What is popularo? Click here.

Welcome to the limited beta launch of Popularo!
(limited meaning “public, but if capacity fills up, we’ll shut down signups for a while”)

A few things we need to tell you:

• Since we are just getting started, the system is pulling in RSS feeds to “seed” the database with articles to vote on and rank. Once more real people start submitting things over the next few days, we will turn off the RSS importer.
• The GUI is intentionally simple. We will soon be announcing a contest to skin the site, where the users create and submit a layout and then other users vote on the submitted layouts. The top three skins will be made available on the site for everybody to use. We felt this was a great way to get the users more involved in the site early on, and it allowed us to concentrate more of our initial development efforts on the algorithm instead of the look and feel.

If you have any problems, please use our help site.

Media inquiries please email media at popularo dot com

We’re still tweaking things even though we are launching our limited beta tonight…

“Does this voting button look better than the one we have?” was the most recent discussion, and so here we are changing the voting button to be something new.  I wasn’t sure about it at first, but now that it’s on the site I really like it (but don’t tell Chris, he’ll just say “I told you so”).

Ok, back to work…  Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed and remember to come back tonight at 7PM EST for our launch!

Another long day, and we’re one day closer to launching on Monday 2/25

Subscribe to the RSS feed so you remember to come back

We wrote the other day about how we were building some of popularo using Amazon’s Web Services, and how we were concerned about it after the outage the other day.  Well, after some internal discussion and research, it looks like we are going to use Mosso’s Cloud Computing Service when we launch.  TechCrunch has a good article about them today, as does GigaOM and ReadWriteWeb.

I like the fact that MySQL is clustered at Mosso, unlike MediaTemple (who we also like), and it’s REAL MySQL, not the wacky SimpleDB “not a database” thing that Amazon offers.  As TC points out, pricing is higher than AWS , but this really does seem like a case of you get what you pay for.

As promised, here is a little bit more information.

About popularo: We wanted to build a site where voting was based solely on the the popularity of the content, not on the popularity of the submitter. All content has the same chances of making it to our front page no matter who submits it, even the founders. We fully embrace the feedback of our users instead of ignoring them for three years and then trying to play catch-up.

Josh Catone wrote a great post today about letting the users define the application, and since building what the users want is the whole premise behind popularo (more on that in a later blog post, I promise), I wanted to link to his post. Get clickin…

In our early beta version, we are using some of Amazon’s web services (namely S3 and SimpleDB) - but have been considering using our own storage and database instead. With today’s outage I’m not sure if AWS is a great strategy for us.

We don’t have huge amounts of data to store like some companies (smugmug comes to mind), so using AWS was mostly for the peace of mind that we would be able to scale quickly after our beta goes public and all of Digg’s users abandon them for us <evil laugh>. We have a meeting tomorrow to take a closer look at our strategy for handling lots of new traffic in a short period of time, and I have to say that it doesn’t seem likely that Amazon will be included in the party.

If only I knew what was popular so I could write about it…