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In the next week or two, we’ll be relaunching our alpha site with a few key features that should make the site a live and working local event discovery tool. I’ll be sure to update everyone with an email and invite you all.

Key improvements include:

• Complete working offering (no more bugs or random pages that don’t go anywhere)
• Access for all browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and a few others)
• The ability to invite your friends to events through our guest list feature
• Simple event management and tracking with a new dashboard
• Improved recommendations through our updated suggestion engine
• Capability to invite friends to the Event Seek system (more users and less closed doors)

Before you know it, you’ll be discovering new events through Event Seek, inviting your friends and tracking all of your interesting events in one place - just like you’ve always dreamed.

Get excited - alpha 2.0 is just over the horizon!

Why can’t I view Event Seek in Internet Explorer? What do you mean I have to download Firefox or Safari? Why don’t you just make it work in IE?

Such a simple question with a slightly more complicated answer.

A brief history of the web to explain what I’m talking about. When the web was created, only a few groups were using it and everyone had to agree on how the computers would talk to one another. They created a set of standards for the communication so data could be passed seamlessly. This simple conversation eventually began one of the most powerful and interesting groups around today - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The W3C “develops interoperable technologies to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.” If you take out all the fancy words, these guys basically create the standards that continue to make the web possible. One of the biggest tasks of the W3C is continuously updating the standards that make websites possible. These guys are responsible for HTML, XHTML, CSS and a host of other technologies that our browsers use to display webpages.

Basically this group gets together, creates a standard for how browsers should read the information underlying webpages and then advocates their changes to anyone who will listen. Browser builders like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple then integrate the newest changes into their browsers. All the cool things that webpages can do now that they couldn’t do three years ago are all thanks to these guys.

Firefox and Safari are excellent about taking the standards suggestions from the W3C and implementing them into their browsers. This means that when you sit down to create a web page, as long as you follow the guidelines set forth by the W3C it will look and act beautifully in Firefox and Safari. Should make developing easy right? It does - once you know the language, you can make a browser do just about anything.

ENTER MICROSOFT.

Surprise, surprise, Internet Explorer does not play well with others. Microsoft chooses to follow the guidelines sometimes. And sometimes they choose not to. What does that mean? It means you have two languages - one for Firefox and Safari and a host of other browsers, and one for IE. Shouldn’t be too bad except that you only get to have one webpage. Try talking to a German and an Italian at the same time with the same words and having them both understand you and you’ll know what it is like making webpages on the Internet today!

Developers have resorted to creating what are called “IE hacks” that are little tricks that they use to make IE able to understand the language everyone else uses. While these can be useful, they are inconsistent and can generate problems for other browsers. Think of it like whispering to the Italian and hoping the German doesn’t hear and get confused.

If Microsoft’s browser is such a pain, why does everyone still use it? Why wouldn’t web users just complain and force Microsoft to switch? 

It’s amazing how much dominance you can have when you pre-load your browser on 93% of the world’s computers (and people are lazy). Remember a few years ago when an anti-trust lawsuit was filed against Microsoft? Yep it was about this issue exactly. It’s amazing how much dominance you can have when you provide the operating system for 93% of the world’s computers…

So, what does all of this mean? It means you have to hire very talented programmers, who are well versed in the challenges created by this issue. Give them enough time and they’ll figure out a way to communicate with Germans and Italians at the same time. It’s pretty amazing to watch, but it does take some time. Tomorrow we’ll be releasing Event Seek so that it works in Internet Explorer 7 and will spend the next few weeks working on IE 6. At the end of the day, we cater to you and will converse with you in your natural language - that is our responsibility. It’s just going to take us a bit of time.

At the urging of our development team, I’d like to say: If you’re using Firefox or Safari or some other standards-compliant browser, thank you! If you’re using IE 7, we don’t mind you too much. You’re at least easy enough to talk to. If you’re still using IE 6, please for the love of all things that are good, upgrade to IE 7! 

Seriously though, continue to enjoy Event Seek, I’ll make sure you can enjoy it in any browser you like, although it make take a few years off the development teams’ collective lives…

Greetings! In honor of America’s birthday, let me quote from one of Britain’s greatest leaders - Winston Churchill.  The stuttering, Prime Minister once profoundly posed the question, “Why stand, when you can sit?” This question is one that I take to heart both in my personal life and professional life.  Make things easy on people; make things easy on yourself.  When the opportunity arises to facilitate efficiency and ease, take the opportunity to do so.   In honor of this mantra, I present to you Event Seek updates designed to make our user’s experience a touch easier.

1. Autocomplete is here!  Don’t waste time inputting new venues into our system, chances are that we already have them.  Adding events is enough of a bear without having to fully describe the locale.  So, as you enter your event into our system and get to the venue portion, simply start typing the name of the venue your event is being held at and should we already have it.  Simply click on it and your venue is automatically loaded. You will also notice the implementation of this feature when you are trying to send messages to friends or invite them to events.
2. We are now IE 7 compatible and starting to make our way through IE 6. Soon, you’ll should have the option of discovering events on whatever non-WC3-standards-compliant browser you want!
3. Lastly, and in my opinion, most importantly, we are now implementing feeds from our ticket affiliate partners.  We are currently up and running with Stub Hub with many more feeds to come in the following weeks.  This means that our little “Event Seek Bot” can finally take a much deserved vacation and our users can have access to the most complete event data around.

 

Designing a web application takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of patience. Two of those three are qualities I find myself lacking (care to make a guess?). But that’s not to say that the product will be lacking. In it’s present state, Event Seek meets all the standards we’ve set for our alpha product. Things are organized in an orderly fashion and everything connects in a more-or-less seamless and usable way. But while the present offering meets our expectations and functions properly in *most* (crappy windows browsers coming soon!) browsers, could it be so much better? Absolutely.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. I think most startups can agree. On most nights and, yes, sometimes weekends, Tristan, Connor and I are all feverishly pouring over the product, the feedback, and the blueprint for beta. While beta is a long time off, the considerations for it are here and now. What more, we’ve got to plan further than that. We need to anticipate. I think one of the hardest parts about delivering a product as exciting as Event Seek is delegating good ideas for the future. Aside from all of our great ideas for features, we have to focus on our primary objective: we have to deliver a product that is functional, adaptable, and modular.

With so much of the future features being put off, one would think that the design of the product could very well be decided before a single line of Event Seek code has been written. Well, as things turn out, that assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. For example, we reorganized the messaging system in a mere 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago. What does that mean for the front-end designer of Event Seek? You have to be on your toes. Your style sheets will need to constantly adapt and your markup should be robust enough (and semantic enough!) to handle the strain.

With that in mind, I am constantly looking at ways of setting down practices: a sort-of design document if you will. But Event Seek is still evolving rapidly. We want to be a comprehensive event solution. That word, comprehensive, and the front-end engineer’s battle –namely, to be concise– are diametrically opposed. Take for example a very likely situation: you’re a partner of ours and you want Event Seek powering your event offering. You will probably want something that looks and feels like your existing site. Further still, you may want a “widget” or some other kind functionality that works outside of the existing application. How does one style these widgets? Do you want a partner having to link to your stylesheets? Do you want to conjure up unique stylesheets for each client? These are questions I have to ask myself on a day-to-day basis.

So, if you are a front-end developer and you organize your stylesheets like I do, you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds most of your “static” designs: elements on the page that don’t really change depending on the ID of the page or the nature of the session. Then you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds the “modular” parts of your design: elements that come and go in a fluid fashion, and elements that need to adapt to the layout they are placed in. The problem comes when you need to have both the “static” parts of your site, and the “modular” parts of your site changing at the same time. No two clients will ever want the same design, so you need to design for the future.

In making the trasition from a completely web-standards design to one that is fueled in part by IE hacks, this is a serious point of contention for me. Designing your site to be robust enough for the future but stable enough to be cohesive and have a sense of brand unity is a very perplexing problem. It’s one of those unique challenges that makes my job more fun. In addition to our own discussions about the subject, we’ve got a great user base that has given us fantastic insight and feedback about the product. We couldn’t ask for more. Well, maybe except having that user base discuss their ideas on the forum.  Everyone here at Digital Lodestone Group is proud of Event Seek alpha. We all have a part in evolving the product, anticipating our customers’ requests and exceeding everyone’s expectations.

Great feedback thus far - really candid honest feedback. Sometimes I forget how brutal people can be when you ask them for their feedback. No worries though, we’ve got a thick skin here at Event Seek and love the idea of getting good suggestions from our consumers.

I’ve culled the forums and emails and thus far, and it sounds like feedback (excluding obvious bugs) is centering around a few issues:

• Event invitations and tracking: Everyone would be interested in inviting other users, and then tracking their attendance status. Almost like a mashup between evite and an event calendar.
  • We’ve been toying with this idea for a bit now and really think it is an interesting concept. How do you know who is going to an event that you aren’t planning? Facebook and Evite have it down for when it is my event, but no one else seems to bridge that gap. This piece of the project is in the works and is largely designed. It is a bit tricky to implement however, so it might be a little while before you see this up and live. I know some of you have heard me say this would be coming sooner, but given that we’ve had two customers interested in the past three days, we’re gonna focus on the features that they need for the time being.
• Adding an event and how much data we need to capture: A couple of you seemed to have difficulty adding a new event, specifically with venues and the number of required fields. Overall the suggestions centered around making less information required, especially venues.
  • Believe it or not, we actually require very little information to create an event and venue. Basically with a title, time, and address you can complete the entire process. Obviously this isn’t laid as smoothly as it could be - maybe we should take some basic information up front and put secondary information in a second set of input fields. I do however recognize this is going to be a tougher question as we are striking a balance between making the process simple and wanting users to put in more information than other event calendars. Look for us to solicit additional feedback as we approach this issue.
• Event & Venue pictures and other user content: Users can not simply upload photos about an event or post anything other than comments.
  • Our next version of the product will increase the amount of user generated content possible. We’ll look to include event reviews, venue reviews, the ability to share photos, and other options as well. Certainly not in the two week plan (as it is a bit complicated), but it is on our radar.
• Enhancing the “obviousness” of the thumbs up and down abilities: Many users have commented on the difficulty they had in finding the thumbs and down for an event or venue. 
  • Believe it or not, but those thumbs have gone through more revisions than I want to count! For a long time they were too obvious and obnoxious and we took effort to reduce the amount that they jumped off the page. Well, guess what happens when you develop in a cave for a few months? We stepped too far back in the other direction! We’ll look to clean those little guys up ASAP so that you can find them much easier in the future.
• Improved search options: Seems like many of you would like to have more searching/sorting functionality. I’ve heard requests for the ability to filter by different metrics, search for different timelines, and search for some categories and not others to name a few.
  • We’ve actually been heads down on search for the past few days implementing some additional functionality that will likely not be obvious at first blush. These improvements are setting the stage for our ability to create advanced search and filtering of the results much like the things everyone seems to be requesting.

Wow, just barely three days into alpha and we’ve already got a huge list of to-dos! All of them are fantastic and things we want to do. As I read back over the requests I’m impressed both by the things we saw coming and the things we didn’t!

Now comes one of the tougher parts of our job, actually trying to prioritize those issues that are most critical and that we need to add/mend right now, and which ones can wait a few weeks/months as we hammer out some of the other needs. One thing that will certainly affect our priority set are customers. We have been in conversations for some time now to bring on beta customers who will work with us both to implement and improve the product. In the near term future, we’ll be focused on solidifying aspects of the back-end support and those features which are most critical to our customers and their decision making.

I’m not saying we’ll be ignoring your suggestions - quite the contrary - many of your suggestions will be critical to our customers. But if you don’t see a sudden change in something you asked about, don’t be surprised. I promise it’s not because we are slacking off…

Oh and an FYI - look for more of our team to be posting to the blog in the coming weeks. I’d like the production team to be keeping everyone abreast of what major issues they are working on. That way as improvements and changes get made, you all can hear it right from the source. I don’t know if their style will be quite as witty and charming as mine, but then again who’s is?

Alpha is live.

I’m just going to let that settle in for a minute. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet.

Months of thought, discussion, debate, design, and iteration have all come down to this. Alpha is live.

Wow. I want to take a week off to catch up on sleep, friends, and my life. Nope, not gonna happen.

Time for beta, customers, investors, employees, and everything else. I think that might be the scariest and most exciting thing about building a startup. For every failure there are another 10 things you need to do. But for every success, there are a 100. 

For now, a good nights rest. For tomorrow we start on task 1. 99 to go.

Wikipedia defines an alpha release as “The alpha build of the software is the build delivered to the software testers, that is persons different from the software engineers, but usually internal to the organization or community that develops the software. In a rush to market, more and more companies are engaging external customers or value-chain partners in their alpha testing phase. This allows more extensive usability testing during the alpha phase.”

Say what you want about Wikipedia and whether or not it will ever make a valid source, but they are dead on here. Alpha is a chance for us as business owners to take the software out of the hands of the development team and have some of the QA department really take a look at the product. In many cases an alpha release is internal to the company - no one else is allowed to see or use it - especially given than an alpha release tends to be buggy and inconsistent.

No, we don’t have a formal QA department. Tristan and I do our best, but we’ve both got about 100 other jobs to do any given day, so we’re soliciting your help. Many of you’ve asked me for an invitation - and many of you haven’t. We want to see as many people using the product as possible and deep down I know you all want to play with it, so yes everyone will get an invitation. At least everyone who won’t go sharing our hard work with the press or our competitors.

It’s late Sunday night and we all still wish we had three more days to work on the product, but we’re sticking to schedule. We’ll deliver invites tomorrow morning and unleash a bevy of friends and supporters on Event Seek. Be kind, but be brutal. Tell us what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be fixed, and what needs to be added. Event Seek is a consumer driven application that is designed to help people discover and attend events - so tell us what we’re doing to support that and what we could be doing better.

Imagine you have an early pass to the development of facebook, MySpace, or Google. Think about how many times you’ve wished a website would do something differently or offer you different functionality - this is your chance. You have a great power, and with great power comes great responsibility - we need you to talk to us. Don’t just keep it to yourself when something doesn’t work right - tell us! Don’t mutter when you wish another feature existed - tell us! Links to the forums can be found in your alpha toolbar - don’t be shy.

This is our alpha launch of Event Seek, but this is your chance to shape a young product and a young company.

Our invitations to private alpha hit mailboxes monday morning. If you haven’t already signed up, send an email to MakeMeATester at event-seek.com and we’ll send an invite your way. It should be pretty cool to see all the neat things we’ve been working on. It’s time, as they say, to ship the product. We set a deadline for ourselves and have stuck to that deadline.

We will deliver alpha on time.

Is every last piece of functionality we dreamed up for alpha included? No.

Are their bugs that we don’t know about? Surely.

Are there bugs that we do know about? You betcha.

Are their portions of the website that could and probably should work better? Uh Huh.

Do I wish I had several more weeks to go back to the development team and get this thing right? More than you know.

It is time, however, to ship the product. It will inevitably have errors, minor bugs and things we wished we noticed before the launch, but that is okay. That is sort of the idea of an alpha launch - put a stake in the ground and push yourselves to deliver. We could spend the next three months building the product, getting it perfect and you know how we would feel three days before launch? Exactly the same we feel now - wishing we had  more time to go tweak.

There is another incredible benefit to a private alpha launch - customers. We get to see in a real live working environment what the consumers use, what they like, and what they find difficult. The best product design comes from customers and we want to harness that. Sure they’ll dream up ideas we’ll never be able to complete anytime soon, but I’ll bet more than anything else, they’ll want the very features we want and help us shape what those features should look like.

Is my development team wary of what people will say? Yeah. Should they be? Maybe a little. Am I? Of course. Do the vast benefits outweigh the risks? Damn straight. It’s time for Event Seek alpha.

We may not yet be ready for prime time, but much like “Magnum,” the preview is still pretty breathtaking.

Interested in testing our private alpha version of Event Seek? Yeah I thought so…

If you’d like to get a sneak peek at the product before everyone else, send an email to MakeMeATester [at] event-seek [dot] com.

The more the merrier!

(And yes, the funny email formatting is so that bots don’t find and spam us)