Mediocre publicity better than no publicity?

So I checked my email a few minutes ago and there was a question from someone who didn't receive their iPrioritize confirmation email (which happens every now and again). So I went into the database and confirmed their account for them. While I was in there, I noticed that the number of registered users went up quite a bit today so I decided to dig a bit further.

Come to find out that lifehacker did a blog post review of iPrioritize today. The review alone generated about 1,000 unique visitors and 200 new accounts in the five hours that followed the post. That's the good news.

The bad news is what the review actually says:

Much like previously-mentioned Ta-Da Lists (but not nearly as good looking), create multiple lists of items with headlines and notes in iPrioritize, like todo lists or grocery lists. Syndicate your lists via RSS, get them on your mobile phone, and share your lists on a public web page. While Ta-Da Lists is still the better web-based list manager, iPrioritize does have interesting Microsoft Outlook integration worth checking out.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement (two not so good Ta-Da List references in 72 words is not my idea of a good time). And the comments from readers all pretty much take up the same tone.

BUT, I've still got a smile on my face. The exposure (and the quality links back to iPrioritize) is awesome. And I've learned in my short time running a web-application business, that you should take anything that the "technosphere" says with a grain of salt. Techies ALWAYS want more features (I fall into this category at times too), but I refuse to fall victim to "feature creep" and change a simple tool that works into something it's not (project management software, calendar software, etc).

There's a great post about this by Richard White (of Kiko fame) about lessons learned from selling Kiko:

You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere

To a degree, it didn't matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I'm attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it.

Richard and I also exchanged a few emails this week on the topic of breaking out of the "technosphere", which is somewhat fascinating to me. So I listen to what they say (and gladly take the traffic and the users), but realize that the "technosphere" is different from the technically savvy corporate American, and that ultimate success will probably depend on people that have never heard of AJAX or Web2.0.