Today is the big day...

By midnight tonight we should have over 50 new accounts, and numerous other 'pending invitation requests'. We are expecting plenty of things to go wrong in the 11th hour. Some pre-release highlights:

- Safari support. Right now it doesn't exist. We hope our new users aren't MAC lovers. Even though Mark loves his MacBook Pro, there are some bugs in Safari that make the site almost inoperable. However, Safari for Windows works great. Oh the irony. Currently she runs best on Firefox, followed by IE, then Opera.

- All users today will be given 6 invites. So theoretically our site can grow infinitely large by the time we wake up on Saturday, though I doubt it. I see very many iterations in our future.

- In my 11 second estimation of our progress. I'd say we're 2% complete 'in the grand scheme of things'. But it's a grand scheme, and iteration is a large part of that scheme.

- We've already been giving accounts to some reviewers and friends and family, so tonight won't be a major jump. But for the first time we'll be giving away accounts to people we do not know. Can't wait to see how that plays out.

Oh, right, and before we forget, today's SPORT'S LESSON OF THE DAY. "don't over inflate your soccer balls, otherwise they will become permanently warped"

Worth 1000 logo contest

We are on the lookout for a new LOGO. If you or anyone you know is good at logos, tell them to have a try at our FREE logo contest at Worth 1000. Winner gets $100 USD cash. So far there are only 5 entries. Contest expires in 5 days.

*Update*: 39 entries + 1 by ourselves. It looks like there are some pretty good options. Check out the contest and help us choose.

the founders that party together, stay together

We went out to celebrate yet another birthday... this one happened to be a mutual friend.

Here's some proof.

Of blind spots and fax machines

You're a good driver. You wear your seatbelt, you signal all your turns and lane changes, you don't drive tired, and you always check your blind spot. And yet, more than once in your driving career, you don't - you get viciously honked at by the minivan that's been sitting in your blind spot for 15 minutes, you swerve back into your lane, and once your heartbeat returns to normal you vow never to make that mistake again. After a while - months, or years - the same thing happens, and you wonder, "I KNOW about blind spots, I KNOW not to make this mistake again, but I still did. What's wrong with me?"

No, I'm not talking about Mark's driving. You've probably guessed that I'm leading up to software engineering. Over time, I've noticed that every project I've worked on develops its own set of blind spots - problem areas that tend to get ignored because they're not part of the main focus, but they keep popping up again and again.

In my previous life maintaining a software product for the health care industry, every release went as smoothly as anyone could hope. We made mistakes, learned from them, improved the process, and avoided them in the future. All except one class of mistakes: those dealing with peripherals - printing, fax, email. These were minor features that were part of version 1 (before our time), and because they were never related to new features, they often fell into our blind spot, and caused a disproportionate amount of problems. Every time that happened we said "we'll learn from our mistakes, next time we'll do better" - but next time there it was again, the same damn minivan in our blind spot asking why the fax isn't working.

ClutterMe is developing a few blind spots of its own. One example is IE. As a Firefox user, I know IE support is essential, I know most of our users will be using IE (though so far only about 30% do), I know I need to constantly test in both Firefox and IE, and I usually do - except when I don't. And then I have to backtrack, fix the problem, and ask myself why I didn't check in IE that one time.

In a way this is to be expected. In a small team, everyone's juggling a long list of tasks. The ones at the top are usually the most important, the most critical, or the most interesting. Eventually the tasks at the bottom bubble up to the top and get done - but some are stuck at the bottom forever. Classic case of resource starvation, where the resource can be the developer's time, interest, or self-discipline. So what's the solution?

One obvious answer is to improve the process - like, say, coming up with a release checklist with the things that are often forgotten. Makes sense on paper, but ultimately a checklist doesn't feel very satisfying - having an "oh crap" moment one week before release is only marginally better than having it one day after. The blind spots are still there.

A drastic solution is to eliminate the blind spot entirely. Do people really still need to send faxes in 2007? (the answer, unfortunately: yes). If the feature that's always causing problems is minor and unrelated to the core functionality, can it simply be axed? If yes, great, but in many cases you're stuck supporting it.

Maybe increasing visibility is the answer. Tools can help: my skin crawls every time I click on the blue "e" icon? I can start using IE Tab. Constant performance problems? Might be worth investing in a profiler.

None of these solutions work in all cases. If blind spots are indeed a common class of problems, it feels like there should be a common solution, but I haven't been able to find one.

What is your experience? How do you deal with blind spots (software or otherwise)?

We are passively-actively looking for funding.

Seeking investment can be a time-consuming process. So that's why we are focusing on make a great product and we'll be actively looking for funding sometime in the future, probably a couple of months after we launch.

Our ideal funding wishlist would include a top notch front end developer to make ClutterMe's front end the envy of every other social network as well as a few hard core rails programmers that can help up build up our war chest of code.

Our blog is apolitical

But this was a history lesson just too good to pass up...




The video has since been removed... another link to it here.

it's like a war zone in here...

We're dropping new releases like bombs it seems. Today's new exemplary feature?

Privacy on Surfaces.
So not only can you keep certain sections of your page for your eyes only. But you can also control who gets to see pictures, videos, text, while keeping the rest of your page unchanged.

"So What does somebody see if I exclude them from a surface" - Bill

Great question Dick. The page, for said person, will render normally, WITHOUT a surface and without the surfaces' contents.

"How do I know if something is on a surface?"

Excellent question. If something has been successfully placed on the surface it will move when the surface is dragged. Placing something on a surface entails dragging it onto a surface and letting go of the object, and making sure your mouse is over the surface when doing so.

Happy Cluttering,
Mark

Blog Buzz

We added a blog buzz feature today. Well, it's not really "blog buzz" since we have under 30 users. It's more of a "recent post" feature. It suits our purposes just fine. It can be found here, that's www.clutterme.com/public in case you were wondering.

I'm rambling to make this blog post over 50 words. I really just wanted to tell you about our Blog Buzz feature.

Night,
Mark

Alex shaved

For the first time in like what seems like years, Alex shaved.

He no longer sports a patchy man beard, but is now sports a sleek, aerodynamic chin.

For the first time in our start-up, Mark's beard is longer than AC's.


Additionally you might be wondering what we do in our spare time. Well, basketball nowadays mostly. Alex is weak on D and I exploit is inability to drive left. I however have a weaker jump shot that he exposes by not letting me drive to the basket.

Alex, of course, has no idea what I'm talking about. I usually beat him by about 5 points in first to 11.

the median age of our founders is now 24

The median according to Wikipedia is defined as the "The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one."

So there you have it, over the past weekend ClutterMe gained another half point in the median category.

IT WAS MARK'S BIRTHDAY.

We went out with Dean and his girlfriend and partied with 3 beautiful women !!! What more could a guy ask for. It's now back to work as usual. Congratulations goes out to Mark for turning 23.

Why I'm not losing any sleep over Google

I've recently read some commentary on the fear that start-ups feel of the mighty Google (possibly sparked by the recent release of Google's storage service).

Now, I'm not going to argue that a start-up should be happy when Google releases a direct competitor. Neither should they take it as the end of the world...

Let's take a step back:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions

That's a pretty long list of products. Just skimming through it there are only a handful of Google products I might be afraid to compete against: Maps, Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, and of course their ad and search products. Even for these, the problem would be competing in crowded markets that require deep pockets and that already have several 900lb gorillas - not necessarily competing with Google itself.

2-3 years back, I was very impressed by Gmail, and then by Google Maps. I definitely saw Google as nimble, cutting-edge, full of great ideas - a start-up's worst nightmare. So how come none of the Google products outside their core - advertising and search - have emerged clear winners in their respective markets? Google Videos "lost" to Youtube; Orkut "lost" to Facebook and Myspace. Picasa, Blogger, Feedburner, and most of their Office products came from acquisitions.

More importantly, why should I be more afraid of my start-up getting "Googled", any more than I should fear my start-up getting, say, YCombinatored, or competition from any other source? Yes, Google starts off with more resources and a much larger audience - but they're not working 80-hour weeks, and their survival doesn't depend on the success of that one product. Looking at their product history, Google tends to acquire their side projects (advantage: start-ups), and when it's all said and done there's usually more than enough room left for competitors.

So, no, finding out that Google is releasing a competing product is never good news (other than validating that the market exists). But it's not really worse news than finding out about any other strong competitors.

Nintendo Wii

One month ago we purchased a company Wii, to be shared between Alex, Alex's girlfriend and Mark. Thus far we've played over 60 hours of competitive tennis, boxing, and golf on Wii sports. This has been accompanied by numerous hand, wrist and ankle injuries and has spilled over into 'almost fistfights' between ourselves.

Wii product review: Overall the Wii has some pretty realistic gameplay. Mark argues that it's far too easy on subpar golfers and since he can barely control the spin on his iron shots it's not a fair representation of true athletic ability.

Alex is thrilled that for the first time in his life he didn't have to worry about injuring other golfers.

Next: Our Wii review of Mario Party 8.

FacebookCamp Toronto

Yesterday was Toronto'S first facebook app conference. Apparently Toronto is the second largest facebook network (larger than even San Francisco) and Canada is by far the highest per capita facebook usage country in the world with Toronto or Winnipeg as cities leading the way.

Aside from the obvious - that facebook hires cute girls - was there any other useful information from the Presentation?

By far the most exciting talk came from Greg Thomson, the creator of "My Aquarium"

My Aquarium, at time of writing, has over 1.4 million users. Here's a summary of the key points in Greg's talk:

- Greg got his idea from the "My Garden" app which he has since surpased in facebook users. My Garden at time of writing has over 800 000 users.

- The "fish" are purchased stock photos all done by the same artist. Greg claims that he cannot draw and is happy with the face (that he willfully pointed out to us) that the fishies DON'T actually move)

- It took him less than three days to get his app up and running and less than two weeks for it to gain serious appeal.

- Facebook has the propensity to change things without telling app developers, which obviously is a source of frustration for any developer.

- In order to add coins to users' daily quota he locks the database table and injects coins into each account. This process takes around two minutes and his database in inaccessible at that time. He is consequently in the process of moving to a row locking mechanism.

- He gets over 1.5 million page views a day.

- Greg remarked that his ads 'made keeping the app up worthwhile'. He wasn't getting fabulously rich it seemed, but he didn't disclose any numbers in front of the audience.

- He uses 5 servers from Serverbeach to run his app, they are approximately running at 2% capacity on average although it peaks at times.


I know this was sort of a ramble, for more info join the FacebookCamp Toronto group. or you can check out my pics.


As a sidenote, I sent Greg a message on how good his presentation was going through facebook. The message showed up in his inbox during the presentation, which I thought was a funny sidenote. The audience didn't seem to pick up on it.

Thanks for your patience everyone...

Haven't blogged in more than a week, I'm well aware of the absence. Let me update on our status.

So we've made around 30 accounts, and some of those accounts have invites. We're starting to make a dent in giving out accounts with invites to those who have signed up through our website. And thank-you for signing up through our website, you are still high on our priority list.

The fact of the matter is that we've been getting so much feedback and our task list is so large that we've taken the last day in August to set as our public BETA launch date.

What does it mean to be a "public BETA"? Well, right now it means around 300 people will get accounts with about 3 invites each. Just to see what kind of loads we are running and just to get people's palette's wet we're purposely limited our growth at launch.

We're still just the two of us and we're lovin' it.

Mark out.