Sorry for the wait; SoIndustry.com, an industry-focused broadcasting tool with a mission statement to ‘help you to keep in touch with your industry’, is the product that has been in an extended stealth development period here at Web Appropriate - but it’s now live in a private beta, and you can register an account right now.
SoIndustry takes inspiration from existing social web applications & micro-blogging services (as first outlined in the Web Appropriate ‘About’ page many, many months ago) mixes in concepts which I’ve really wanted to see on the Web, refines previously existing user interactions, and pitches/wraps-up/packages it all in a way that isn’t available anywhere else.
There’s so much more that could be said here, but the site itself will do a better job and it would be fantastic to have you registered and using the service and giving real feedback, rather than just reading about SoIndustry. If you’ve already signed-up, we’ll be activating your account asap. If you know someone already using SoIndustry, they can send you a beta invitation with which you can jump the queue.
The Web Appropriate Blog will be used for posting information about running a UK web startup, so please stay tuned, or subscribe to the RSS feed, if you haven’t done so already.
I love all the one-click features on the Dreamhost control panel, and I even enjoy all the fun & games they get up to, in a strange way. However, the time has come for a new, improved, and more reliable host to step-up to the challenge. So, as a Web Appropriate reader/visitor, I’d love to know which web hosting provider you entrust with important task of serving your sites, blogs, & apps, and why you chose them over everyone else. Is it the price, is it the support, is it their understanding of your favourite development platforms?
Or do you have any recommendations for alternatives to Dreamhost? My specifications are as follows (in case you need a little more info):
They don’t have to have the one-click installs; I’m just about capable of handling WordPress, MySQL, and even Rails deployments now.
They don’t need to be UK-based (most UK outfits seem to be pretty sub-par; I had quite a bad experience with Fashosts/UK Reg, and that was without even having a live site running on their servers!).
A good customer service track record, and compatibility with the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Django, Rails etc (I appreciate Rails can be tricky with shared hosts). I think these two go hand-in-hand; your ability to launch a site on a new web development framework can seriously suffer through less-than-optimal customer service!
Decent scalability through their pricing structure, i.e. their cheaper services are as good as their high-bandwidth services.
It’s over a year old, but this video of the MyBlogLog founders speaking at TechStars 07 is just fantastic. There’s a huge amount of proven advice packed-in, and as such the video hits over an hour in length. But if you’re doing a startup, and your still open to taking advice from experienced entrepreneurs in your valuable time away from frantic coding, this is one hour of you life that you won’t mind sacrificing (I’m pretty sure they covering everything you need to know - it’s fascinating):
There’s one question that’s really been at the forefront of my mind ever since Facebook joined the Data Portability group; where will customers go if their data is truly portable?
Well, for starters, I think they’ll stay in exactly the same place. They won’t move an inch until budged. And, in my world, that means Facebook (social side), LinkedIn (business side), and Twitter (twitterings/random musings/thoughts - yes, it’s in a world of it’s own) will continue to hold the top spots.
However, times will change, and people will leave today’s top social networking sites due to boredom, spam, and post-acquisition development wind-down time. The services that will win, in the long run, are those that articulate your data in the most precise, useful, and well-presented way. Quite simply, if people can take their data wherever they wish, they’ll definitely take it to the service with the best interface.
As a (UK-based) Web start-up, every social Web app that comes out of Web Appropriate will need a strategy for data portability. So, ours will be to strive for the cleanest, well-interpreted interfaces out there. Being closed probably won’t be a strategy for much longer; offering well designed products will always be a good business proposition, no matter how much widgetisation occurs on the Web.
