I’ve worked in the WordPress world for well over 10 years, yet I don’t think I have ever actually written a blog post. This will be nice.
We are excited about Postmatic and are glad you are here with us.
It feels fantastic to have developed this technology and now be so close to sharing it with the rest of the world.
Where we are now
This will be easier to understand with a little bit of product overview. We have broken the technology up into a number of products, two of which we will be releasing this year:
- Comments by Postmatic: The free widely available WordPress plugin which allows for subscribing by email, and replying by the same. It’s on this site right now and perhaps you are even using it.
- Postmatic: The more exciting big brother which focuses on community collaboration, crowdsourcing, and machine-assisted emergence.
Comments by Postmatic is wrapping up development while the core Postmatic product is still a few months out. The remainder of this post will only discuss Comments by Postmatic.
Alpha testing
The launch of this blog coincides with the beginning of our alpha testing of Comments by Postmatic. All of the core technology is in place and we are performing small scale testing in a variety of hosting environments among a small network of brave friends. We hope our alpha will be just a week.
Pilot program
As soon as things feel solid with alpha we will roll out our pilot testing program to a larger number of a few dozen well known WordPress sites. We do not yet have any commitments but we have identified about 100 high profile sites that are perfect candidates and ought to have more comments!
If you know of any WordPress sites that might be good candidates for the pilot program please leave a comment.
What makes a good pilot?
- A blog which is not hosted on wordpress.com…
- with commenting enabled…
- which does not run a 3rd party commenting system such as Disqus or Facebook Comments.
If you know of a blog that might be a good fit but you are unsure go ahead and let us know anyway. We’ll figure it out for you.
Beta testing
If all goes well with the pilot we’ll enter beta about two weeks later. We are going to seed the beta program using a combination of social media and viral (i hate the word but it’s true!) techniques. In this case it’s simple: every email Postmatic sends of a post or comment during the pilot program will contain a link in the footer saying Delivered by Postmatic. Clicking that will bring them to a beta signup site.
Public launch
We hope to be in beta for less than two weeks and then launch officially in the WordPress plugin repository shortly thereafter.
What we need from you
Let us know of interesting pilot projects. That would be the best help right now. What blogs are you reading? What’s exciting right now? Who needs a little help?. Leave them as a comment here. If you happen to have a contact at the blog in question let us know.
Thanks for keeping in touch,
Jason