On That’s

The countdown begins heading into phase 2. We’ve had some great feedback on the private beta launch and we’re getting ready for some updates. Our next release will contain RSS feeds, and a public version that will enable everyone to browse the site without having a login and password. If you want to rate and contribute, you’ll still need to sign up, which will be also free and instant.

I’d like to thank everyone for registering and signing up for the site. There were a few hiccups, some people might have received multiple invite emails. We’re working on that. There are other bugs here and there, and those will get fixed very soon.

So far there are 116 users either registered, invited or active. But only 47 items so far, so if you feel like adding something, please do. Getting users has been easy, but getting people to post has been hard. As a guide, there are lots of things that are cool, classical art, coffee, restaurants, Japanese dolls, music, videos, 80s, tons of things. What are you waiting for?If you registered on the site and have yet to get your invite, let me know. I might have to open it up to the general public very soon. So you might want in before that time. Users up to that point will be considered special “pioneers”.  So in the works are the following features,

RSS - this will enable people to get a feed for any selected keyword or combination of keywords.

iphone - thatscool.org is perfect for iphone. This is currently being designed by a good friend.

Random - An idea to put a Random item link or button has been submitted. We’re looking into it.  

As we start the countdown to BETA launch, we’re marking milestones.

Last night someone outside of the development team posted an item on the site. Guess Mark T. can be thought as USER #1 now. But maybe not, he did do a lot of the design refresh last year. So maybe user #.5.

In another milestone, someone registered on the site two days ago who I don’t actually know. Anonymous USER #1. Maybe this person found the site because I added it to Startup Index.ca, a listing of Canadian Startup Companies. Here is the page about thatscool.org. I was hoping some people would hear about it and register - and it happened! Just one person though. But thanks guy or gal @ yahoo.com! I’ll be sending you an invitation soon.

Part of the Startup process is this huge excitement of launch and then the silence of no one signing up. There’s always been this battle for attention online. Online and off. But these days people are cynical and I don’t blame them. Who’s got anymore time or space to fit an additional social application into their lives?

This is why I built thatscool.org to be efficient and effective. It accomplishes it’s task without distraction. I was unbelievably feature stingy during concept and development. Little or no Social Networking, no messaging, or chat or profile worship. Just the goods. It’s not about community- it’s about cool things. Shocking you say. Community and being social is what 2.0 is all about. That separates the men from the boys, the successful from the deadpool the experts say. Well, if these features distract and confuse the user away from the primary objective of finding, adding and evaluating items we don’t need it. Besides, all those features can be added later with different versions, mashups, 3rd party applications and API. I feel, the few popular sites in this space, I guess you would call it “Social Shopping” are bloated, boring, over-sold, confusing, difficult to use, or completely useless.

Users will come when they hear how useful the website is. What a great resource. I can’t wait to use it. And you know what, too many users would ruin it anyways. So whatever you do, don’t go to thatscool.org and register to get an invitation.

So the development is pretty well done. We are going into delete the test items and start fresh. This might not be the first time we delete all the items, there might be another time just before launch. 

It’s time to ask a few people to test the site out. Right now we’re totally in Alpha, so I don’t want to invite too many people. Only people who don’t mind adding a few things that might get deleted later. Also people with a sense of humour, as they might think the website is a total joke.

Anyway, if anyone is reading this and wants to try it out, add a few cool things and tell me about any issues, email me. peter.jubb [at] gmail.com

Never say never. We are finally getting this baby finished. I haven’t set any dates for the launch yet, but that’s the next thing I have to do.

Tonight I’m going to dust off my copy writing cap and write me some system messages. Someone has to write these things.

I’m sick of the whole flickr niceness myself, what do you think? Like hello Flickr in 34 languages? Oh that’s so cute as my finger stabs my tonsil. I’ve always wanted to write for a website that somewhat abuses the users with a certain attitude. This is why I love the video lesson series, You Suck at Photoshop. “you do, you’re awful, and that’s why you’re here”. I guess I’m just tired of writing the proverbial, “Oops, we couldn’t find any results for your search, try again.” ThatsCool.org is my chance to take revenge on all those stale and cheesy projects I had the privilege of writing for.

Let’s see if I can hash them out right here, tell me if you hate them, then I know I did my job.

“Hi there, unfortunately you’ve done something really stupid and we have to delete your membership now. Thank you, bye bye. ”

Or how about,

“Here is your invitation to ThatsCool.org. Someone either sent it to you by mistake, or they thought you would like this website and figured you were worthy of membership. Either way, they did you a great service. ThatsCool.org is a website not quite about everything, it’s only about the cool stuff. It could be about sailboats, or rattlesnakes, nintendo or nantucket as long as it’s nice and you say to yourself, that’s cool. But if you don’t find something cool that you like, just add it. Let the membership decide. But what does ThatsCool.org do for you? It enables you to find the best and newest of almost everything. Lip-smacking snippitty-snacks.

Here is your Invitation Code which can be used once for an email of your choice, <###########>

Visit http://www.thatscool.org/beta to get started.”

or “Woah, now you’ve really done it. Not only has your membership been deleted, but your IP address has been banned! Hopefully there are other websites out there that will support you cause this one ain’t it. Thank you bye, bye”

and “Apparently someone in our Department of Redundancy Department had been working overtime. And since we can’t afford overtime, this person was fired, twice. (We had to hire them back to teach their offshore replacement how to do that job, then we fired them again) . Sorry about this, but it appears that the new guy deleted your membership or lost it in all the bureaucratic paperwork, you know these places… Anyway, times are tough so we hope you’ll forgive us. To make things better we just wanted you to know, you can now sign in using your email and password. Again we’re sorry, give us another chance, we can change.”

and “We just wanted to let you know that we’re really concerned about this situation. Ok, we’re not that concerned, in fact we don’t even know or care what’s up. Either way this email is a warning to you. Get your act straight. You are either makin’ someone mad, have a really low score, or your attempting to game the system. This is not cool. There will be no other warnings, only account deletion. Thank you, bye bye.”

I’m getting pretty psyched about launching to this website to just about any community of friends. Once there is interesting content in there, it’s going to shine. We are talking weeks now. finally.

that’s right, you’re reading that correctly, the number has gone up since last time! It’s been a month, almost. You think there would be a lot more bugs fixed. Development can be slow, especially when your developers don’t have enough time to work on it. Also, all the bugs were not documented before.  But now they are.

This project has spent 3/4 of its life in development. That’s more than 2 years! What challenging times! Applications as complex as this need time.

In a week there will be a teaser where you can add your email to the list; maybe get a membership. that’s cool is an org afterall. Org like as in organization. And this organization is about cool.

Oh buggin’ ain’t easy. Especially when you pay attention to details. And payin’ the bills. Here comes the long slogged out battle for perfection. it continues!

It’s been a while! But the project is Back. Back on track. Back in business. Back in time. Well folks, it’s been almost 4  years since this idea was born. November 8th, 2004 I wrote an email to a friend talking about this idea. Back then  it was only a working title, thatstheshit.com, or thatsdesign.com milling it over. That’s was always in the title we just didn’t think of something so obvious like “that’s cool” something you hear everyday. Something you say everyday, sometimes without even knowing it.

Well soon we’re going to launch the teaser page, where you can sign up for your membership. This should go live in next week. My old team actually did this just over a year ago, but this team has since moved on to enjoy greener pastures. more updates to come.

Every Tuesday is the review session. Somewhere between escaping working, walking and lunch I have a telephone meeting with a guy named Shan. This gentleman I’ve never met is developing my website. Although he isn’t, he sounds like he’s calling from Lahore. That’s fine with me. I don’t care if he is in Tazmania. As long as he gets the job done. I think he’s actually in Seattle… or Michigan.

So at 2:00 he calls me. We go to the staging site and he guides me through what has been done in the past week. I drink tea, and hold my breath.

So far they have worked on things that as an Information Architect, I would have saved until last. The recover password regime, membership, admin, invites, sign up, sign out, etc. I guess these things are just an important as anything else.

This Tuesday (Jan 22) is especially important. It’s when I get to see some serious front-end and design changes. How its going to scroll. The headers, all that stuff. I just can’t wait until he says it’s done. That’s when my work begins. I’m really good at nitpicking, and oh boy I hope he’s prepared for my pixel pushing meticulousness.

First this blog will be about a website getting launched. Then it will be about a website getting built. It will never be finished. At the same time it’ll never be changed. Whereas Googles moto is “don’t be evil”, this website will be about “fight evil”.