A small clarification and details about our open beta
Last week I had mentioned that we were going to setup an open beta and we got some really positive responses. We managed to get about a dozen or so people that were really excited to test out anything we were building (even if they didn’t know what it was). But I wanted to clarify something really quickly.
Our idea of an open beta is not the same as Google’s. We’re going to have a beta team that is going to be using the service prior to anyone else. The “openness” of the beta stems from the fact that they can talk freely about their experiences with the product. There will be a few limitations put on what they can speak of, screenshots, etc. But as a whole we don’t mind them publicly flogging our crap, or openly praising what works. Our hope is to help make our product better.
Details! There has been a few people prodding us for details about our service and we do not aim to strum the hype guitar - so here are a few details that I can say right now. The service is called mysteamr (the current holding page was designed by me, not Mike - so yell at him and maybe he will replace it). Exactly what it does is still being ironed out. We had a few ideas of what we wanted to accomplish and what has come out of those ideas has been really interesting. We’re using mystreamr in ways we didn’t really think of originally - and as we build the service out (following our original roadmap) we’re finding that it has become useful in more ways than we originally thought. After we got an internal version running (we’ll call it Alpha 0.1), we started to use the service a little and even that has opened some doors that we never saw coming. It’s been pretty fun so far and we can’t wait for our beta testers to get in on the fun.
We’re aiming for “sometime this week” to allow our beta testers in the door to start using the service and giving us feedback. We have a few features that need to be completed, a few details to work out with our host, and some tweaks on the design to get done before we can give it to our testers.
If you’d like to be a tester, shoot me an email and I’ll get you set up once we have everything up live. Oh, we don’t want more than about 20 testers for this first initial test - so we have about eight slots left. We’re currently looking to fill our Windows XP void (we’ve got enough Macintosh users right now).