Things have been busy here while we build out new software and get several new services ready to go. I’ve cut back my hours some, instead of working 20 – 22 hours a day (seriously), I’ve only been working around 16 – 18. Ryan and I have been totally focussed on getting The Daily Spike finished and rolled out. We’re only a couple days away from that now, we’ve rebuilt the server and have taken the server downtime as an opportunity to get two other servers ready. We will now have one server that is dedicated to ping processing. Processing pings isn’t an issue for us right now, but we plan to add a few other ping services and create our own ping listener (make it so you can ping us directly). By having a dedicated server and database we’re also starting to implement plans for the near future when we will offer access to our ping/post database.
As we build The Daily Spike and begin a complete re-write of the front-end of TagJungle, we’re taking a more distributed architecture approach and building out web services that our front ends will use. As we build functionality, we’re also making that more modular and using plugin type interfaces on our web pages. This means we’ll be able to offer some pretty cool plug-ins for blogs and for sites like Facebook. There are a couple plug-ins that we’re building that I’m really excited about. I won’t go into too much detail yet, but some of the things we’re going to be putting out are things I’ve always felt were lacking in the blogosphere and I’m anticipating that a lot of other people feel the same way. More on that soon.
I’m really looking forward to getting through this phase of development and really for the first time, start to heavily publicize TagJungle – and The Daily Spike and other services along with it. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of “Black Friday” at Provo Labs, which is when we were all laid off and decided we wanted to do our own thing. We didn’t really start working on TagJungle until a bit later though, we tried a few experiments first. It’s been a pretty crazy journey with lots of twists and turns. I’m glad that we’ll have a real release version of both TJ and the Spike out before we’re 1 year old!
We’ve got a lot of plans, visions and things we’d like to do, but I’m curious – what would YOU provide as a free service if you had a database of millions of blog posts, knew what they were relevant for, could categorize every blog post into a Yahoo Directory like structure, 10’s of millions of links provided by bloggers in their posts, and a myriad of other analytic data based on word usage, post frequency, and anything else you wanted to analyze in the blogosphere? I’m really curious about what others would do with our data, we’re planning on providing access to a lot of it so that mashups can be built from it – so really, what would you do with it???
