On Life...
We went out to our
favorite Rib joint last night, I think I'm going to have to eat salad for the next three weeks to get back right. It's all about the beef ribs though.
The smog here (well, not Huntington Beach, but LA) is disgusting. I'm pretty sure the folks who say SoCal is the most beautiful place in the country really haven't been to that many places. It's Central Florida with a dash of Miami plus crime, pollution, traffic and smog. We saw a plane land last night and you could see the smog rolling off of the wings, no joke. Three cheers for asthma I guess...
We haven't hung out at the beach yet, though I'm sure we will. I'll try to judge it with an open mind, but as
Wayne pointed out in a comment on an earlier post, the oil rigs really do kind of kill it.
We helped Kathryn get her office off the ground on Saturday though. We met a lot of great folks, including the Congressman from this area. He's a really funny, laid back guy.
On Work...
Netscape's going well, we just need to get that new hardware online asap. We have some servers on the west coast that are causing some headaches, but we can't take them offline until we get more servers to take their place. Catch-22. The big thing this will solve is the annoying sign in over and over stuff. It should only be happening to a very small percentage of users at any given time, but it's annoying as sin. The work around for it is to click the "remember me" option, at least, I think -- I can never seem to recreate the problem myself.
The dev team has been kicking ass and staying on top of the bug list. Tom and Andy are at it again doing some really neat stuff with the friends functionality, so stay tuned. That'll probably be the "visible" addition of the week.
Andy's also cleaned up the front page some, moving around certain items to make the design a bit less cluttered feeling. He's got some really slick design mocks of a "non-digg" look. Whenever we have a bit of time, we talk about different interface approaches. It'll probably be a little while before we switch to something different though, the masses can only handle culture shock so many times ;)
On Emurse...
We hit 1000 users sometime during the week, though we were too busy with Netscape (in addition to
TMZ for
Gavin) to notice exactly when. We're still sporting about a 67% active user base, which is stellar in my opinion. We're planning on unveiling some pay services for the site soon. The general functionality (what's already available) will continue to be free, since we really believe in offering as much to the user as possible, but we think it's important to start building out the business model early.
Expect to see a "plus" account with more features and resume templates, which is slated for $25 a year. Competing services seem to charge about three times that, but I mean.. A college kid who can really benefit from the service simply can't afford that kinda flow. We'll probably do a "premium" level account down the road, but I think $25 a year is more than reasonable coming out the gate.
We also have a review service (pricing is being researched now) that should be online in the next couple weeks. Gavin has already written the bulk of the backend, we just need to get the CSS straightened out so it doesn't look like poo (we're big believers in interface design, especially since we get to work with such a
badass.)
If you have any suggestions for us, we're listening. Any insight into pricing structures would be helpful too ;)
