Beta Update

Thursday June 29th 2006, 4:42 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:AllPeers
Posted By: Matt

Judging from the comments to my last post, it’s probably time to give another update on the status of the AllPeers beta. As we’ve said a few times in the past, the purpose of having a private beta phase is to find problems while maintaining a manageable number of users. This creates a no-win situation to some degree since we can’t get testers unless we ask for people to sign up, but the very nature of a private beta means we don’t want to invite everyone at once. That said, we’re getting great feedback from the 2,000 people who have been invited so far, and we really appreciate that! You’ve helped us to find and fix a number of important issues.

We’re working extremely hard to get the public beta ready, so it’s somewhat vexing to have people come on our blog and accuse us of peddling vaporware. But that’s still far better than releasing something before it is ready for broad consumption. You only get one chance to make a first impression, as they say, and we want to make sure that this impression is a very positive one. AllPeers is a very powerful product, more so than most people perhaps realize (we have about 200,000 lines of source code in C++ and JavaScript), and it’s perfectly normal for it to take 2-3 months to go from private to public beta. We’re getting really close though, and we’ll continue to invite more private testers up until the day the public beta is released. Thanks for your patience and support!


16 Comments »

  1. Matt:

    I sincerely hope you guys coming out soon. Some of my friends have switched to pubet.com. They are at early stage and UI seems a little awkward but it works. I met one of their founders last week and they are very determined to drive the change, he mentioned the trading service coming soon which will be huge giving how much user created content out there.

    Comment by Brian — 6/29/2006 @ 4:49 pm

  2. who cares? you have lost the moment.

    Comment by Roger — 6/29/2006 @ 5:57 pm

  3. Matt,
    Glad to see that our comments don’t go unread. Also, let me say that I completely agree that you only have one chance at a first impression, let hope that yours is a great one!

    Comment by Alex — 6/29/2006 @ 11:55 pm

  4. I hadn’t heard of Pubet before, and after checking it out, I think I’ll wait for AllPeers. Peer networks benefit from widespread adoption, and if Pubet is going to be as complicated and clunky as it currently appears to be, it’ll never fly. The AP guys seem to have a stronger commitment to ease-of-use for everyone (unlike most people in, say, the GNU community). I’m getting impatient too, but I also want to see this work right and make a splash, so I’m sticking around for now.

    Comment by Michael — 6/30/2006 @ 1:57 am

  5. Invite the the rest of us readers :p
    I’m really looking forward to the beta!
    I told all my friends awhile ago and they started to lose interest… hopefully when I get a beta invite I can re-ignite the fire!

    Comment by Brandon — 6/30/2006 @ 2:17 am

  6. I got my invite yesterday. Thank God! Looks pretty good so far and it’s only crashed my browser once. Thanks Matt!

    Comment by Rich — 6/30/2006 @ 3:03 am

  7. Matt:

    Not be critical here: 200,000 lines C++ code for an extension in FF? that seems pretty high. I remembered baseline for Apache is only about 80,000 lines. I cann’t image an extension can be that complicated, not sure this will stress browser to extreme, coupled with memeory issue already in FF.

    Again this is a total speculation, you have final words on your product.

    Comment by Chuck Murcko — 6/30/2006 @ 3:31 am

  8. Hi,
    its an exciting, feature definitely, but I am interested in the technology. Is it Open Source ?
    and will it provide multiple NAT traversals. It would be interesting to learn that.
    And offcourse, may I request to get an early invitation, if thats possible.
    cheers
    Sanju

    Comment by Sanju — 6/30/2006 @ 8:35 am

  9. Chuck - yeah, it’s big for an extension. That’s my point. But compared to FF itself it’s still tiny so it won’t stress the browser. What we’ve done is much broader in scope than most people probably imagine, as will become clear over the coming months when we roll out new features on top of the initial release. In software it pays to create a solid foundation that you can build upon.

    Sanju - We’re planning to open source eventually. We are working on NAT traversal right now.

    Comment by Matt — 6/30/2006 @ 9:52 am

  10. how is allpeers working? will there be an obligatory registration? do you have to login, connect to a master server, like Skype? Or is it really only p2p? Can it be used in a closed network? Can others connect to allpeers-network, without having this extension?

    Comment by nobody2 — 6/30/2006 @ 2:21 pm

  11. Yes, you have to register and there is a registration server, but you don’t have to login since presence is handled P2P. You need AllPeers to participate in the network.

    Comment by Matt — 6/30/2006 @ 5:45 pm

  12. Allpeers is Vaporware for sure. It’s to late!

    Comment by Coy — 7/8/2006 @ 4:16 am

  13. Matt,

    You’re doing the right thing. I also write software for a living and it’s good to see you care about quality before release. In the end others will agree it was the right decision.

    I’m extremely excited to get my hands on this product as I’ve been following all peers for quite some time.

    Disregard the vaporware comments … it’s an obvious ploy to get you rhiled up. I imagine some of these comments mask the user’s childish frustration with not being part of the public beta.

    Continue the great work!
    Mark

    Comment by Mark — 7/17/2006 @ 5:29 pm

  14. What’s with the beta? In feb I got a mail that I would be invited soon… and I still have nothing! Where to get the Activation Code?

    Comment by Bas — 7/22/2006 @ 6:14 pm

  15. you can only have a product in development for so long before people get annoyed and tell you to f off. i understand the fact that you want this app to be a good one but also remember that the longer you make us wait the more we will become annoyed.

    Comment by Anonymous — 7/23/2006 @ 5:48 am

  16. […] sooner. This led to unrealistic expectations on the part of our investors (entirely our fault) and impatience on the part of our fans. It is far easier to make this type of judgment in hindsight, of course, so it’s best to be as […]

    Pingback by AllPeers: Lessons Learned · Get Latest Mozilla Firefox Browsers — 3/5/2008 @ 8:46 pm

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)