Back for now

This is a long over due post. I apologize to my 3 loyal readers.
I recently realized that keeping a blog is great way to keep track of progress and chronicle the various processes of a startup.

Since the launch of uLiken.com we have been pretty busy working on different projects and enjoying the summer. Our main project is POPrl. POPrl is a URL shrinking service that ranks the popularity of it's URLs by tracking clicks. The site is live so feel free to check it our at www.poprl.com . You can also read the techcrunch post(http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/poprl-mixes-reddit-with-tinyurl-gets-strange-result/) the mashable post (http://mashable.com/2008/06/06/poprl-news-aggregator/) also a recent post on the inquisitr (http://www.inquisitr.com/2114/poprlcom/). You can google the rest, don't yahoo it(whatever that means).

Traffic is doing great and growing organically at a steady pace. We're also getting ready to push some new updates in next couple of days that i'm pretty excited about. If there's a feature you would like to see drop us an e-mail and i'll what i can do.

H-Hour

Through blind luck and clever planning we have somehow landed on Techcrunch. Before i go any further i would like to say thanks to Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch for his great work. That being said, the servers are taking a beating, visitors are pouring in. No major bugs have been found, just some minor browser issues (blame M$). I Personally recommend Firefox for the best user experience. I've had a long night preparing as much as i could, in the end you can only cross your fingers and hope everything goes to plan. I'm a strong believer that the user should dictate the functionality of the product, with that in mind please feel free to drop us an e-mail with an suggestions or angry letters.

You can checkout the Techcrunch post here http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/13/facemash-returns-as-what-else-a-facebook-app-uliken

D-Day

It seemed as if this day would never come, but it has. Tomorrow we officially launch our site uLiken.com. It's by no means finished nor perfect, but I've come to realize that it will never be.

My current efforts have shifted from product development to the unpleasant task of promoting the site and whoring myself to anyone that will listen. We would love to be featured on Techcrunch, but due to pedestrian nature of our product i find that highly unlikely. Maybe we should have built some sort of twitter/adobe air application. In either case it wouldn't hurt to try, so i will be sending out some e-mails, talking to a couple contacts and seeing what happens. Mashable is another great blog that focuses on social networking startups and news. Those attributes makes them a great fit for our startup, however they seem to only command 1/10th of the Techcrunch audience. None the less we would be lucky to be featured on either blog.

On the product development side we're working on minor bugs and some browser compatibility issues. We're also excited about the music category that we plan to roll out next month. We have big plans for that category, but if I've learned anything in last 7 months it's that things never go as planned. In either case i promise we will do our best push the envelope and create innovative products.