We have been live with the alpha-test version of qubox.com for just over a month now. I thought I'd share a few reflections from the qubox team.
First off, we feel that things are going well and we're really excited! We have real people using qubox.com and we're getting a lot of great feedback! If you are one of our early users - thanks for helping us make this happen!
The basic functionality of the site is working well and we've made a lot of improvements based on things we've learned from our first few users. For example, if you registered with qubox.com early on you'll have noticed that the process of uploading a photo was quite challenging - we think we have it a lot smoother now.
We're pleased too at the number of users. We'd set ourselves a goal of getting about a hundred users for the end of March, and we've beaten that number (there are around 140 users as of today). Those are tiny numbers by internet standards, of course, but we have to start somewhere! And we know that the functionality of the site is far from complete so we don't expect to see explosive viral take-up at this stage. Our priority so far has been to get sufficient people signed up for the "search by like-mindedness" function to return interesting results, and to give us a meaningful sample from which to get feedback.
Some things we've learned and that we're working to improve:
- A lot of people think that qubox.com is "another social network". We need to do a better job of explaining how we see ourselves - we want to be a way for people who think alike to make connections into their existing social networks. So for instance, if you use MySpace for social networking, qubox.com should be a way for you to make connections with other MySpace users who think alike. We're going to make some changes over the next few weeks to address this. In particular, we're going to make the homepage more informative.
- We've hidden the "share with a friend" functions of qubox.com! Most of our users haven't found these great features, which we think are one of the most exciting things about qubox (they are in the "share" menu, www.qubox.com/share). We'll be enhancing these features - for instance, we're building better widgets - and making them easier to discover.
- We need to encourage people to round out their profiles with bookmarks. Adding a bookmark to qubox.com is a way to help people who think like you find interesting things. We need to make that easier and more obvious - we're working on it!
- Some people found the registration process too long. We've streamlined it and added a very lightweight fast-track registration option (we call it "just let me in!").
We are also working to expand our range of quboxes. Right now we're developing a "Love" qubox. (You can help us build it at www.qubox.com/development_zone!) That should be live in a week or two, and there are more in the pipeline.
Finally it's great to see that we already have a whole bunch of really interesting people with great profiles! Here are some of my favourites:
Keep the feedback coming!
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