Of course it does!!

Celebrities are everywhere and we want to do our bit to add a few more to the world, well, to the world of Facebook at least!

Over the past few weeks we have discovered that we truely have some legendary advice givers on Agonymous, people who are giving really great caring, clever, funny and nasty advice. After speaking to these people, we decided that we wanted to empower them and allow them the opportunity to build a reputation on Facebook as great agony advisors.  So after some brainstorming with our most frequent users, we decided that the best way forward was to develop a user profile page which acts as the user’s own personal advice column. The advice column will be generated automatically and can be published directly to the user’s Facebook profile page as a Tab.

We think our users are great and we firmly believe that if Agonymous is developed in the right way - i.e. in a way which helps to support and promote their advice skills - then by working together we will be able to create a whole new group of mini celebrities with their own set of dedicated followers via the subscription feeds.

Move over Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle!  Spencer Johnson, Adrienne Potts and Heather Allison are ready to take your crown!!

The new user profiles will be launching in the next 48 hours so watch this space!

Okay, so it might be a little too early to celebrate our birthday but today marks the 1 week anniversary of Agonymous’ launch. Our first week has been a tremendous success with already over 400 users signed up and providing a huge variety of advice. To give you an example, someone wrote in to say her boyfriend was really controlling..

She received funny comments..

Tell him the following : “Go on now go , walk out the door. Just turn around now , coz your not welcome anymore”

caring comments..

Your boyfriend is controlling because you let him. You should wear what you want and what you feel comfortable in. What kind of a boyfriend tells his girlfriend she looks like a slut? It’s ok for him to upset you but not the other way around? Men like this are best avoided. You can do better and find someone who accepts you for who you are. I’d get out of this relationship as soon as you can. x

and nasty comments..

You need to remember these Four words: F**k off you tw*t!!!!!  Have a bit of self respect and get rid of him then stick on a shirt skirt slap on some make up and go out and have some fun!!

We’re absolutely delighted with the response we’ve received and the number of people already using Agonymous daily is amazing! Yesterday we announced the first winner of our t shirt competition, a promotion we are running for the first 4 weeks of Agonymous to say thanks to our earliest users. For more information, click the image below.

We’re delighted to say that we launched the early version of Agonymous over the weekend and while it is still a considerable way from the finished proudct, we are already receiving great feedback with alot of delighted users!  Over the weekend we managed to attract 160 users and already have around 25 fans which is great!

We’ve added a few extra bits and pieces in over the last few days, most notably there is now an Updates page where users can quickly see everything which has happened on Agonymous amongst their social graph. We’re still working on the Updates page but can already see it adding a lot of value to the user experience.

We’ve also linked in our Cafepress shop now, so if you go on to achieve the legendary Level 5 Nasty Personality, you’ll be granted access to purchase a matching t-shirt to show off to your friends!

There’s alot of fingers crossed at XISX at the moment, because we recently submitted Agonymous to the Facebook Developer Competition which is designed to promote and support the coolest new applications on Facebook. The number of applicants is huge so we won’t be holding our breathe on this and it isn’t part of our overall strategy, but it would be an absolutely huge advantage if we can be one of the 25 winners. Judges, if you’re reading this, we think you’re all the nicest people in the world and if you want to back the next great Facebook app then please do come and show us some love!

We’ll hear back in two weeks time, so if we mention it again, we’ve won, and if we never mention it again, we haven’t won and we’re depressed!

Now, stop reading this, log into Facebook and share your agony with us!

http://apps.new.facebook.com/agonymous

… or at least, so we keep telling ourselves!!

It’s been quite a frustrating couple of weeks for us. While Agonymous has been “almost ready” for the last fortnight, we have had to add a few neccessary changes before launching and submitting to the Facebook Application Directory.

While some would argue that we should just get the app ‘out there’ and iterate as we build up a user base, we are trying to be a little more patient to ensure we launch with a quality product. The last thing we want to do is upset our early users with bugs and non-functionality.

While we’ve been working on the scalability issues of late, we have also added some new funky functions which were a result of the first feedback we received on our initial test run.

We have now added a full flash based tutorial to give the user a friendly introduction on how to use Agonymous and all its features.

We’ve added a Fake Filter which allows users to vote an agony as fake and then apply the filter when browsing agony, the higher the Fake Filter settings, the less likely you will find fake agony posts. We built this in as didn’t want to deter people from having fun by posting stupidly random agonies, but at the same time wanted to ensure that genuine agony was still clearly visible. The Fake Filter allows for both, if you want to see genuine agony only then set your Fake Filter to high, whereas if you love all the funny fake stuff, turn the Fake Filter off. It’s all about the Fake Factor!!

Another cool extra is the Updates tab. Now users will have their own Agonymous News Feed within the application such that users can easily spot which of their friends have recently posted agony and comments and who has achieved the latest awards and personality developments. While we already had some Agonymous updates going through to the main Facebook News Feed, we thought it would be much better for the users if they could see all updates in one place. Updates can be filtered by Agony, Comments, Awards and Personality and works really well. Hopefully you will like it!

We’ve also made a few tweaks to the Leaderboard, allowing users to see the Personality levels of their friends and also re-arrange for different date ranges - another user request!

We’re trying to accomodate as many ideas as people give us to maximise the Agonymous experience. So if you have anything in mind, then please do email us to ideas@agonymous.com

We’re going to run another round of testing next week but this time to a bigger audience, hopefully 100 or so people. We’ll make whatever fixes are identified from there and then after that, we should be ready for the big launch at the end of September!!  Oooh how exciting!

Have a good weekend everyone!

We launched Agonymous two days ago as an invite only for around 20 testers. We received some really positive feedback which was great.

We were also inspired to add a few extra features which we hope to incorporate as soon as possible, so watch this space!

Many thanks to all those who participated!  

erm..   except Byron…   *sighs*

Yes it’s true, I’m afraid we are having some server teething issues today, but actually, no, we didn’t  go shopping, I just wrote that for the sake of a funky blog title

Our good friends at Joyent are helping us move the Agonymous test application across to the live server, and while we had hoped it would be relatively straight forward, alas, it wasn’t!

We’ve had to do a bit of thumb twiddling today, so instead of catching up on all of our favourite websites, we decided to put together a CafePress shop so that future fans of Agonymous will be able to dance around in an Agonymous t-shirt while drinking coffee out of an Agonymous mug…  yay!

Here’s a screen of how the shop looks, or if you prefer to check it out, then click this link: www.cafepress.com/agonymous

And finally there is some light at the end of the tunnel…

After 8 weeks of blood, sweat and tears (when 6 hours of work is lost after a laptop crash without any saving, believe me, there are always tears!) the Beta version of Agonymous is almost upon us. We’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front during this time as have been too busy trying to get the app built - we’ll try harder to make the time from now on!

Beta testing will start later this week, just as soon as we make the final tweaks and move it to the live server. We’ll be inviting around 100 people to Beta test from a user perspective, then ask a few techies to try and hack the system and also test for load stress. Fingers crossed, everything will pull through and we will be able to start our campaign attracting people to use Agonymous.

The feedback we have received so far has been really positive and we’re now getting quite excited. This first application launch will be a big step into the unknown as we have no idea how the public will react to Agonymous and how well (if, at all!) it will spread virally.

Facebook’s new design encourages applications with high functionality which is the long term vision of Platform - i.e. they’re trying to weed out all the junk “what type of doggy do am I?” style applications which surely is a good move. We’re trying our best to work alongside the new principles which Facebook have provided to ensure Agonymous is meaningful, trustworthy and well designed.

We’re hoping for some great new ideas from our testers who will inspire some brilliant new functions, so watch this space and we’ll keep you posted.

As a way to symbolise our progress over the last month, I’ll leave you with a few of our initial design sketches for Agonymous and the final graphics we ended up with.

Have a good day!

Character sketches on 7th July 2008

Character graphics 28th July 2008

Agonymous landing page sketch 2nd July 2008

Agonymous landing page 2nd August 2008

It’s late on a Friday night and while I should probably be out partying, the semi-geek in me (I just can’t bring myself to say geek on its own!) is delighted to say that the first iteration of the XISX website is now online. With all my professional commitments, XISX has been on the conceptual shelf for a long time and it feels great to finally start taking steps forward. The company doesn’t officially start until July but we wanted to get a few things in place before then. We have big plans for this site but, for now, just having something basic is a satisfying first step.

We have the designs and architecture all drawn up for our first application Agonymous and are very excited by the prospect of it. We sincerely believe that it offers something new to Facebook users which they currently don’t have and while we understand it’s going to take a long time to polish, even just the drawing board version is getting great feedback so we can’t wait to launch it! Development of Agonymous will begin in July and we anticipate the Beta version being ready in August so watch this space!

After 16 hours working, I’m going to call it a day now, crack open a beer and catch the end of Big Brother – or whatever else junk tv has to offer. I’m working on XISX issues all bloody weekend but then I guess we all have to make sacrifices every once in a while! Besides, next weekend we’re going to Glastonbury for a major blowout so it isn’t all bad!

We’re not really sure how this blog will evolve, but as the title says, it’s ubiquitous and seems to appear on every website these days. We’ll try and keep it as light and interesting as possible and hopefully add in a bit of education as we chart the progress of our application development.

If you want to stay in the loop, then we encourage you to subscribe to the rss feed by clicking on the big RSS logo near the top right of the page. There are also plenty of options for social bookmarking aswell,  just click on one of the icons below to spread the word!

Anyway, I’m signing off now, I wish everyone a great weekend and certainly hope that yours will be more fun than mine!