Mike Griffiths

Well, it’s a new year and as everyone else are starting their fitness regimes, I’m thinking about what projects need finishing off, beginning and pushing.

2009 was a good year for me and some great accomplishments were made. I graduated with my Software Engineering Degree, I got ‘best project’ of 2009, I started my job as lead developer over at Reckless New Media and I have begun several important projects of my own.

Towards the beginning of 2009 I began work on the Football Badges app, which now has (at time of writing) well over 35,000 active users, with over 15,000 signing up each month. With the success of this project I decided to branch out with some similar projects including University Badges and more recently Baseball Badges. As expected Uni Badges has not been as popular with only 1,000 active users, Baseball Badges however is growing very fast, and it’s rate of growth reflects that of Football Badges.

Another finished project taken on this year was Downtime Preventer, a system built to notify web site owners of downtime via email and SMS within minutes (if not seconds) of the downtime occurring.

A joint project that is completed that was launched earlier this year is QueryLife. QueryLife is a social network that asks thought-provoking questions to users every day. Users can add their friends and view/comment on friends answers. Answers are not simple text-based answers, but can instead be stories told by text, imagery and video. The project has been created in a partnership between myself and the guys over at Creative Happy.

Other projects that are VERY close to deployment are ‘Officing’ and ‘Dont U Forget’, both web applications built for specific purposes and unlike anything out there at the moment.

So, my plan for the first quarter of the new year is:

• Promote Downtime Preventer
• Complete Officing and deploy live
• Complete Dont U Forget and deploy
• Market QueryLife

Once I’m happy that this list has been satisfied I will not doubt begin a new project, maybe something to do with Andoird…

Recently I began a project with two other guys. The idea was simple; get a group of people signed up to a web site that asks you a unique question every day. This question changes at midnight and you can view your friends answers and comment on them.

The project was finished about a week ago and it’s been met with excellent feedback. Everyone seems to love the idea and we’re seeing a steady increase in our userbase.

We aim to have 1,000 users by the new year, at which point we’re hoping for an explosion of new users as the word spreads.

Similar to my Facebook App Football Badges we have integrated into Facebook Connect. This seamless integration will allow users to sign up at the click of a button, providing they have a Facebook account. Logging in is a breeze too, just hit the log in button and we use your Facebook session to log you in. The idea is that every time a Facebook user answers a question the question and answer is posted to their Facebook wall.

Check the project out, it’s called QueryLife.

QueryLife