The first 100K

On Christmas Eve we achieved a significant milestone. SceneCaster is now installed on over 100,000 FaceBook accounts. What a way to help the SceneCaster team celebrate the holidays! We would really like to thank all of you who have signed up for SceneCaster and especially those of you who have been actively pushing it and giving us feedback. Your suggestions and comments help us make the product ever better. We've taken all of your requests into account to help craft the feature set of our next release. We expect that you'll be very excited by what we deliver.

The number of users keeps on growing steadily and we are constantly amazed at the creativity that goes into the many scenes that we see you creating!

We're looking forward to a very exciting year in 2008 and hope to amaze you with the next release of SceneCaster!

Our favorite pass time right now at SceneCaster HQ is to pore over our growth curves to try to predict when we will go past the 1 million user mark! If you're feeling adventurous, feel free to add your guess to the comments here! As a basis for your guess, you should know that we went from a handful of users at launch on September 25th (mostly the SceneCaster staff), to over 100,000 users three months later on December 24th. A hint for those of you who might be mathematically inclined: the running assumption that most people are making is that this should be some form of geometric progression (you get new users proportionally to the number you currently have).

Happy Holidays to all and have a wonderful New Year in full 3D!

=Alain

Apologies for the outage on December 12

At half past midnight Eastern time on December 12th, our site started generating server side errors that prevented users from being able to use our service. Unfortunately the outage wasn't a full outage. The web site was operational, but would serve up error messages instead of fulfilling user requests. As a result, our monitoring system, that, at the time, simply tested to see if it got a response from the web server, did not send a page to our network staff to let them know that there was an issue at hand that needed to be taken care of immediately. This incident only got resolved when our staff came to the office in the morning and noticed the issue. It was quickly fixed after that, but left tens of thousands of you stranded in the interim.

That's not the experience that we would want you to have when using SceneCaster and we are taking concrete steps to make sure that this scenario can not occur again in the future. More specifically, we have now set up monitoring that checks the content that the web service returns rather than simply making sure that it returns something.

We understand that many of you were frustrated, especially the new users that had just signed up for the service, and would like to apologize to all of you who experienced difficulties using SceneCaster as a result of this outage. We're putting the necessary changes in place in our processes to make sure that you never have to experience similar circumstances in the future.

=Alain

SceneCaster earns the #1 spot on FaceBook

This past Saturday SceneCaster was the #1 Most Active application on all of Facebook. This ranking is judged by having the most daily active users as a percentage of the total user base, and having over 10K users. SceneCaster took the top slot with 80% daily active users. Read more about our growth in this article.
Thanks for making us #1!

Stability release, upcoming feature release, a new Facebook group and plenty of new holiday objects

It's been quite a while since my last post. We're going gangbusters here at SceneCaster HQ, getting ready for the launch of our next release, scheduled for end of January. Two days ago we deployed a stability release to address many of the issues that you have raised since we launched at the end of September. We're busily at work on the next version which will be a feature release. We'll be posting more info on what is new when we get closer to the release.

Given the time of year and the success that we had with our Halloween collection, we've also released a holiday collection with all sorts of objects that you might use to make 3D greeting cards to send to your friends for the holidays. How about sharing what you build with me (use the share link at the scene description page) and I'll post about the holiday scenes that I find most interesting!

Michael, our eminent Scene Master, has started up a facebook group where you can learn directly from the Master. He's accessible and he's open to your questions! He's also posting "How To" videos there to show you how to do the more difficult operations with SceneCaster. You can visit Michael at our FaceBook group page.

Jonathan should be posting about the fact that we are number 1 on the Most Active list of FaceBook apps today. We want to say thank you to all of our users because what that means is that you are using it a lot!

=Alain