Happy Birthday, TheBroth!
December 5th, 2006 in Developer Diary · By Markus WeichselbaumHappy Birthday, TheBroth! TheBroth is one year old. Find out how it all came to be!
Actually we’re cheating with this image - the pic is from the birthday of Mikey, my brother-in-law. Barbara, my sister, brings in the cake. But at least you get the see the offices where TheBroth was created…
Believe it or not, TheBroth is one year old. In fact, it was on November 26th 2005 when TheBroth was conceived. It was a mild Friday evening in Perth, Western Australia, yours truly and Sue Zann (aka Freaky Friday) were at the greyhound races. We’d never been before, but we were invited by friend and former staff member Takatoshi so we went along. The thought of a pleasant evening with friends and family (plus an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet) sounded very enticing indeed.
During the copious amounts of plate refills I had been pondering on how to create a collaborative web site where users could interact freely and have fun while doing so. We already had plenty of experience on how to technically do that from prior web projects (which I may or may not reveal in the near future, hint, hint), but what we didn’t have was the concept on what exactly our users were meant to do on our site that is instantly accessible yet open-ended enough to remain fun for a long time… or forever, ideally.
Probably somewhere between plate refill #2 and #3, with yet another plate full of yummy garlic prawns, it dawned to me, for no particular reason. Squares, I thought! We shall have a thousand squares! I knew I was onto something. Everyone present at the table was much more inclined to talk about the dog racing and the buffet and what not, but I was very much preoccupied with the squares idea.
Over the weekend, I was more and more creating a vision in my mind. Come Monday, I presented the idea to all staff (at our now defunct board room table - it has been converted into a table tennis table!), in context of all the other ideas we’d been throwing around. Put it down to “don’t disagree with the boss” or “man it’s Monday 10 am I wish I still were in bed” or any other reason, but the squares idea was simply accepted as is. No resistance, no nothing, everyone just “bought” it. I was almost disappointed - this wasn’t the epochal reveal and the standing ovations I’d hoped for. Maybe at that point it just made perfect sense to everyone, who knows… fact is, we pretty much dropped all other projects and started work on TheBroth, all men on deck.
We worked hard and feverishly to meet our own deadline and we met it. April 19th 2006 we went live and allowed the public in for the first time. We put out a (hardly noticed) press release and left it at that. We knew at that time that we went live not with the full version of TheBroth as envisioned, but with enough to have people take a look and provide some feedback. As they say, it’s better to go live with half an application than with a half-assed application (if you pardon my french).
Even though we didn’t further publicise TheBroth, we did get some digg.com traffic and also a mention on the BBC Click program, and that brought in quite some new members from the UK and the rest of the BBC-watching world. However, we just put our noses down to the grindstone and kept working away - we had a vision and by golly, we wanted to see it complete. Now, we didn’t really plan to have it all done after exactly one year, that’s just pure coincidence.
Here we are now, one year later, and by and large TheBroth is complete. We’re ready for prime-time! Let the users come! We’ll start publicising it now, and hopefully you’ll see more of TheBroth in the media soon. Quite obviously I’m terribly biased, but I can tell you, I love TheBroth a great damn deal if I may say so myself, and I’m proud of what our development team has achieved. I think it’s a marvellous site and I wish everyone in the whole wide world would take a look and check it out. I know, I’m dreaming… :-)
Now that TheBroth is complete — mind you, we’ll probably keep improving it FOREVER — it was time to reflect a bit on the history, the journey, and where we are now. Hence the other articles I wrote just before this one:
Your comments to this article and the ones above are more than welcome! Heck, I’d love to throw a party and celebrate with you all, and I think I even have an idea on how to give all the loyal members of TheBroth a little gift in appreciation of … you enjoying TheBroth and being the cool folks that you are. More about this in the next post :)
