CrowdEye has certainly gotten more attention than we ever dreamed of for our first Beta. It’s clear that the world is hungry for *useful* views on the firehose of social data from services like Twitter.
We are busy making changes to our service in response to the feedback and usage patterns we’ve seen — more about that another day, but let me say that we are incredibly excited about the positive and constructive feedback we’ve gotten from you all — please keep it coming. Boy are we happy to be “in the game,” and we are confident that our future changes will be ones that lots of people will enjoy.
We get asked a lot how we can move so quickly with such a small team, so I wanted to take a moment to answer that question.
The answer is that we are not really a small team — we include in our extended team many big and small companies that provide platform/service components that we make significant use of including: Twitter, Amazon AWS, Microsoft BizSpark and more.
Each of these is very significant in our ability to innovate, and we owe a big “Thank you” to each of them.
Twitter has been a model of openness and customer focus throughout. We wish that some other companies would follow their model — especially as they see how successful a strategy it has been.
We run our service on Amazon EC2, SimpleDB and S3. The efficiencies we’ve seen have been tremendous. I never dreamed I’d be able to work on building such a complex service from the ground up and never even step foot in a data center.
Microsoft’s BizSpark has been equally helpful to us. We love the .NET platform, Visual Studio, and windows server. Like any good platform, these tools have enhanced our productivity dramatically while causing almost no problems.
In addition, we have found countless other tools and services that we can take advantage of for free or very cheap including Bing API and LoadStorm. And, last but not least, we would have been lost without the community of developers that have posted the answer to almost every problem we have encountered on various forums around the web.
If there’s interest, we’ll blog about our use of these platforms in more detail — tell us if you want to hear it!
And once again, a big “Thank You!” from CrowdEye to Twitter, Amazon and Microsoft!
CrowdEye's Blog 