Aaron Swartz # first (earliest) post to infogami.com/blog :
Yay, Infogami is finally out. (If you don't know what Infogami is, go check out the front page.)
I began working on Infogami last summer, as part of the first batch of Y Combinator startups.
// Y Combinator--> is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding very early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company. We invest mostly in software and Web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your idea than whether you have a formal business plan. //
At the end of the summer we had a working prototype and a number of offers for funding. Things were going so well I took a leave of absence from college to work on it. [but..]...Paul: "I thought of a solution to your problem," he exclaimed with his inimitable energy. "Merge with Reddit!"
[here is today's convergence: saw first mention of reddit this am on tpcspy (kittenauth post via mecha), looked at it, dlcs'd it & dlsc'd ebay story there wh rw picked up: Bleak argument that eBay's jumped the shark (ZdBlog via mCass) wh ~ incidental but saw this evening (yay rwwl back home) and the next rw link was to Paul Graham's blog, which is "a guinea pig for infogami" and I am gathering that Paul Graham is of YCombinator who is funding Infogami and Reddit among others that include Writely (wh I have seen before ~ only one I think. no wait now I am thinking I had seen reddit before, familiar, but wld've been a long time ago and didn't seem uniquely int to me) upshot today is I got to reddit by 2 separate paths and take this to mean hee that infogami is cool. anyway I like it prob bcs what I've seen is simple b&w text.. and am liking what blog tells:]
We discussed it, got more and more excited -- it seemed like such a perfect fit. I still can't even imagine a better solution.It was clear that the prototype I'd built would never work for any serious site, so Steve built an amazing new industrial-strength database system while I built the software to talk to it. Unfortunately this amazing system is pretty much invisible to the outside world, but it's going to allow us to quickly build software that's more advanced than anything else out there. ooh how so, how so!
.. So we decided to work like crazy for a week and launch whatever we had after seven days.
Obviously there's lots more work to do -- right now we only have the most basic of features. But instead of continuing to work on it behind closed doors, we're going to try something different: we're going to build it in public. yay like I enjoyed seeing the developmt of Librarything.
Send us feedback and if you have an idea for Infogami, post it to our reddit where other users can vote it up and down. We'll try to implement the most popular requests. Here's my goal: something new for Infogami every weekday. Some days it'll just be a blog post or a bug fix. But most days, we'll try to add a whole new feature. I hope you'll stay tuned. cool.