Roadmap

Creating and launching this website is going to be broken down into projects. Out of habit, I'm going to use the set of NASA project names for each phase.

Mercury

The original Project Mercury's goal was to develop space technology and safely put a human into orbit. Similarly, the goal of our Project Mercury is to develop our application technology and enable a small group of known testers to make full use of the site without encountering any errors.

Mercury focuses on the basic features: User Accounts, s, Friendships, Posts & Comments, Reactions, and Messages. The Feed Algorithm will be dumb: Posts of Friends and Public Posts, listed from most recent to least recent. We want to make sure that the foundation supporting the mechanics of user interactions is solid.

Gemini

The original Project Gemini focused on developing the technology and procedures to execute an entire mission in space. Our Project Gemini will develop the mechanisms for enhancing the interactions and engagement among Friends, expand the information kept in a (public profile), and act on what we learn from Mercury.

Tagging friends and providing notifications of activity in tagged Posts will be a focus. We do not plan to directly moderate conent for all users from on high. Instead we'll introduce a form of Community Censure, inspired by concepts that have worked at Wikipedia for years. Probably won't get it right the first time, but you'll definitely have something to react to. The Feed Algorithm will get smarter, and though we won't have a large user base, the smarts will also lay the groundwork for Friend Suggestions.

We'll introduce the limits of the Free Tier that are discussed in the Philosophy and refine them so they are as little abrasive and negative as possible. The goal is to keep the Free Tier useful and enjoyable, not to force users to pay to have any kind of good experience at all.

The user inteface will get some attention as well. Feedback from the testers will be important for finalizing how all the pieces of the site will look for launch.

Apollo

The original Apollo Project of course actually went to the moon, but not until the 11th mission of the project. For us, Apollo will get us to a public launch of the website.

All the features of inviting new users to the platform (and subsequently registering) will be open for use — our testers will be able to expand our test group themselves. (We might limit the total number of all users; we'll see.) We will polish the user interface and try to make any consfusing features more friendly.

We have no plans to develop any advertising of any kind. Similarly, we do not plan to support a forum for selling things, a calendar to promote events, s for entities other than people, games, or other vehicles for proucing revenue. That's not why we're here.

Hosting and streaming video is not on the drawing board because it is so resource intensive. Yes, the other platforms are very video heavy now. We are going throwback on purpose and know we may not appeal to anyone younger than Gen X, or maybe Millenials.

Pioneer

Obviously, opening up a web page is less convenient than having an app. An email inbox full of notificaitons is terrible compared to app notifications. But we can't build an app in parallel with building the website, because we will be refining our ideas as we go. We can't do that refinement process twice and at the same time. We just don't have the capacity.

That said, if this platform becomes popular at all, it'll need to be done. At some point as the website becomes more refined, we'll start Pioneer to create a companion iOS app. It likely will start out limited, just like the website grew over time. But we want the experience to be consistent between the two platforms. We don't want y'all to have to learn six different ways to do the same thing depending on where you're using a piece of functionality.

So if the initial lack of an app is frustrating, we will get there. If the initial lack of an app is a deal-killer please let us know.

Mariner

A native Android app is going to be at the back of the line behind the website and an iOS app. There are plenty of Android phones out there, but with a web app avaiable, precious development effort can't be divided between too many Shiny Things.

If the resoruces become available and if there is an audience wanting an Android app, there's no animosity toward producing one. I just don't think it will happen any time soon, and certainly not if the userbase does not grow to a critical-mass size.