With our private beta coming online, it’s time to give a quick heads-up on our philosophy about releasing. About a week ago I came across this post which does a great job of summarizing two choices for going to market: Big Bang vs. Darwinian Evolution.

There’s no need to repeat it all, but suffice it to say, we’re not doing the late ’90’s dot com approach of trying to build version 5.0 and launch with a colossal party (fun as that might be). We’re committed to the other path: release early and often. The value of getting our product in the hands of users, and then listening and acting on that feedback, can’t be overstated. This approach was one of our keys to success at Serials Solutions. Our release cycles were shorter than our competitors, we were more serious about listening to our users, and we responded faster. As a result, we were able to win in product lines where competitors had multi-year head-starts on us. We’re taking it up a notch here, with a serious commitment to agile development.

We’ll be reaching out to more people over the upcoming weeks, inviting them to check out the service and provide feedback. Yes, you will find some big bugs, missing functionality, and strange use cases. The servers will probably bonk out as well. But we’ve got a great team in place, we’re squashing the bugs, and growing the application fast.

Best of all, the earliest users will be able to say “I saw it when…”

I attended the “nakedtruth / Madrona / Redfin / panel discussion / party” last night. (Not sure of the name, but thanks for the invite, Greg)

An interesting panel and a packed house with great people. The biggest take-away for me is that, yes, it’s time for me to stop ignoring our blog.

I’ve been avoiding it for two reasons: First, joining a company of all technologists means there’s a massive amount of work that needs to be done immediately. It made sense to be purely inwardly focused at first. There’s still no shortage of work to do, but as our Private Alpha is getting ready to go and we’re talking with more and more people, the time has come.

Second, the role of blogs had a mixed track record in our prior industry. Serials Solutions was (and I trust, still is) an industry leader in the library technology space. We innovated not just products, but ways of thinking about problems faced by librarians and patrons. This required following a lot of blogs. There are a few excellent, bell-weather blogs in the library industry, but there are too many that need to be tracked, but ultimately say nothing. This may be true across the board, but I’d rather not contribute to the problem with yet one more.

I guess we’ll just have to risk it. I’m officially joining in the mix…

Hey all, the boys in the lab fixed the bug that prevented the simple iTunes recommendations from running… we’re still working on the Netflix recommendations.

By Edward Hirsh (Courtesy of Slate)

That was the year I lived without fiction
and slept surrounded by books on the unconscious.
I woke every morning to a sturdy brown oak.

That was the year I left behind my marriage
of twenty-eight years, my faded philosophy books, and
the green couch I had inherited from my grandmother.

After she died, I drove it across the country
and carried it up three flights of crooked stairs
to a tiny apartment in west Philadelphia,

and stored it in my in-laws’ basement in Bethesda,
and left it to molder in our garage in Detroit
(my friend Dennis rescued it for his living room),

and moved it to a second-floor study in Houston
and a fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side
where it will now be carted away to the dump.

All my difficult reading took place on that couch,
which was turning back into the color of nature
while I grappled with ethics and the law,

the reasons for Reason, Being and Nothingness,
existential dread and the death of God
(I’m still angry at Him for no longer existing).

That was the year that I finally mourned
for my two dead fathers, my sole marriage,
and the electric green couch of my past.

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language of
the unconscious and study earth for secrets.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

The boys in the tank yard are patching the private beta tonight.

This patch address issues with the (tightly controlled) invite system, speediness of the application, and a minor edge condition with iTunes and Netflix uploading.

Please forgive momentary downtime.