It was a protracted labour, but we want you to know the baby is doing just fine. After a week of 15-19 hour contractions, we publicly launched a preview of Rilli to the world at Launch Party. The event was an incredible success for us, and the enthusiasm of the crowd was a great boost. We gave close to 200 walkthroughs and had some great chats with Vancouver’s best and brightest. Thanks to Strutta for putting on the event and to everyone who came and said hi and traded energy and ideas!
Read on…
Break out the cigars, it’s a perfectly healthy baby social lens.
Do you ever wonder what Rilli is?
February is a big month for such a little Rilli.
How to “Monetize,”
as the Undead Refer to It.
One of the things we’re beginning to work on is how Rilli can one day pay us an honest wage; how to “monetize,” as the undead refer to it.
Facing Up
Some of you may have noticed that Andrew, Colin and I have been plastering our names, photos and faces all over everything we create for Rilli.
Our home page has a photo of us holding a banner and lists our names.
Our blog page (which you are viewing right now) also has our unsightly mugs in the header.
We just got new business cards and, lo and behold, the front of the cards features our faces in Rilli markers.
So what’s the deal? Are we so in love with ourselves that we feel the need stick our names and photos on everything we create? Well, maybe a little. However, there are some less masturbatory reason we are doing this.
URLs are people too
It’s getting close to SXSW, which is (for the uninitiated) an unlikely mix of a spring break booze up and Star Trek convention. This of course means it’s time for new business cards!
We recently had an interesting discussion about what information we should put on these new cards. In the end, we made a somewhat bold move and left off email and other contact details in favor of a simple URL.
Why? Well, because we don’t really want to get more email. In many ways, email is where ideas go to die, as my friend Boris Mann famously says. A URL (marked up with microformat goodness) will point people to additional ways to get more information themselves, or to contact us through alternate means. It feels a little like Apple leaving off the disk drive on their original iMacs, but I think it’s a neat idea. Email is broken, and I love the fact that there is this URL that represents me (similar in concept to how an OpenID is just a URL).
You can check out the online component to our new cards here.
(blog post excerpted from MixedContent)
A series of fortunate events
(or how we aquired rilli.com)
Wild times over here. We’ve got less than a week before we take our wares down to SXSW in Austin, Texas. We’re toiling on an update to Rilli the likes of which it has never seen (seriously, I mean it) which should land… at the last possible second of course. And, very happily, We just got our hands on a brand spanking new 5 letter domain name – rilli.com!
Rilli Mobile
We’ve just opened up the beginnings of our iPhone web app (http://dev.rillirilli.com/iphone/) to our testers! So far, it’s a simple set of lists: recent comments, today’s events, this week’s events and an activity overview. Of course we’re working on all kinds of more interesting goodies.
What kind of goodies you ask? All will be revealed. Read on…
Instant Gratification
One of the patterns we’ve noticed while picking apart successful online communities is what we’re referring to as Instant Gratification. Instant gratification means not having to log in, sign up, post, search, make decisions, or try to figure out site structure in order to find meaningful content and experiences right away.
Hello
We’re going to be using this space talk about our process and what we learn while making Rilli. At the very least, it will give us a space to collect and articulate our own thoughts. At best, you might get something out of it as well.
Here we go.