When I decided to give this software a fair chance to succeed on its very own domain the only question in my head was; will it pass the test of users? It doesn’t really matter what you have intended the users do with your application. What matters, first, is what they think they’d like to do with it and then whether or not they actually use it.

So I tried and I failed. Two main reasons of this failure are; technical deficiencies and the special way of interaction coffee reading is. Technical deficiencies is the easy one. I couldn’t devote enough time for telvee, especially lately. As a result it doesn’t even have basic stuff like e-mail changing or account deletion. This is 100% my fault. The second reason however is more complicated and there was not much I could do about it. Except one thing I will tell you at the end of this post.

Telvee didn’t pass the user’s test mainly because coffee reading is somewhat private. It’s more of a 1-to-1 communication, while all social applications¹ are designed for 1-to-many communication. This was disastrous not only because of the lack of viral growth but also because of the reluctance of users to interact with other users.

An example image of coffee remains telvee generates

I would like to thank everybody who participated and I hope you had some fun playing with it. Telvee domain will soon redirect to this post and I will probably not renew it next time.

I won’t be starting a new experiment soon. I will spend most of my time on my work. Hopefully I will be spending a little more time on free software projects. By the way I would like to note that Telvee has spawned a couple of Django apps: django-inviting & django-simple-friends.

Oh, and the thing I could do better about user experience was to be more agile. I should have either fixed the problem quickly or failed fast. I have no regrets though. This was a unique experience and I have learned a lot.

1: Yes, even the e-mail system and dating sites are designed for 1-to-many communication primarily in mind.

Related posts:

1. New Project: Telvee
2. Freedays’09 Recap
3. Django Fixtures

Telvee is a social toy built around the idea of coffee grounds reading. No, it is not a fortunetelling application. Telvee is intentionally dumb in that sense. It generates an image of the remains inside a coffee cup. Looking at this image, users write fortunes for other users’ cups. This is the basic idea.

What if you don’t know anything about coffee reading? Well, we have a 12 step program that… No, no. If you don’t have proper coffee reading skills just make something up. Telvee is after all nothing more than a social toy. I am very passionate about coffee reading. I can’t tell a fortune. But I can drink the coffee, turn the cup and listen to my fortunes. This has worked pretty well for me in real life. We’ll see how it works out on the Internet when telvee is launched.

As you might have guessed telvee is a Django project. I am happy to work on a well organized, clean and well tested (91% coverage) codebase.

What Works?

Basically all the main functions are in place:

• Cup image generated ✔
• You can write fortunes ✔
• You can moderate fortunes (but blocking is broken) ✔
  • Deleting, recovering, liking, unliking…
• You can write comments ✔
• You can delete comments (but blocking is broken) ✔
• Friending works ✔
• You can block users (but it doesn’t have any effect for now, hence broken) ✔
• Invitations work (but, currently hidden from testers) ✔
• Account management works (but, incomplete) ✔

What Needs To Be Done?

Aside from critical functions I haven’t thought of:

• A blog
• Groups
• Improvements on many pages including homepage
• Django goodies that has little to do with frontend experience.

When Will It Be Finished?

Probably never. But I would like to initiate a proper beta this year. And then launch as soon as possible, maybe before summer. It is currently tested by a tiny group of people. I will start sending invites as soon as I decide it’s reasonably embarrasing.

If you would like to try telvee; please leave your e-mail at http://www.telvee.com.

Related posts:

1. I Am Discontinuing Telvee
2. Sad State of Web Development Industry in Türkiye
3. django-renderformplain