Geojoey's Weblog

Quick update

Just a quick update. We're still working on the new release. We're now expecting it to see the light of day in about a week or two. As usual it's ready when it's ready, not when the marketing dept says it is.

I'm not going to try to sell you a list of features before we launch. The product will speak for itself. If you were one of our initial 20 users then there's almost certainly a feature in there that you asked for.

You can help by taking the next 7 days and having some of the best experiences of your life so you have something to write about.

Have a spectacular week!!

Mark.
Chief Alchemist & CEO.

Geojoey Progress update

It's 3:03AM here and we're finishing yet another long night of work. The code gets most of the focus around here, but that's really only half the work - about an hour ago our COO was explaining the intricacies of SEC filing exemptions. Fun fun fun!! ;-)

We've taken the huge amount of feedback we received for the first preview of Geojoey and have come up with a user interface design. Lets just say that every time we look at the new UI we get VERY excited.

You know what's also scary exciting? We have to tear ourselves away from actually using Geojoey so we can get some work done. I think that's probably a good sign.

There's already some debate about how we calculate trekker miles. One of our users (who shall remain nameless) sailed most of his miles and claims he should get more recognition than the land-lubbers who flew theirs. Ever heard that expression "why walk when you can ride"?

We're still on schedule for launching the new UI on Thursday next week (Sept 28th), and we'll announce it via email to all our brave early adopters and on this blog.

Have a spectacular rest-of-the-week!!

Mark.
Geojoey Chief Alchemist and CEO.

Next Steps

We've gotten a ton of feedback from everyone who has been test driving the site. I know some of you want to tell your friends about Geojoey, but we'd like to polish the site a bit more before we open the flood gates. So we're going to leave the invite-only sign up for a while longer.

I suppose I should put my manager hat on and manage expectations at this point. I'd like to say 2 weeks just to be safe, but as I've mentioned before, our philosophy to building software is that it's ready when it's ready. So hang in there and keep an eye on this blog for updates.

I was on the phone to my mom this morning in Cape Town. It's amazing how valuable a fresh pair of eyes and someone who doesn't know about the details of software is. She wanted to add her diving experience in a place called Chole Bay in Tanzania and was having some difficulty with the double-click thing. Joe I know that bugged you too, so that's one of the things at the top of the rapidly growing list of improvements.

Once again, if you'd like to preview the site, please email me at mark@geojoey.com and I'll send you the password, provided you promise to deliver at least one bug report or usability suggestion. :)

Thanks again to everyone who is helping put this together!!

Mark.

First steps

Today a few of our friends and family took geojoey.com through its first baby steps. We have our first 14 experiences in the database along with photos and they've gotten their first few votes. We have our first 7 registered users! YAY!

After staring at test data like 'asdf' and 'lorem ipsum' and 'owiefowedksd' for weeks it's amazing to see real experiences in the database.

We have some minor flow issues with the instant messaging system and experiences appearing twice in the Top Experiences list when a tag is active, but other than that it's ticking over pretty smoothly.

We're going to run the invite only trial for about 48 hours - or as long as it takes us to deploy any serious bug fixes and then we'll open it up to the world. If you have some time to spare and would like a preview of Geojoey then drop me an email at mark@geojoey.com.

Thanks very much to everyone who helped out tonight!!!

Mark

Update

It's 3am on Saturday morning and after another long nights work I thought I'd blog a quick update:

If you've noticed the 'by invitation only' sign on our front door and haven't received an invite it's not because we don't love you. It's because we haven't sent any invites yet.  We're going to run a limited preview of the site for a short while before we launch to the general public. If you're a friend or family, we'll be borrowing some space in your inbox shortly.

The software, is coming along very nicely. Our resident QA guru says she hit the site pretty hard tonight and only a couple of minor issues shook out. Nothing that can't be fixed in a single Saturday morning. Otherwise it's pretty solid.

Right now I think we're looking good for a preview launch on Tuesday. How very very scary for us all.

Have a spectacular weekend!

Mark