Beta Blockers

Ced’s last post is a good lead-in to what I wanted to say about the current state of the beta. As he points out, we’ve got very ambitious goals for our product, and this means making sure that the foundations are solid before we flesh out the edifice on top.

We’ve had great feedback from the first batch of testers. Nothing unexpected or catastrophic, which is a great achievement in itself. We did unearth a couple of architectural issues we have to resolve. Like everyone I’m excited about the potential of the “Drag-n-Share” technology in our consumer application, but I’m also juiced about the world-class platform that we’re building. By catching these things early we’re ensuring our ability to roll out new features smoothly like comments, tagging, instant messaging, richer profiles and a whole lot more that I’ll keep to myself for now, thank you very much.

Bottom line: we want to clean up some of the more significant glitches that have been identified this week. Nothing that major, and I’m confident that we’ll have another version ready next week. A few of the infamous “known issues” on our website will also be fixed (and some new ones added, no doubt). Then we’ll invite some more people, and we’ll see how the new improved software holds up to their onslaught.

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4 Comments »

1. I really like all the ideas in Cedric’s post, and I’m glad to have the update on the beta. I especially like that you’re viewing this as a platform to spring off other services, but why reveal so many of your secrets so soon?! I can’t wait for all this to come together.

   You talk about scalability being essential to this technology and Mark talked about US-centric business having too small a market; do you worry that being tied to Firefox might be a huge market limitation? I understand the programming benefits and the cross-platform distribution possibilities and the security, etc., but it seems to be against a major part of your ethos. An old question, I know…it just seems contradictory.

   Comment by Michael — 4/28/2006 @ 5:50 am

2. Sounds good With any new program major bugs usually play early beta’s, seems like you guys have done a great job. I cant wait to use this!

   Comment by Elessar — 4/28/2006 @ 8:14 am

3. @Michael: I don’t think so. If the AP is as good as it promises to be, it’ll help to drive more users to use FF. An IE user who havn’t switched to FF is the kind of user not interested in AP.

   Comment by funTomas — 4/28/2006 @ 9:02 am

4. You ask a couple of good questions, Michael. We’re revealing details of what we’re doing because we want people to understand the scope of our project (at least people interested enough to be reading this blog). Of course, it will take a while for this to come together but hopefully we’ll be releasing new pieces frequently enough to hold people’s interest. I’m certainly not afraid of someone stealing our ideas. There’s no way anyone could duplicate what we’re doing without already sharing our vision at a very deep level.

   Regarding Firefox: first of all, we’re tied mainly to the Mozilla platform, not Firefox itself, which means we can run pretty easily on other Mozilla-based products like Flock and Songbird. Also, we can make a standalone version using XulRunner. I feel like Mozilla is a great runtime for us to be using whatever direction we head in the future. Ideally, people will want AllPeers badly enough to download Firefox or the future standalone version of our product, as Tomas suggests. If we sense at some point that this requirement is a brake to adoption, we might consider integration into other popular browsers, but for now I’m sure the Firefox community gives us plenty of scope to grow. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

   Comment by Matt — 4/28/2006 @ 1:45 pm

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