This post was published back in 2008. It may not function as originally intended or may be missing images.
Read It Later Wins Mozilla's Extend Firefox Competition
On August 2nd 2007, just over a year ago, I walked through a little tutorial on how to make a Firefox Extension. It was that night I started working on an idea of mine, Read It Later.
I 'released' Read It Later a few days later on the 6th. I say 'released' because all I did was send it to a few friends and put an entry for it on my website, which was getting about 6 hits a day.
I had never expected Read It Later to reach even 1/4 of what it has. It was created to help me keep track of articles that I wanted to read but couldn't while I was at work. However, during fall of last year, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and DownloadSquad picked up on the add-on.
Since then Read It Later's user base as been growing strong.
But during this past year, I've learned one very important thing about application development: listen to your users. Luckily, my users talk a LOT. I mean there are over 700 comments on the Read It Later project page. There are so many it's almost unmanageable (working on a new solution for this, look out in Sept). You guys have provided some amazing feedback and suggestions and without it, Read It Later would be nothing.
The first version of Read It Later was two (obscenely large) buttons with limited functionality and control. Over the past year I worked hard with users to make it better. Because of all of the user feedback and suggestions, I was able to release Read It Later for Firefox 3, which was a huge improvement from the original version. I'm honored today that Mozilla Labs has awarded Read It Later as a Best Updated Add-on in the Extend Firefox 3 Competition.
So this is thanks to all of you who have emailed me, left comments, submitted translations, answered questions, beta tested, and worked with me one on one resolving bugs. Read It Later couldn't have done it without you!