On That’s

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.