Beta buzz, engine updates and Friendfeed integration
Our private beta launch 3 weeks ago has gotten off to a great start. We’ve had some great interest and feedback from beta users. Thanks to everyone involved so far. We’ve also made some improvements on our Prediction Engine, and have continued building integration with other great social media tools.
The buzz so far…
We had a positive but skeptical review at Mashable. Thanks guys - we’re all fired up to take onboard those comments! Mashable’s key point was that Nostradamical.com is not a ‘wisdom of crowds’ app because when a user makes a prediction at Nostradamical they can already see the existing group forecast so in theory they could be influenced by it.
This is an interesting point, and introduces further interesting ideas around herding, group think and even self-fulfilling prophecies. The reality is however that it’s just a lot more fun to see what others are forecasting…so this feature stays. It is this ‘crowd opinion’ that we’re trying to get at Nostradamical.com.
By the way, thanks HubDub’s Nigel Eccles for his feedback and comments. Great stuff.
Thanks to Leo Ryan for his mention of Nostradamical.com in their crowdsourcing discussions.
We’ve also had some interest from Spanish startup blog What’s New.
Auto-publishing your predictions to Friendfeed
We love Friendfeed. It’s a great site and a great way to share you thoughts, ideas, pictures, videos, etc with friends and family.
At Nostradamical.com you can now publish your prediction to Friendfeed in one click. First you need to add you Friendfeed nickname and remote key to you Nostradamical account (get your Remote Key here). Then, every prediction you make is published back to your Friendfeed page with your personal comment on it. Nice! It’s also added to our Nostradamical room: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/nostradamical.
So be sure to join our Friendfeed room and share your latest prediction ideas with the community.
Extending our Prediction Horizon to one year
Thanks to feedback from several of our beta users on the time horizon of our predictions, we’ve now extended this to one year. So you can now make a prediction that closes anytime over the next year, meaning we want to see all your hottest 2009 predictions please…
Giving the author an opinion
We had good feedback from several people including Marquis Hunt from http://juuble.com/ around seperating our the prediction ‘question’ from the author’s own opinion. So now an author can publish a prediction, ‘e.g. will Microsoft buy Yahoo this year?’ and add their own mini comment (e.g. “not a chance!”). Comments are listed with each person’s own forecast for the prediction. Comments are also published to Friendfeed if the user has registered their Friendfeed account with us.
So far our beta reviewers have created some great predictions - get a preview at our main prediction feed.
What’s next?
Twitter…and of course Facebook.
Interested in becoming a beta reviewer? Sign up for a beta invitation from our beta page here.
