If you’ve signed up for an invite on our home page you’re probably wondering where the heck your invite is. Well, we discovered that we weren’t quite where we wanted to be in terms of usability, features and supported services.

We are working feverishly to get a few more features in place before we release another huge wave of invites. Anyone on our current waiting list (if you’ve signed up on the home page) should be receiving an invite in the next week or so.

We thank you for your patience as we try and make this the best possible experience for our users. We look forward to sharing this app with all of you who have show an interest and will be doing so very soon.

In the meantime please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Take care.

Ben, Ben and Ryan
BlueSwarm.org

We’ve sent out a few invites to friends and a few bloggers and a few reviews have started to trickle in…just wanted to say thanks to the below who reviewed or mentioned us:

Mashable.com
“…It’s very basic for now, but give them some more development time and this one may be pretty useful.”

I Hereby Decree
“I hereby decree that BlueSwarm is amazing…very well put together. I wish them the best of luck.”

InternetDuctTape.com
“I was trying out Blue Swarm the other day and they are using a very slick widget from Plaxo that does easy address book imports. All web startups should use this, since email address contacts are the only universal data format for identifying your friends on the web.”

After months of hard work, we’re in private beta. Invites have already gone out and we’ll be sending out a lot more over the next couple days, so please sign up on our homepage if you’d like to check it out. We’re incredibly excited to see what everyone out there thinks of what we’ve been building. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks!

Viva la Swarm…

-ryan, ben, and ben

How much can you get away with when you have amazing design on your side.? Ryan and I were recently discussing how big of a role design plays as it relates to startups. Some examples of sites that didn’t have the best design when they launched yet have been very successful: del.icio.us (though not bad design, it’s definitely simple) and the original digg.com. These sites have come a long way, but when they started they certainly didn’t have design as a top priority. I guess my feeling is that if you have a good designer on your side (which we do) and you are able to design it off the bat that’s great. But I don’t know if you can get there on design alone, especially if you’re not an established player in the industry.

What’s interesting is how it changes once you do have some successful projects in the bag. It seems that once you’ve become relatively successful you can get away with more design over functionality. Two examples come to mind.

Recently a popular tech icon launched a new much anticipated application. It was announced on Diggnation as Kevin Rose’s new venture. With styling to the max the app looked promising, excellent work by Daniel Burka. Being big fans of digg.com, Diggnation and Kevin Rose, all of us here at Blueswarm.org were excited about this new venture, hoping that Kevin would match the success he’s having with digg.com. Since its private launch, pownce.com has gotten mixed reviews. Tonight I got my invite and eagerly signed up, ready to make up my own mind about it. After completing the registration process (which went smoothly), I’m sorry to say I was underwhelmed. I landed on what I assume to be my primary ‘home’ screen and was at a loss as to what to do from there. Fortunately there was a well placed notice with that very question and a 4 step answer to it. Steps one and two (inviting and adding friends, and downloading pownce’s software) are somewhat necessary to get to step three where the actual value comes in. But “Then start sending messages, files, links and events!” hardly seems like an innovation. It seemed that whatever need this app was attempting to fulfill has already been done by other apps in a better way, or maybe never really existed in the first place. But given Kevin’s popularity in this space and how slick the app is I believe that pownce.com has the potential to be quite popular.

The second example that comes to mind is the iPhone. I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy. There products have been out of my price range for the most part, but I have an iPod and iBook that I wouldn’t trade for the world (well, unless I had to choose between my family and them… though… no I would definitely choose my family… well… NO, family first). So when the iPhone was announced I flipped out. I had been waiting for a data phone that would integrate with my Mac and I knew that with Apple’s touch it would be amazing. Apple has done a lot of good in the last few years continuing with their solid line of computers and of course the iPod. But the iPhone might be their first mistake in awhile. It looks amazing. The styling and overall slickness of it can’t be denied. But the list of cons on the other hand make that luster diminish quickly. How could Apple neglect such basic thing like a faster network, or the ability to do voice and data simultaneously (thanks EDGE), one-way sync on iCal, and a long list of others? And yet it sold 700,000 in the first weekend, making the Razr look like nothing. How does design trump functionality in a $600 product?

I don’t really know how to wrap this up, now that I’ve spent the last few paragraphs ranting about things I’m nowhere near an expert on. I think that styling counts, a lot in most cases, but I don’t think it can take precedence over functionality (art for art’s sake excluded). We are striving to do both with BlueSwarm. We are blessed to have a great designer on our team and that frees Ryan and I to focus on functionality. Hopefully we can meld the two and provide our users a good balance. Please help us in this by pointing out where our design or functionality doesn’t make any sense. We are open to critisism and would love to get any kind of feedback from our users, good or bad.

Take care.
-Ben R.

July 7th is rapidly approaching. We decided that we needed to set a definitive date for our launch and since then time seems to be speeding up. It’s amazing how quickly days slip by when you’re working 16 hours a day. Late nights, early mornings and everything in between distorts your perception of time after awhile (though all the caffeine and energy drinks might have something to do with it). Pretty much everything in our lives has been put on hold as we try to kill the bugs and finish adding the last few features. We have cleared our schedules for the next week and we should be ready to go by Saturday. We are super excited to share with the world what we have been busy building. We are excited to see what kind of reaction we get. We just hope that it will be useful for people. As Ryan has said before, we have tried to create something that we wanted to use ourselves and we think there are people out there with the same needs. Remember to sign up to be a Beta tester on the home page if you want to get a look at it.

-Ben R.

When we started this project almost a year ago, we snagged BlueSwarm.org for our domain name. It fit (.org as in organism) and we figured we could try and pick up the .com eventually. This was a big mistake. The closer we got to launching this thing, and the more we realized that we wanted to take this project seriously, the more we wanted blueswarm.com. Once we launched, the price would go up dramatically. However, the gentleman who owned it didn’t want to sell (he thought the name was cool). After talking to him several times over the course of the last year or so, we finally were able to come to an agreement. It wasn’t cheap, but it was a lot cheaper than losing a bunch of traffic or having to pay 5 - 10x as much down the road. We’re planning to keep .org as our branding and just redirect all the .com traffic to .org, but we may change our mind…everything is a work in progress Just wanted to share our news and say thanks to the guy who sold it to us.

Viva la Swarm!
-Ryan

We’ll be the first to admit that we’re not experts or anything when it comes to web development. Watching us bumble through simple problems would probably keep Digg’s userbase entertained for weeks. I’m already dreading Uncov’s review of our javascript However, we’d like to think that we’re able to learn from our mistakes. Today, our mistake was that we hadn’t been checking our site’s design in IE6 regularly. Needless to say, things were completely buggered.

However, the weirdest thing was this random bug where some links on our site would show a white page, with the URL in the address bar being of the page we were coming from, instead of the page we were actually supposed to be on after clicking the link. Upon hitting refresh, the page would display correctly. View source didn’t work, so there was no source file, and it only happened on certain links, despite there being no apparent difference between those links and links that functioned correctly. Inspecting