Update, October 24 2009

We just pushed a new release of Approver.com to the site. With this release, we’ve removed support for a couple of features of Approver.com. We are doing this to streamline the Approver.com experience, and also because the number of users who had ever utilized these features were very small. The changes we made today will support a planned major rewrite of Approver.com that we are hoping to launch early next year.

The affected features are:

• Support for embedding Meebo chat windows in document approval windows. Of course, we still support comments on documents, and you can still create a chat window using Meebo or any comparable chat product (such as Skype, AIM, or Yahoo! Messenger) outside of the Approver.com document review page to collaborate with document reviewers in real time. We just don’t support the notion of embedding the Meebo chat window in the web browser.
• Support for publishing documents to a blog. To reference an Approver.com document from a blog, simply make the document public, then link to its public URL from a blog post. In the planned revision of Approver.com we’re working on ways to make public access to your files and documents much easier, and this is the first step in that direction.

Thanks as always for using Approver.com, and please let us know if you have any feedback.

Tweaks to Upload Page; Scrivener Support

We just released a new version of the Approver.com upload page that fixes a problem having to do with the way we store old versions of uploaded files. If you were one of the two or three users who were having trouble accessing revisions of uploaded files this week, this should fix things.

Today we also added support for uploading and sharing Scrivener files. Scrivener is a terrific tool for writers; it has an integrated outliner, a place for research notes and external links, and awesome project management features. It’s particularly good for working on book-length projects. For more information, check out their web site or read the NY Times’ glowing review of Scrivener that came out last week.

Happy Birthday, Approver.com

Today the site celebrates its first birthday. In the past 365 days since the launch of Approver.com, we’ve signed up thousands of active users who have created and uploaded thousands of documents. We’ve engaged in countless valuable discussions with users about our feature set and future product roadmap, and we’ve picked up paid users in five countries (thank you!).

Thanks too to our network of friends and advisors who have shown such generosity and given us invaluable encouragement over the past year.

In the past year the site has evolved from a place to simply upload and share Microsoft Office documents into a more fully-featured workgroup application that teams all over the world are using every day to work smarter and communicate more effectively.

But we’re not done yet. In the coming months we’ll continue to roll out upgrades to Approver.com to make the site easier to use and more powerful. The list of things we want to do is long (more than 150 projects at last count), but the higher-priority features we’re planning include:

• The ability for users to administer the accounts of other users
• Support for more granular and intelligent alerting
• Better support for uploading and sharing video
• A better experience for uploading files, and the ability to upload and share larger files
• Better community and social networking features, including the ability to have richer discussions and shared discussions within workgroups
• Support for new document types (such as the calendar document template we released a few weeks ago)
• Integration with other services you use such as Plaxo and Facebook
• Improvements to our web service API to make the site more accessible to developers

Got an idea for what you’d like to see in Year 2 of Approver.com? Let us know.

“Social Workflow”

I’m linking to Casey’s post about Approver.com not just because it’s the first blog post to name-check the site (woo HOO), but because he nails what Approver is about by referring to it as “social workflow”. I plan to steal that phrase and use it in the Approver.com elevator pitch; maybe I will use it to replace the phrase “sucks less” in version 0.5 of the pitch.

I demoed the site from my mobile phone for Om Malik prior to WordCamp on Friday; his first question was “Is there a social networking aspect to this?” The answer to this is, of course, yes (this is what we call “My Contacts”). This made me extremely happy/lucky that I’d thought to work on the social aspects of Approver a few weeks back. (I’m also happy that I resisted the temptation to add so much Ajax crap to the site that it stopped working on mobile phones.)

Also: For the four readers of this blog who don’t also read my personal blog, I formally announced that I left my day job and am going to work on Approver and consulting full-time. It sorta feels like stepping off the ledge, but in a good way (more like a blind date than a step into a dark flaming chasm).

I have two new features that I want to add to Approver before we start promoting the site more aggressively — a revamp of the My Documents page and a PayPal payment flow (both of which are half-done). I’m going to do my best to get this stuff done by the middle of this month — I can’t guarantee August 15, but it should be around there.

Until then, we need more testers. If you’re reading this, feel free to invite whoever you like to Approver.com. I’ve found that the best way to get someone in the groove is to send them a document — make it part of your normal workflow and (one hopes) they’ll figure it out naturally.