Planbeast is live!

We had our soft launch yesterday. The site is now live at http://planbeast.com.

I sent out my first invitations to join to my own Xbox Live friends list, and bug reports and feature requests are already starting to trundle in. This is excellent.

My plan is to not actively promote the site until it's proven its usefulness and usability to people who are not its developers. That said, I am encouraging folks on the site already to go ahead and invite their own friends on board - just don't go nuts with the blogging yet. We're not quite ready for a slashdotting of any magnitude.

This shyness begs the question of why we're doing an open public beta right out of the gate, versus a closed beta. In fact, we'd originally planned to start off closed, and I went so far as to spend a significant amount of time designing and implementing an invitation-only system. It's still running behind the scenes, in fact - it's just switched off. And it will probably stay that way: we later decided that, given the fact that a system like Planbeast is only really useful when it has lots of users registered with it, artificially restricting the number of user registrations at any time would make the site less meaningful for its initial users, and therefore would make initial testing less valuable. So, instead, we just threw the doors wide.

What do you think?