Now we're out of pre-alpha, as the new server should be able to handle quite a bit of traffic! Next stop: The medical logic needs some tweaking, nothing fatal.
This was short status update. Press/blog release soonish.
CTRL-F "Illtags" doesn't work with Mindtrek Launchpad finalists, maybe it is not yet time to win awards. We first need to add a few zeroes to the 274 user we currently have.
And now it is the time to do that: We got a nice server dead with kotisivut.com (thank you Miikka for understanding our mission) and this weekend we're moving to a server that can handle more than three concurrent users. Next week we're ready to start to try to get some coverage on blogs or even traditional media.
I haven't blogged about Demola earlier. I should have, since Demola is the main reason we have managed to create the service with practically no funding (BTW, thank you Slush!).
Demola is an open innovation environment, where great things can happen without too much hazzle. There are many ways to explain Demola. I have my own: Demola aims to project the brainpower of (tens of thousands Tampere region) students that is usually wasted on pointless assignments towards something less pointless, like real life projects.
Thank you Digioske for understanding our mission and providing the necessary resources for making the Demola project possible. This summer Jani Palovuori, Tuomas Rinne and Matti Särkikoski, our excellent Demola team created the Illtags core and it works perfectly!
This is interesting: Because one of Demola's purposes is to create new businessess, the rights of the Illtags core will stay with the Demola team. I bet Illtags will not be the only service utilizing the microblog feed parsing platform (or Tagregator as we call it). I can imagine a range of services making use of the simple technology collecting tags, combining them to user contexts.
Even though we were lucky enough for being able to concentrate on the actual product development, the summer was hectic. Facebook API, Twitter API, RESTful API, AJAX programming... all of the current technical buzzwords were strangers to us until this summer. We googled, we learned, we conquered!
At the moment I feel very comfortable with the product, even though it is full of small holes. Pre-alpha is our version of the blinking "under construction" sign. We'll remove the "pre" when we have the servers in a bit more solid state.
...and I'll test the site with IE6 when we can call it beta ;)
Ok, now a few knows about our service. And now we have some feedback. And the feedback makes us work hard.
This is really strange: When we opened the service, at that exact moment, I was available to see it from a new user's perspective. Before I was blinded to small or even bigger problems. Now I am able to be more critical and, well, realistic about the UI we have created. A lot of fixes done and a lot to do. Today we actually took the design we had already back in January, changing small details we have learned along the way.
There's a load of features on the TODO-list, but all in time. Which brings me to the motivation of this post. I want to share a small home-made video we created, visioning the illtags mobile service:
The service is open, feel free to test and explore it. We have a bit of server trouble, which is the reason you should not tell anyone about our service, yet :)
Now we're trying to test and learn what is the server capacity need for a certain amount of users.
Subversion revision is at 6852. Pre-alpha is ready, but so is H1N1, according to local newspapers.
I think the launch will in few days, maybe even tomorrow, but I'm not sure about our servers. We'll have to launch it very very silently, just for the important feedback and try to get a solid server base ASAP.
We would probably make it invite-only, but we're not really Gmail or Spotify. Besides, it's too much of a hazzle with the invitation e-mails.
