Qrowd

Qrowd reached an important milestone today, with the launch of the private beta. Invitations have been sent to a select few people to begin the process of finding defects and gathering feedback to help make Qrowd a better system.

I am very happy to have reached this goal. Qrowd to date has been virtually a single-handed effort that I started last June. I have worked on Qrowd maybe 50% of the time, equating to about 3-4 months of real effort.

The results so far are a system that does as much as Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly combined, with the potential to far eclipse their capabilities thanks to the generation of both Flash and DHTML runtimes for client-side widgets via OpenLaszlo, along with the ability to process data on the server to create RSS and JSON feeds.

One of the coolest sample widgets is a MP3 player that uses SeeqPod’s API to find MP3 files on the internet that can be played and (even better) downloaded. I knocked this widget out in a few hours, so it is very crude. Still, the availability of API’s across the web is opening up a new world of possibilities for mixing and mashing up data.

I hope to eventually add WYSIWYG design capabilities into Qrowd, to make widget creation even easier (like Sprout’s widget builder.)

A long list of defects and desired new functionality awaits, but for now I can take a brief pause and enjoy this milestone. I will start to expand the circle on the number of beta invitations over the course of the following weeks and months. Feel free to send an invite request to sales at qrowd.com if you would like to take Qrowd for a test drive!