c’mon already!

I read a blog post by Michael Air tonight asking what happened to Sphere so I thought this was a good time to come out of a self imposed hibernation and let you know what’s going on.

We’re very much alive (and well!) Our private beta has been really great, awesome feedback along with some excellent constructive guidance. And, as Michael noted, the very positive blog reviews by some really great bloggers (John Battelle; Om Malik; Michael Arrington @ Techcrunch; Jeremy Zawodny; Paul Kedrosky @ Infectious Greed, etc) created a lot of excitement early on - a little too much perhaps. We spent December putting in place a new data center that can now handle substantial amounts of traffic. We can launch tomorrow if we want so our only hold up is ourselves.

End of December, we made a decision to add some very cool, advanced features to the site that we believe pushes the quality of blog discovery to a very different level. Delaying our launch was a very hard decision, one in which we went back and forth on for weeks. Ultimately, despite the great beta feedback, we felt it important to take a step back and work towards our larger goal. I’ve been involved with a number of start ups (Oddpost; Post Communications; Iconoculture; and Automattic/ Wordpress - by the way, this is my first post on the wordpress platform - very nice!) and I believe you need to trust your instincts. In this case, our instincts tell us we can do something really great so we’re focused on getting there. Once we launch (soon), it gets harder to develop, especially with a small team (we’re 4 people). So, we’re in that mode right now, hyper focused, making real progress at a fun rate.

In addition to version 2, we’ve had some excellent achievements that we look forward to sharing with everyone as we get closer to launch. In fact, we’re psyched to go live and get your feedback. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tony

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