back on track.
guys and gals,
It’s been a hard time for us for the past months and I guess you thought we’d be dead by now. There’s been little progress in the development and we’ve been fighting the usual start-up struggle. We run out of the resources that we thought would take us to a public iPhone beta. They didn’t.
We tried for a long time to push the development even without any resources, with lot of help from the guys initially on the project, and other friends trying to fix and & finalize the beta. Working with limited resources is good in many ways. It triggers creative thinking and often more optimized solutions than if you have unlimited resources, but working without resources, that doesn’t last for long.
Since the beginning of the year we’ve been trying to figure out a sustainable model to continue the development and to get things up running again. It’s with quite a relieve that we finally have found a path that we believe will help us in short-term but more importantly in the long run.
We invited you to become a part of a beta team in September last year, and we haven’t forgot about you. We know that you care about your address book, and so do we. The app has yet to reach a level where it doesn’t act as ambahoo. At some points the app has been a little funny and mixed people and numbers, and even though it’s surprising at times there’s no way we’ll let this happen to you.
Delays and problems and the heavy winter behind, we have exciting & bright times ahead. I’m promised myself to never say “soon” again so I won’t, but I truly believed in “soon” last year… we only had weeks until release, right. But you learn as you live. When it happens, it happens. Until then, make sure to back-up your contacts!
Yours,
Does the world need another twitter client?
it certainly is not about being the first out there
When we pitch our little project, we often get the same reply: “Isn’t that what Plaxo does?” I often think the answer to that question is “no”, “not really”, or maybe even “partly”, depending on how deep into the industry the guy we’re talking with is. But lately I’ve been thinking of answering “maybe”, or even “yes”. So what?
Twitter has been around for some years now (and the fact that despite being one of the greatest things ever they still don’t have a business model that the people we eventually pitch to would like to hear, but that would be the suject of another post) and since the beginning there have been many ways to interact with it, specially desktop clients. And I mean many.
Well, it turns out despite having endless ways to interact with twitter, there were these guys who thought there weren’t enough ways already and came up with the wonderful Tweetie. And guess what, it turns out that after a couple of months, Tweetie is the third most popular way of interacting with Twitter on the desktop (the second if we don’t count their own web), that is according to twitsats. According to the people around me, it’s just the Twitter client many people had been waiting for.
I don’t want to mean that we’re going to be the same thing on the personal information management arena (sure as hell we’re trying to), but I just can’t help but picture these guys pitching their product:
“What? Another twitter client? And you have to pay for it? Go home, kids”
So… did the world need another twitter client? It looks like it did. Plaxo or LinkedIn have been around way longer than Twitter, and the real truth is that everybody signed up but nobody actually uses them, or at least no more than eventually. Maybe the world just needs another contact manager.