Last Tuesday evening, a slip of the keyboard accidentally sent 500 emails that soft-launched Islandoo, the first BloomBox-powered website.
Islandoo lets you apply for Channel 4's hit reality show Shipwrecked. Shipwrecked gets tens of thousands of applications. Islandoo uses Web 2.0 techiques to let the fans filter the best candidates to the top.
A couple of BloomBox features we are particularly pround of:
1. The user can upload photo or video in pretty much any format. If a photo is uploaded, it is centred, resized and converted to jpeg. Video can be uploaded in over 160 formats. It is resized and converted to Flash. The user can then choose between 6 frame grabs to use as the thumbnail image.
2. The profile page makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to improve the user experience. Comments and fans can be added without the need for a page refresh. We've been amazed by how much the inhabitants of Islandoo communicate with each other and how friendly they are. The slickness of the Ajax interface must take much of the credit for this.
Here's what users say:
"This site it more addictive than crack!" Burnsybaby
In the internet spirit of 'release early, release often', there are parts of Islandoo that aren't to our satisfaction. However in a week we've learnt a huge amount about how users interact, and we are working hard on incorporating that thinking into future versions."I'm literally just doing this and making a cup of tea roughly every 45 minutes... MySpace has already got me by the balls, and now this!" Gabsy
One thing we are struggling with is how to make 'popularity' as good as possible a measure of who should be on Shipwrecked. If you've got any ideas, we'd love to hear: andy@mintdigital.com.