alpha testers

[saltpro15]

Hello all, hope you all had a good christmas! A friend of mine is working on a social networking site called Sokanu and we're looking for alpha testers for when it launches. It's written in python I believe. All you need to do for now is sign up, I'll repost in this thread (or you'll get an email notification) when it launches. The purpose of this is to get maximum feedback on the site and of course, test how well it runs with a lot of traffic . Thanks in advance.

[ecookman]

All right I signed up.

Do you have any idea when the alpha will launch?
(Just so I don;t forget about it[I will set a reminder])

[andrew.]

I also signed up for it. It would be amazing if this became the next Facebook.

[[Gandalf]]

It would be nice if you gave a bit more detail before telling people to sign up... "Social networking" is a very broad and buzz-y term.

[Tony]

If you plan on testing something, especially along the lines of a "social network", you really need to have a plan that's better than "throw some users at a website".

First -- most of the core features would not even be touched, unless testing users join a social group and are aware of each other. Think about using Facebook with 0 contacts on your list.

A good idea is to have a list of "goals" for users to achieve -- "friend a person", "make a post", etc. This exercises the features, bootstraps activity, and you can ask usability questions (was this task easy to complete? How's the UI?).

Ask questions. You are much more likely to get valuable feedback if you ask for specific things, rather than just hope that testing users will write up good feedback on their own.

[saltpro15]

sorry guys, haven't been at the computer for a while. The site should launch first quarter of 2010.

and Tony, thanks for the advice!

edit:

and Gandalf, I posted as much as I know, hopefully I'll be able to get more details from him soon

[Dan]

asp running on IIS.....

I hope they have some good scalability plans.

[sthomps]

Hey guys,

Sorry, just found this topic through a search engine. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sokanu, and really appreciate you signing up for our alpha. While we are in stealth mode, I will give you a little more info on what we are building.

Sokanu aims to be a Web 3.0 company for helping people discover their passion in life. Many career sites match up individuals with jobs, employers, etc... in a specific field. What about finding that specific field? There is a step before applying for that career. Most people are not happy in their career choices, and we aim to fix that. Our original demographic is between the ages of 16-24, because of the high % of individuals deciding what they want to do with the rest of their life.

The social network is merely the beginning of the process. Social networking has been around for around 7 years now and nothing transformative has happened. We aim to change this. Our private alpha will be very basic, with just the main layer of the site done and the ability to use, add content and begin to build a solid base. The real goodies will come out once we have tested, iterated and then moved on to beta. Web 3.0 is the web of personal interaction design with each individuals, and we aim to do this through an intelligent learning engine.

We will hopefully be launching the private alpha in the next month or two. And yes, it's being built on .NET. .NET allows for excellent scalability and is optimal for iteration. If you have any questions please feel free to email me at spencer@sokanu.com

Thanks everyone!