Photo Finder alpha updates

Two weeks into our alpha launch, we thought we’d share some early stats, thoughts, and a little message to all the kind people who are patiently waiting to join (read on).

On Mar 24th we announced our alpha program with amazing response, and got covered by Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, All Facebook, InsideFacebook and more. All of our invites were snaffled up minutes after the announcement, and our 1000 alpha users are finding new photos, and identifying bugs… yeah, we have those too, and we’re releasing maintenance releases every few days.

Many thousands of people have requested an invite to join the alpha. We are trying hard to add people to the app, while scaling our system carefully and keeping the user experience positive for people. We’re inviting people in the order in which they registered, sending blocks of invites over the next few days, and watching to see how the system handles the load. From time to time, we might also release small blocks of new invites via blog post or other media. Keep an eye out, first come first served.

“I want to see my photos, NOW!”

For those of you who are still waiting to join but want to know if Photo Finder found untagged photos of you – install our application by following this link. This will give you limited access to the app and let you check out photos of yourself, but not your friends.  If Photo Finder found untagged photos of you, you’ll be able to view, approve, correct, or hide the results. Clicking on the giant “Apply to alpha” will take you to our registration page, letting us know that you want to join the alpha. This is a way for you to play with the app and find your photos, but doesn’t put as much load on our system as a full install.  (Installing at this stage will not affect the order in which you’ll be able to use the full app.)

We’d like to shout out a big thank you to all our testers, bug reporters, and to all the people who’ve requested to join. We’re working hard to improve the experience,  and it’s very gratifying to know when it works for you. Please give us feedback, here on the blog or in the app.

And, as a special reward for reading a company blog… the first 20 people to click this link will be able to add the Photo Finder app immediately! (Rewards are fun)