Wishlisting Blog

At long last… the site is live at wishlisting.com. Feel free to go there, explore, and sign up!

It’s been a long time in coming. A big thanks is in order for our best beta testers, Kate and Shuttle. This weekend we also got extra help from Fil, Karen and Marysharon to help find all of the most serious release-blocking bugs. We even received a bottle of champagne from our “Belltown Buds.” Thank you!

I think the site will be not only fun, but also a valuable tool for keeping track of the things you want and exploring what your friends think about things We’ll be posting more as time goes on about the ways the site can be put to use to solve a lot of the problems that we all have.

Here are a few random, possibly interesting statistics:

• The first checkin was January 14th, 2006 - 1 year and 3 months ago. We are currently on revision 1,882.
• A passing set of automated tests involves 33,263 assertions across 245 tests.
• In the last 7 days, 4 all-nighters were pulled. By one of us. Not me.

We’ve put a ‘public beta’ label on the site for a few reasons:

• It currently doesn’t pass the “mom” test. People who aren’t web-savvy will run into a few roadblocks which we’d like to clear up.
• The server is fairly young. We’re not entirely sure how reliable it will be - so far, so good.
• There are enough small bugs/annoyances that we probably shouldn’t set the expectation that the site is perfect.

Features coming soon, explicitly to help with usability and the “new user” experience:

• Firefox extension and Internet Explorer plugin - to make getting your browser button installed a breeze.
• Getting started guide - help new users figure out what’s going on
• Various flow enhancements - Make sure it’s easy for people to find what they’re looking for, and accomplish what they’re trying to get done

So, those are some of the things we’ll be working on over the next few weeks - so please use the feedback form and let us know if something’s broken or confusing (or slow!). We’re not planning on promoting the site until it passes the mom test, so we’re not asking for anyone to promote the site at this point. If you like it, use it! If you don’t like it, let us know what you dislike, so we can fix it.

We want our moms to like it. Yours too.