Sunday, January 29, 2006

Zanby gets better...

We released Zanby Alpha 1.3 and 1.4 over the weekend.

Here are the highlights:
  • It is a lot easier to register
  • Your profile and Account Settings now make it possible to keep your age, groups and gender, private.
  • Lists are much easier to manage and view.
  • Canadians can now register
  • Hosts can remove and approve members in the group workspace/members section
  • Hosts can now fully moderate the group discussion boards
  • Many of the "Join Group" and "Start Group" interfaces have been simplified
  • The event calendar is functional, including RSVP, event invitations, publication of events to your personal calendar and attendance details.
TIP for hosts: I recommend exploring the group privileges section. Hosts can give privileges to members of their groups. If you want people to be able to post messages on your group message board, or upload photos, documents, or lists, the you must give them permission first.

We have taken the approach that it would be better to not make assumptions about what hosts want to do with their groups - So at the moment, all privileges are defaulted to "off." If the host wants to distribute privileges to the wider group, they must do so. What are your thoughts on that? When you create a public group is your assumption that all who join it may post messages, upload documents and photos, etc., or do you prefer to control that yourselves?

Thanks again for your interest, energy and continuing patience while we finish our work...

ps. if you need help with anything on Zanby... please email us at feedback@Zanby.com.

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Thursday, January 19, 2006

Alpha Alpha

Gatheroo Alpha 1.2 is up. I think we have arrived at a great suite of opening tools. Don't forget to read the release notes.

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Wednesday, January 04, 2006

A long wait...

Happy New Year everybody! It has been brought to my attention with varying degrees of humor (ahem), that our website still says that you can stop paying for online organizing tools in fall of 2005...and it's 2006.

Something doesn't compute there, does it? Sorry about that. We missed our deadline by six weeks or so. I made the call to take the approach that it is better to delay on behalf of quality than it is to rush to market with something that doesn't meet our standards.

Not to worry, though. All evidence to the contrary, we have been heads down for the last several months developing our first release. We will be in a public alpha stage by Jan. 20, one week before we will be featured in Twin Cities Business Monthly.

We introduced the application to a select set of 20 group hosts in Minnesota tonight. I don't know if any of you out there have ever developed software or not, but usually when a new application meets real users some degree of chaos ensues :). Tonight was no different. It was informative and gratifying to watch users create and manage groups. I was excited to learn that the users were very, very positive about the strength of the application.

We will be continuing to conduct user tests over the next two weeks. After that, if you have registered a group with Gatheroo, we will load your information into the system and contact you. If you have not registered a group or as an individual, you will be able to do that on the site.

Thank you so much for your patience. I can't wait to get it out to you, get your feedback, and start helping you build stronger, better communities through groups.

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