

So far content shared on ReadBoard has been very clean because it is still in private beta. But it may no longer be the case once we go public (yes, in a few weeks :O ). So now you can report abuse for the snippets or comments, which are offensive or written in a bad taste. We will do our best to take immediate actions.

5. Edit / Delete own comments

Better late than never. You can edit your own comments or delete them if required.

I hope you will enjoy ReadBoard even more because of these little additions. Kudos to the ReadBoard design and development team for making this happen.

ReadBoard is still in private beta. Medium users, click following link to directly sign up (jump the waiting queue).

ReadBoard - Change the way you converse on the web

UPDATE: ReadBoard is open for all since mid-July 2016 and becoming more awesome everyday because of people like you. Thanks. :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

Since 2004, Digicorp is helping startups build meaningful and usable software products.

People, Bookmark, Share, Report, Edit :) was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I came across an interesting question on Quora today.

Online Commenting: Why do both Disqus and Livefyre suck so bad?

I used to think Disqus was good but the # of sites with failed implementations of their service grows by the day. Similarly, if a premier tech blog, Techcrunch, can’t even implement Livefyre given several months of catastrophic bugs, clearly there is a problem.

Because the “customer is always right”, the blame has to rest solely on Disqus/Livefryre, right?

It took me a while to write an answer but I think it is an interesting perspective. So here is what I think and I answered.

Both Disqus and Livefyre grew organically and replaced traditional online commenting systems by offering better service, community, spam control, etc.

Livefyre has many more offerings now and they call themselves “the engagement platform”. Disqus calls itself a “global commenting system” and it is pretty good too.

But unfortunately there won’t ever be a day when all websites on the Internet will have Disqus or Livefyre installed. The market of online commenting will always be fragmented as it is in the hands of website owners whether to install certain commenting system or not. Thus all your conversations (as readers) on different websites will always remain scattered across Disqus, Livefyre, Facebook, Wordpress, Email, etc.

Now what if we give the power of owning a conversation in the hands of readers instead of website owners? Because at the end of the day readers started it, right?

And when I say “owning a conversation”, that means…

1. I, as a reader, will decide on which part of the article I want to start a conversation and with whom.
2. I, as a reader, want all my conversations at one place.
3. I, as a reader, want to know what others are discussing on the same article.

With this new powerful perspective, we are creating ReadBoard.

ReadBoard’s browser extension allows you start a conversation on any part of the article with people you know. You don’t have to rely on a commenting system of that article to initiate or join a conversation.

ReadBoard brings the power of conversations in the hands of readers.

ReadBoard is still in private beta but if this thinking intrigues you, here is a special link to sign up for all Medium users.

ReadBoard — Change the way you converse on the web

Following video (< 4 mins) explains What is ReadBoard and Why we created it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xPLhARgM90

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this. You can help me build a better product or stop me from making a product, which nobody wants!

UPDATE: ReadBoard is open for all since mid-July 2016 and becoming more awesome everyday because of people like you. Thanks :)

I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp and product manager of ReadBoard and BA Apps.

Since 2004, Digicorp is helping startups build meaningful and usable software products.

Online Commenting: Why do both Disqus and Livefyre suck so bad? was originally published in ReadBoard Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.