Ever wanted to talk to the other drivers that you share the roads with?

Maybe you would like to:

1. Thank them for being a courteous driver.
2. Make an offer to purchase their vehicle.
3. Send them a social message or ask them out on a date.
4. Pass on a message related to road safety or their driving habits.

This is all now possible (and super easy) with communiplate. Go ahead and install it on Facebook.

Communiplate, let’s you communicate with other Australian drivers, simply by knowing their number plate.

The system simply asks for your number plate and registration state, as well as mobile number, before connecting you with the Australian communiplate network.

Once you’re part of the communiplate network, you can send a message to any Australian driver, simply by addressing the message to their number plate. Its dead easy.

There are two reasons we decided to use Facebook as the platform for the first version, rather than say our own stand-alone site:

• Ease of development: Building Facebook apps is simpler than building an entire stand-alone web site from scratch. That saves time and infrastructure hassle. You don’t have to build a login form, forgot password, register form etc. You get pre-authenticated users just ready to hit the GO button on your app!
• Virality: Facebook is already loaded with users just itching to try new things. Its the quickest way to get a large number of interested users out of anything currently on the internet and, of course, it is saturating the news lately. However, from there you can still build your own web site front end and integrate the two. Because you still own the data behind your Facebook app when you build one. In fact, it lives remotely on your own server, not on Facebook like it appears to to users.

We were dead right, because the take up already has been awesome. We have never seen this many users so quickly take up a new web application in the first couple of days. All of the Facebook infrastructure specifically designed to allow decent applications to spread virally, truly works. We think its the perfect platform to build so many modern web apps, even before you build your main web site.

This is only very early days for communiplate, we have another thousand ideas that you will see integrated into the application over time.

Then check out our new news feed at news.ratetheplate.com.au and subscribe to the RSS feed.

We will be pushing out all the latest developments with Rate the PLATE, where things are headed and what we are doing to improve the communication on our roads between drivers.

Happy New Year to you all.

I have returned back from a magic trip up in Far North Queensland with my girlfriend. Spent about 6 nights on beautiful Dunk Island, 2 nights at Mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest and then a final 6 nights at Port Douglas. It is certainly amazing what a short break does to your brain and wellbeing. Its also just as amazing how lush and healthy the environment is up that way. I have never seen so many frogs, tree snakes and colourful fish - just beautiful..

It was awesome to catch up with some of my best mates in Newcastle just before Christmas also. One of the best things I love about Christmas is that it always seems to bring friends and family back home together to recite fun memories and remember how important people are to the centre of your life.

I was feeling semi burnt-out late last year, doing shorter and shorter consulting days at work, taking off a little earlier each day as it became closer to Christmas. Now I feel refreshed and ready for action once again - and 2007 is going to be a big year.

The best thing about the break for me was that I did not check my email or web stats for almost an entire month. I completely lost the desire to even care about the stats for a while as I was feeling very jittery and sick of constantly checking mobile phones, emails, messenger programs, skype, web stats etc. Having too many things constantly beeping and flashing at you over a long period of time can eventually get to you. Then I realised when I returned home, how much I love this stuff and now had a fresh energy store ready to get stuck in even more this year.

It was great to find out how my new web startup had performed over the break. As I’d previously mentioned, it was never officially launched, but kind of spread via word of mouth to outsiders before we had even finished coding it. Considering, internet traffic from random browsing generally becomes a lot lighter over the holiday season, we still gained an extra 200 users in a relatively short time. This brought the total to 300 users and even more since being home. User participation in the site has sky rocketed and now we’re facing a whole heap of exciting new decisions on how to improve the site simply based on the spike in user data that has forced us to consider new ideas and fine tune our direction to cater for what users are doing.

A previous site I coded up about 8 years ago, only now, has approximately 1650 users, simply because the site is so niche specific. So I have been very impressed with our ability to attract 300 users so quickly without even completing or launching this new site officially. We have already been written about on the homepages of PageRank 5/10 web sites in this short space of time. A PageRank of 5/10 is certainly not an internet heavy weight, but it is respectable.

We are receiving a lot of emails coming in from these early users demanding new features and really caring about what we are trying to accomplish. That definitely drives you to work even harder and to push out a nice feature set for them. Its a funny concept to think that users actually care about something that you created from scratch only a couple of months ago. Some of them really get into it and are leading the way in terms of the amount of User Generated Content they are pumping in.

I know 300 users is miniscule, but the site kind of works exponentially. The more users we get, it catches on and attracts other users. We have already found examples of 5+ users signing up simply to participate in something that someone they knew had initiated. We are preparing to start actually pushing the site by kicking off a couple of advertising campaigns and submitting links all over the place, but at the same time, it seems the users are doing a good enough job for us. I am excited to think about the number of users we can attract with some gentle marketing efforts. An informal viral email marketing campaign that will spread through Australian workplaces is high on the list.

We also thought we would get in quick and launch the New Zealand version of the site.

There is definitely a great feeling associated with having something exciting underway outside of your normal 9-5 employment. Its a case of doing what you truly love after hours and in any available slot of spare time.

Well I haven’t stopped. I’m always too afraid to stop consulting until I can feel the torque of my new web startup pulling away from me. The past few weeks have been full time at the consulting contract throughout the day and non stop until around midnight or after every single night. Just to get it off the ground. I’m pretty tired, but seeing the site come together is so rewarding, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I will be happy to go on my summer holiday this year just thinking about how happy I am that its out there, and how the initial launch is behind us.

A lot has happened since my last post on this aaconsult blog. But basically the production version of the new startup web site is still very basic. Yet we have a new super deluxe version in our brand new development environment. This is what we have been working on during the past weeks. To me, the existing live version looks absolutely pathetic and bug-ridden now. We have improved so much stuff its not funny, and I can no longer bare to look at the existing live version. In fact, I am asking myself, why are we still signing up new Members and why are they actively contributing to the site? They don’t even know how good the site could be!

Why? Because this site is something that people want to use. Even though our initial beta version was very cheap, people still want to use it. They know they want to and they love it. We are getting the hardcore users who love the idea of the service, regardless of its flaws in this early state - so its growing regardless.

102 users now and we haven’t even launched the site. We’ve actually tried to keep it very quiet. But every day we are still seeing fresh new Members signing up with their beautiful real-world data that they love to contribute.

I used to firmly believe, that you really had to go out and actively promote any new web site to get the first 100 users on board. I.e. Launch a Google Adsense campaign, or send out some email marketing, or tell your friends etc. But now I know that its possible to create something that people want to use and to some degree, it just spreads like the plague. They email the URL to each other: “Check this out mate!”. They do the work for you.

I simply cannot wait to push out the new version at the end of this weekend, keep an eye on the stats and usage patterns. We are close to pushing out a mass email marketing campaign through our networks of friends and their friends and so on. After that will be Adsense. But we just need a couple more weeks to further fine tune things and refine the site before we target mass publicity..

Look after the user and the business will run itself.

When developing a new site from scratch, I like to make critical use of the time that the web site is not known by anyone. You’ve registered the domain and nobody knows about it. Its just a brilliant idea in your own head, yet to be executed.

How quickly can you code up a reliable ALPHA version before Google indexes it? This is the challenge!

In production, with no users yet, you have nothing to lose. So you go berzerk - half the time the site works and half the time its broken. If anyone found it yet, you would be upset. But they haven’t and you still have more time to keep coding..

I am doing this right now to a brand new site, which I am very excited about. But I was very surprised to find out that its already been indexed by Google after approximately only 1 week. Nothing links to it yet, but if you typed in its exact name, you would find it at the top of results. I’m pretty sure its because I placed an Adsense strip down the side of the home page, so Adsense immediately knows which site the ads were being rendered on and then goes off and tells the Googlebot to come check it out. This pressure has made it more important for me to really hurry up and launch the BETA version.

Now already, the site is working pretty well, does not crash and already provides the main service that it was intended to do. I’m really just deepening the feature set and usability at this point, but the raw core service is there.

So what do you think has happened? Its gone into BETA mode already without me even launching it. That’s right, some users have found the site via Google as well as small leaks from the site founders to family and colleagues. Now I find myself ultra excited each day when I get home from my consulting contract only to find fresh user-submitted information on this web site which isn’t even launched yet. And this is not fake testing information designed to pump the site up so that it looks busy from launch day one (which I normally recommend to do!). This is real, production quality information that is gold and will now stay there and be part of the finished site.

How exciting, automatic BETA launching, live from day one! You can’t beat that - users wanting to use your site before its even finished.

I am finding this ultra helpful already. I have quickly fixed a few bugs thanks to things that the users did, plus the best thing is that it makes me more excited and passionate about pushing ahead full steam as quickly as possible because real users are getting a kick out of the site.

I have stressed this before, but definitely do not wait until your site is 110% polished before you launch it. Someone else may have launched their own version of your idea by that time. Put your stake in the ground and get the users trudging through your live sandpit. That feedback is gold and will build a better site.

My site right now is still totally vulnerable to XSS style attacks, because I haven’t put in the regex’s to block them yet. But I will, later. Because I know its far more important to have the site working and looking good for users. Noone will XSS attack me until the site is prominent, but I have to get there first. I’d rather gain ten times the number of users that I currently have in the meantime, then fix the XSS leaks in a few weeks time.