Potluck - Bite-sized news and facts to talk about

@libbybrittain @nbashaw and I have some ideas to make Product Hunt more valuable through Twitter. I'd love to swap stories soon! So you and the Branch team recently released FriendLib (posted by @imkialikethecar a week ago - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/187). What was the inspiration for this and what are your goals with the product?

Yay. Glad it got posted here. Short answer: For fun :) Josh (http://twitter.com/joshm) was thinking a lot about the content that gets his friends from high school and college sharing and talking, came up with the concept for Friendlibs over the weekend, and we built it in about 4 days. Our team just finished a big, months-long push to get the new Potluck for iOS out the door, and while we have a lot of changes we want to make ASAP, sometimes it's good to get your brain thinking about new projects and in new ways.

Oh, and we also built Friendlibs to get really familiar with Facebook Open Graph. We've always favored Twitter because that's where we all hang out, but... not so for all our non-tech friends! It's a powerful beast. Josh's Friendlib about growing up in Santa Monica has gotten shared over and over again by kids in LA, and it's up to 16,000+ views — from Facebook alone. (!!) Here's the link: http://www.friendlibs.com/lists/...

I saw @joshm tweet about that. Impressive! @libbybrittain - What are your longer term plans with FriendLib? It sounds like it was just a short-term experiment/learning opportunity but what if it takes off?

@rrhoover - No long term plans. If it takes off, who knows! That would be cool. We try to treat experiments like this as learning opportunities and mental exercise for our team, and have anything else be a bonus.

For me, it's also been a good conversation starter with some of my Facebook friends who haven't been super interested in Potluck, but who I think would really like it. Creating those little opportunities to reengage people (even your friends!) is really important. Not everyone wants or knows how to "give product feedback," but they do like playing with cool stuff. Ideally, those are one in the same, but it's been helpful to use Friendlibs as an opening to talk about what else we're building with them.

@rrhoover What weekly email? FriendLib is cool, I made one and the GA folks enjoyed it.

@FrankDenbow Thanks, Frank :) And I started writing a weekly letter about what I was up to with Potluck. I haven't sent it for a few weeks since I haven't been focused more on product than on growth/users, but will pick it up again soon! You can sign up here: http://tinyletter.com/growingpot...

Also, in case you were wondering, yes, I did lobby to wedge my first name into Friendlibs.

Totally unrelated to this AMA... @libbybrittain *huge* fan of Potluck (but you already knew that).