Listen, do da do, do you want to know a secret?

swamygee — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:51:09 +0000

Seriously, I’m not that much of a beatles fan, the song was just playing on the radio a while ago. Anyway there’s something we thought you should know, something that’s been bothering us ever since the site went live. Right from the start, when we decided to create yiktik, we felt only the users should control in deciding the fate of the stories. We wanted the whole process to be really fair and simple. The big issue right now is that the stories that you see there, right now on the site, well, they haven’t been really posted by users that the site shows. Certain users in the site right now are just as real as Santa Claus. Well here’s the deal, when we launched the site a week ago, we saw it was completely devoid of life without any user activity. Imagine if some prospective users lands on an empty site? He would immediately just click the back button and scram off. So we thought we should fill the site with news items ourselves. But then, submitting hundreds of stories by just 2 or 3 real users really wouldn’t make the site look alive now, would it? So a decision was made, we agreed that we would create some 10 or so users and submit stories under those names. That was a real tough decision, since from the beginning we thought we would take a back seat when it comes to submissions and ratings (unless of course it was something that would get us in jail). It wasn’t just submission we stopped with, we had to rate the news as well and comment on it too, just so people who stumble upon the site, would really know how well it can be used. Is this unethical? I still can’t tell for sure, well atleast you’re hearing this direct from the horses mouth instead of getting it from other blogs. Atleast we aren’t filling up the site with fake profiles under the names of Neha, Anita, Priya or Sunny complete with steamy hot photos of theirs, you know, like how most social networking sites do to grab users. Co-incidentally we found out this was how reddit got started too, when those 4 guys initially launched their site, for a month or so they had to submit their own stories and mod it up or down. That was a kinda of relief to us. I just hope that all these 10 or so “fake” users soon get replaced by real ones. I just thought I should let people know about this. Post your thoughts in the comments.

Dawn of a new Era

swamygee — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:53:07 +0000

Huh? That was just to grab your attention. It has been a week since our beloved yiktik was launched quietly and after countless hours of testing and fixing bugs and making sure everything’s doing what its supposed to be doing, we finally sent out invites to our friends and family today. Though a majority of our friends and family are not exactly the type of people who would really be interested in mergers and acquisitions or other such “serious news” , they quietly obliged to atleast click on the link in the invite and pay the site a visit (as visible from our access logs). We also sent a mail to all the famous blogs on the Indian web scene to review us, don’t know how that’s gonna turn out for now. All-in-all, it feels like a great load of weight has been lifted from our heads and that old feeling of accomplishing something has finally settled in each of us. Though we understand that if the site were ever to grow (and we’re pretty optimistic for now), it would grow only gradually, there’s this hidden feeling inside us which wonders “what if suddenly there are 10,000 users by next week, wouldn’t that be exciting?”. Nothing can be done about that, I figure, except let it gradually die down. For now, we are just glad to have finally pushed the launch button so we could sit back and take a breather for a while. And finally to all our friends out there, thanks for the support and your friendly criticisms, and keep submitting those stories!

Yiktik's Weblog

Listen, do da do, do you want to know a secret?

Dawn of a new Era