Thanks to Marc Köhlbrugge’s wonderful betali.st, I have been able to occupy myself over the past couple months with trying out an obscene number of pre-release web apps. As a web developer and budding entrepreneur, I have a vested interest in being able to look at new web apps with a critical eye, for the sake of my own projects.
I’ve noticed some interesting trends among the betali.st startups as an early follower and end user. With brevity in mind, I’ll be going over my experiences with each of the startups and their (sometimes) cool apps. I have not been interested in trying every single app, and some that I have tried did not draw me in enough to warrant further exploration… With that disclaimer, here is my amateur analysis of each startup. Some of them will be crude, some of them will be basic, I just hope they’re interesting. I apologize in advance if I offend any founders, oops!
First impressions, it simply looks beautiful. Great site design, unique user experience, very easy to use. Aside from that, the concept is brilliant and I love being able to scroll through my social timeline back to when Facebook was still cool. My only question would be how they expect to monetize this, but I trust that they’ll find a way (or just get tons of funding).
I love the minimalistic design. The demo video makes it very clear what this site does, and it is extremely useful for those of us with tens of thousands of e-mails (or even 100,000+) and no clue when we got what attachments. Once your account has been crawled, your attachments are very easy to navigate. My one wish would be that it list the contents of compressed files and index the content of documents for easier searching. Very clever concept.
This is a personal favorite. The design is super simple and despite the obscenely large visuals I find it very aesthetically appealing. These days I’m connected to more web apps than I can count
and ifttt makes it very easy to define automated interactions between them. I worry that this might be a “bridge technology” but regardless its a very fun tool to use. My one gripe is that I’m not creative enough for it…I still haven’t been able to come up with a truly useful trigger/action combination.
Love the name. Reminds me of FriendFeed combined with TweetDeck. The design is somewhat generic, though easy on the eyes. It feels unoriginal overall, which is fine, but I don’t think its the best app out there for managing multiple networks. The one feature I absolutely love and that I think is somewhat revolutionary is the ability to easily separate your personal and business social profiles. Awesome idea. Last comment is that it is very difficult to use a site like this without an existing and large userbase, but no harm in trying…can’t build the userbase without launching first.
Generic Web 2.0-ey design, though I like that it dares to go beyond the fold… This is merely another variation on the plethora of project management tools out there and doesn’t really have much to distinguish it from the crowd. It just makes me pine for Google Wave, which was a far superior product.
Very cool concept, especially with my recent attempts to use the CR-48 for web development. In general, I much prefer to build my pages with straight HTML/CSS (no WYSIWYG) but Buildor Pro is an interesting take on the traditionally desktop-based web design program. I’m not sure its yet at the point where I would consider using it for a production site, but it has some very nice development tools if you want to do a mockup. Also, A+ for making hacking the underlying HTML/CSS easy without shoving it in the face of less technically savvy users.
Not the most unique concept (friend group location sharing). Aside from that, its only for iPhone. If someone releases first to Android I’ll be really impressed.
I’m not sure why your username is called a BakedCode, but thats not relevant. Interesting idea to name your app Interstat when its for building ROAD-maps (so punny). But really, it has a simple interface and is pretty easy to use. Not revolutionary as far as project management tools go, but not bad. The ads on the side aren’t too in your face, which is nice. I also love the ability to have a separate API key for each roadmap. Design is somewhat generic as well, but maybe I’m just a harsh critic.
So, keeping in mind that I’m using this to promote one of my own sites, I have some serious criticisms. It was very clever when it launched barely a month ago, since then I have been overwhelmed by the amount of “viral” campaigns to reward the users who share their beta link most. Its pretty damned annoying when I have to spam my followers with a link to get higher in the list for a beta account. This is a smart product with a lot of potential, but they need to find an alternative type of marketing campaign than simply link sharing – its already old. Design-wise, I really like the transparent box over a high-res image, very pretty to look at even if its a template for each site.
Yet Another Version Control + Bug Tracker, but unfortunately Github is still better. Sorry. You need something unique to distinguish you.
Absolutely love the home page, very attractive introduction. The inner design is just as pretty to look at, and the functionality aint half bad either. Simple and sweet, just like jam. My favorite feature is that instead of listing links multiple times it counts up how many times a certain link was mentioned. I feel like it has a lot of potential, but is missing something still… Either way, great so far.
This is going to be huge. Heroku for PHP. Need I say more? As a PHP developer, I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages. Great auto-installers for common PHP apps, waiting for CodeIgniter but I hear its coming soon. All they need is a solid API and this will be a hosting service to reckon with.
Yet Another Feed Tracker. I much prefer Google Reader, sorry…
Interesting concept of managing multiple cloud backup accounts. I feel like its missing something. Of course, its nice to be able to see all of your backed up files in one place, but really this isn’t enough of a reason to use Joukuu over the core apps such as Dropbox. I imagine it will be hard for them to keep up with the core apps without finding a unique niche of their own.
Those are my thoughts for now. I realize that all of these sites are in beta, some earlier than others, and that they will mature over time. But these are my first impressions and hopefully they will interest someone else, or at least server as a timepiece for when TaskCan becomes the new Github..or something.