Hello World.

It’s Go Time:

Today, we are opening up our site from the “Preview” stage (under a thousand people) to “Beta” stage (about 50,000 invites distributed). That just means that we are a little more confident that we have something solid—but not quite confident enough to call it “done”.

For about a year we have been on the sidelines. Working away on the platform—and the Views. Writing and rewriting various bits of code. Revamping features. Testing with real users. Testing with fake ones. Today is the big day—Beta Launch. We are so excited about being one giant step closer to having the gloves completely off.

An early brainstorming session in Deep Ellum.

We (initially just Chris, Aaron and me) started Viewzi for a few reasons. First, it was just time—time for a new project. And Chris had been at Yahoo! way too long (10 yrs), so he was getting restless. Oh yeah, and we both felt there was a big opportunity in search.

A Google Killer?

While there has been a tremendous amount of chatter about whether such-and-such Silicon Valley startup is the next possible “Google killer”, we haven’t been as enamored with Google killing as we have been with building a new way to search. Not just new, but also rich, fun, visual, tailored, flexible, and different. We think we are on to something.

The Fuel.

I am not going to spend much time here telling you what Viewzi is. We have a great video on viewzi.tv (our video blog) here. What I will talk a little about is why we are excited about Viewzi.

Viewzi is great not because of my brilliance (which is often in question), or our great team (not in question), but it is, and will be great because of the aggregate beauty that comes from View builders from around the world creating great Views.

Viewzi is a new way to experience search. We also think of Viewzi as a search platform. A platform through which our View Selection Engine serves up an appropriate selection of Views for each search term (we call it this the View Mix) and allows the user the choice of a number of Views. Then the user is able to see search results through the selected view (and the other views) giving the user many, unique perspectives of each search.  This is one of the core differentiators from an end-user’s perspective.

From our perspective—and from the perspective of View developers, a key value point is that Viewzi is really more of a rich, View-based search platform than just a search site.

I don’t even remember when we went from “Viewzi search” to “Viewzi search platform”, but it was pretty early. We registered Viewzoo (for our developer / API site) back in September of ‘06 (way before Chris left Yahoo!), proof that the notion of having external folks involved in the view building process goes way back.

Initially, and for the short-term future, we are working only with “commissioned” artists—designers that we invite into the process. Currently, that means guys like Aaron Martin, Joshua Stearns, and WhiteVoid and a few others that I can’t wait to tell you about. All are award winning guys.

Soon, that process will open up to any developer around the world who wants to contribute to making Viewzi a better place to search. That could mean a medical services firm doing a killer “Medical Search View”. Or, it could mean a day-trader assembling a great “Day Trading View”. It could mean a McCain supporter building a great “McCain Search View” (yes, Republicans know how to use the Internet too).

However, while we are excited about what is to come—and specifically, opening up the View development process, right now we are really enjoying the process of collaborating with some of the best of the best in the interactive design community. It is great to see their reactions to the platform and hear their excitement about working on some interesting View.

What’s Next?

I think I will have to do a post just about “what’s next”...too much to talk about here.

In the meantime, sign-up for the Beta and give us feedback! Tell us what stinks and what makes you smile.  And check out Viewzi.TV for semi-regular video posts of the behind-the-scenes work of bringing Viewzi to life.

Viewzi. It’s all about the Views.