When I said rash, that was being unfair to myself: both decisions were made after many weeks of deliberation.
Kinda forgot about my “On Web Design” “series” …part one.
The reason SWIM was so delayed was because a lot of deliberate decisions were made, then iteratively re-made; code written and rewritten and yet to be rewritten some more…what has actually been released as version 1.0 (now a 1.01 emergency bug-fix release) is actually the fifth version…the version that still runs this web site is a combination of the second and third.
A minor observation I’ve made is that the cool kids (i.e. flickr, del.icio.us, basecamp, etc.) just put out the good goods first/fast/etc.
So if it is the experience that makes the difference*, why are the most popular social software service and most popular blogging software both crappy user experiences?
Suddenly I’m still not in the mood to make any conclusions. More later…