buffington

I just posted about how Stikkit has been nominated for a SXSW Award in the Technical Achievement category. This is obviously great news, and I spent most of yesterday grinning about it. We've been so busy and deep into some really technical stuff - it's great having that announcement hit around the same time as two other big announcments:

We launched our Stikkit API yesterday (you should read Rael's announcement post - very good insight into our philosphies).

Merlin Mann announced that he's joined the Values of n advisory board.

Regarding the SXSW Awards, the People's Choice voting application went live today, so you're able to go in and cast your votes for who you think should be the winner. Start voting! For Stikkit!

### Update
[We won!](http://www.valuesofn.com/blog/2007/03/stikkit-won-sxsw-award.html)

I'm back from the Web 2.0 conference where we launched Stikkit, and the response has been fantastic. We're already getting a ton of great feedback from people using the product, and we're realizing that a lot our instincts were correct. It's reassuring to have so many people acknowledge that the world needs Stikkit. And where we have people saying they don't get it, we realize that we haven't done our job in making it clear in a lot of cases.

So in addition to solving that problem, we're fixing bugs, optimizing queries, and generally working hard at tuning what we've built for the past several months.

Talking to Anil at the conference, I realize something now that I only sort of had at the back of mind before. He described how he just got back from watching the NYC Marathon, and how gruelling it can be just to arrive at the starting line. You need to fly there, take taxis, ferries, subways, then register, warm up, and finally start running. He said "You've just now arrived at the starting line, and your marathon has just begun."

And there's no doubt he's right. I see much more clearly now that we've launched that a lot of attention has to be paid to pacing ourselves, and making sure we're tapping into the collective intelligence of our rapidly growing user base. Some of those little things we put off prior to the launch are now beginning to take center stage, and we're spending good quality time getting things right.

This period of a web app's life cycle is my favorite. It's where theories about what will work get proven or disproven, and it's where significant clarity about how people perceive the product starts to occur. And it's a chance to show that we care about the people using our product by making incremental improvements, and encouraging criticism and feedback.

I'm thrilled to be running in this marathon, and I'm happy that so many people are cheering us on.

A sneak peek of Dan Cederholm's fantastic design work for Stikkit is now up and online, but more importantly (for Stikkit) is that we're pulling back the covers just slightly and describing with a bit more detail about what we're doing.