Hot Potato

• Nov 23, 2009
  

  Tweaks!

  By saadiq

  With launch barely behind us, we’ve started in on some fixes, updates and optimizations, as promised.  Today was a busy day.

  A few people mentioned that the color scheme made areas of the site difficult to read.  I suggested we buy everyone new monitors and have them all calibrated exactly to ensure all the subtle nuances of our palette could be appreciated.  Sadly, someone pointed out that our investors probably wouldn’t appreciate that. Instead, we’ve updated elements of the design to be more forgiving.

  We updated the sort order for events in an effort to improve discoverability.  The intent is to help you find the most interesting events currently happening.  Hopefully we’re now just a little bit closer.

  We have also included improvements to how you share messages in the stream to Twitter and Facebook.  Getting your friends in on the fun has become even easier.

  There were also some tweaks behind the scenes that should make things more responsive.  That was today.  Imagine what we’ll have tomorrow.

  The iPhone app… we’re looking forward to you playing with it and while we can’t control the process, we are deeply hopeful that you won’t have to wait much longer.

  We’ve also seen some great events created, like Startup Weekend NYC yesterday.  Keep ‘em coming and if you have any recommendations on how we can improve your experience, please let us know.  Feedback links are on the site and you can find us on twitter at @HotPotatoHQ.

  -Saadiq

• Nov 22, 2009
  

  Hot Potato Launch

  By justinshaffer

  Friday was really exciting for the whole team at Hot Potato. We launched at the Techcrunch Realtime CrunchUp and got some nice coverage from Techcrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, and VentureBeat, amongst others. We’d like to thank everyone for their support and kind words. Perhaps most importantly, we’d like to emphasize that hotpotato.com (and our forthcoming iPhone application) represent version 0 of Hot Potato and we’re already hard at work making both incremental improvements to hotpotato.com and the iPhone app. We really appreciate your feedback (there’s a nice thread running here: http://htp.to/7zXYEW ). You can reach us by clicking the support link on the side of the page anywhere on hotpotato.com. We’re also @HotPotatoHQ on Twitter.

  In the spirit of transparency, our focus over the next 24 hours or so is in the following categories:

  - Making sure the iPhone app is available ASAP (it’s in Apple’s hands - and they’ve been very supportive and positive, so we hope its coming soon!)

  - Bug fixes and usability/cross-browser fixes

  - Making it easier to find the most real-time discussion and see what your friends are doing on hotpotato.com

  - Making it easier to tell your friends what you’re doing and ask them to join you. Talking to yourself isn’t any fun.

  We’re really excited to see what you all end up using Hot Potato for. Any event that more than a few people that are interested is a great opportunity to try it out. You can even use it to document a personal experience that you might like to share with your friends as its happening. On the other end of the spectrum, we’re looking forward to connecting many groups of friends around larger events like sports and concerts.

  Thanks again for your support from the entire team of us (Jace, Jeremy, Lincoln, and Saadiq).

  -Justin Shaffer

  justin at hotpotato dot com

• Oct 23, 2009
  

  Tap tap.. is this thing on?

  By justinshaffer

  Thanks for coming by. We’ll be posting regularly once we get launched, but in the meantime we thought we’d at least say hello.