Look anything like this?
Private Message
To: bob
From: BryanB
Tuesday, Jun 22 1999 7:00PM ET
Beta Launch Announcement
Dear Silicon Investor Member:
On the off chance that you have spent the last couple months as
an alien abductee or seeking inner peace at a Tibetan monastery
and therefore missed the fact that we are planning to re-launch
Silicon Investor, I am pleased to announce that we are rapidly
approaching the finish line. In fact, I am extremely proud of the
SI team at Go2Net as they have done – IMHO – an exceptional
job on the new Silicon Investor site. Now, it is time to put the
new site to the test – a beta test to be specific – and that's
where you come in. You have been selected to participate in
the beta launch of the new Silicon Investor, so we'd like your
help.
Here's what happens next…
Sometime in the near future, we will add a link on the Silicon
Investor Home page to the new SI Beta Site. You can click on
that link, and with your SI User ID and Password, we'll give
you access to the beta site. The beta site will be a fully
functional (or at least mostly functional) version of the new
Silicon Investor. Essentially, you'll be able to do all of the cool
things you can do on the current SI, with a few new tricks that
we think you'll like.
What do we want from you?
Basically, we want you to use the beta site as much as possible,
and spend a little extra effort giving us some feedback. Of
course, you can communicate with us for any reason at any
time. For the beta test, we are especially interested in hearing
from you:
A – About bugs. If you click on something and it doesn't work
right, or one of the new features is confusing, or something
about the site is just – well – bugging you, then please let us
know right away. There will be special instructions on the beta
site introduction page telling you where to send your bug
reports.
B – About your overall impressions. Please tell us what you
think of the new site. We didn't do this because we just felt like
working really hard. We did it because we wanted to deliver an
even better product to you.
What should you expect?
For starters, you'll find a dramatically different user interface,
especially in terms of colors, headers and integration of certain
features. It'll be different than what you're currently used to,
but our primary objective was to make the site simple and
intuitive to use. When you look at a page, if you're confused,
then let us know because it means we didn't achieve our goal.
We've also added a handful of new features, like the IQC.com
charts (Yea!), the ability to turn off the original subject post,
the ability to display multiple message on the page at one time
(a member's only feature) and a few others. We'll provide more
details on the beta site introduction page.
Heads up – i.e. IMPORTANT!
Finally, I wanted to tell you now, and we'll tell you again, that
the beta site has not been optimized for performance. In fact, it
will mostly likely be slow – probably very slow – because it'll
be running in our beta environment, not our production
environment. Don't worry, we'll speed it up when it goes into
production – promise.
It'll also break occasionally – perhaps frequently. You'll get
ugly messages like GSP Error and Server Problems and
GLOBAL MELTDOWN (OK, perhaps a little exaggeration on
the last one). If you get these errors, please tell us where and
when they happen, but chances are, they occurred because we
were temporarily working on that particular section of the site.
That's all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for the beta site link
on the home page.
Regards,
Bryan B. and the SI Team |
