The extension seems to be getting ready. I’m working on the finishing touches right now. As you can see in the image the extension installs a Fleck button in the menubar. When you click it it adds a Fleck to the page you are currently visiting.

I a few days, or as soon as I’m done, I’m going to ask some of you to install the extension. It will not offer all of the functionality yet and will just show a nearly empty page when you click it but it will enable us to test if it installs correctly and might help finding the first bugs.

So, if you are interested in helping with that just let me know here in the comments or send me a message by mail.

It has been a while since we last updated the blog. There were a few reasons for that. One of the reasons was that we were having trouble with Fleck. A few things went wrong during the summer. First of all we chose a certain direction for the software which looking back wasn’t very smart. The software was slow and buggy and we didn’t get the feeling that that would improve. Around the same time it became clear that the deal we had been negotiating with a VC wasn’t going to work out. And then the summer started…

So there we were. Summertime, nobody home. No deal so no money. Buggy technology and not a clear path on how to fix that. Energylevels dropped, expectations started to fade and we felt terrible.

Then in early September everything started to move again. New investors contacted us. We started feeling better about our prospects and we were making plans on how to fix our software. Then one night I couldn’t sleep.

As I lay awake I was thinking about our software problems and wondered what I would do if I could just throw everything away and start all over. I figured out one little problem we were having and, half asleep, came up with a solution for everything. Just before I fell asleep I made some notes so I wouldn’t forget. Even in my sleep I thought it would probably be nothing. You know how these great ideas at night seem very stupid in the morning when you are awake.

So the next day I sketched some things on our whiteboard for Patrick and after about 30 minutes Patrick said “You are not telling me it can be THAT simple?!” to which I replied “I’m not sure, but lets try it!”.

So right now we are working on Fleck again with two developers and it is going very well. I won’t promise a launch date until the day before because I would hate to miss another deadline. But there is one more thing I want to discuss.

Looking back I guess we overbluffed a bit. The introduction text on Fleck.com “Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered.” got us a lot of attention and we didn’t mind that at all. But when things went wrong we started to regret having hyped ourselves like this.

When we started working on Fleck again in September I bought a new domain: Searcle.com
I figured we could build something on Searcle.com without getting the attention we got on Fleck.com and launch without having to live up to the high expectations we have on Fleck.com.

But last week we decided to use Fleck.com after all. Fleck is just prettier than Searcle. All we have to do is get those high expectations back to a more realistic level. I’ll try to do that by explaining a bit more about Fleck in my next post. I might even throw in a screenshot…