It has been great to see the favourable reaction to the Islandoo launch. For one thing, it makes it much easier to explain what we are trying to do with BloomBox. Here’s some posts: Mashable, The Stage and, my personal favourite, the Selsius Real Estate Blog (MP3 version) drawing lessons from Islandoo for the real estate industry.
It is famously difficult to predict how a community will interact with a piece of software. What has astounded us is how friendly Islandoo is. As I write, our newest islander (our 9744th) is a girl named melodyblue. She joined Islandoo 12 minutes ago. She already has 12 comments and 9 fans.
Our recent research suggests MySpace is like a pub where most people chat to their existing friends, boys ogle girls and occasionally you bump into someone new at the bar. By comparison, Islandoo is the world’s friendliest party. As soon as you open the door, dozens of people want to say ‘hi’ and start a conversation. It is great buzz (and, anecdotally, a great way to meet people).
The flip side of this is “fan spam”. Islanders have quickly realised that a good strategy is to fan as many other islanders as possible - there is a good chance you’ll get fanned back, increasing your prominence. We are currently working on a couple of solutions that should reduce the noise of fan spam, but still maintain the community’s friendliness. Interesting new features coming soon. Watch this space: 
Last Tuesday evening, a slip of the keyboard accidentally sent 500
emails that soft-launched Islandoo, the first BloomBox-powered website.
Islandoo lets you apply for Channel 4’s hit reality show Shipwrecked. Shipwrecked gets tens of thousands of applications. Islandoo uses Web 2.0 techiques to let the fans filter the best candidates to the top.
A couple of BloomBox features we are particularly pround of:
1. The user can upload photo or video in pretty much any format. If a photo is uploaded, it is centred, resized and converted to jpeg. Video can be uploaded in over 160 formats. It is resized and converted to Flash. The user can then choose between 6 frame grabs to use as the thumbnail image.
2. The profile page makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to improve the user experience. Comments and fans can be added without the need for a page refresh. We’ve been amazed by how much the inhabitants of Islandoo communicate with each other and how friendly they are. The slickness of the Ajax interface must take much of the credit for this.
Here’s what users say:
“This site it more addictive than crack!” Burnsybaby
“I’m literally just doing this and making a cup of tea roughly every 45 minutes… MySpace has already got me by the balls, and now this!” Gabsy
In the internet spirit of ‘release early, release often’, there are parts of Islandoo that aren’t to our satisfaction. However in a week we’ve learnt a huge amount about how users interact, and we are working hard on incorporating that thinking into future versions.
One thing we are struggling with is how to make ‘popularity’ as good as possible a measure of who should be on Shipwrecked. If you’ve got any ideas, we’d love to hear: andy@mintdigital.com.
