Thank goodness!

Mario, our Super Support guy has arrived here in San Francisco from India. I'm sure he is dying of jet lag, but I started hammering him with information anyway. It's great to have him on board.

Although Mario doesn't have a blog, he will be 'da man' behind the future of the support wiki, currently held at Wikispaces. The idea of using a support wiki was mine, but instead of being an ingenius way to leverage user expertise (and "user created content"...sorry Robert), it was just me being clueless. I thought if I created a wiki, all of the engineers could help me create content 'cause I had no idea what made stuff work here. It's way cool, but I don't know why.

We aren't ready to roll out those alphas quite yet, but it will be very very soon. This is how it will work:

• Those who asked me a looooooong time ago (sorry about the wait), then filled out the online survey (thanks!) and took the time to send me their small photo set ahead of time (you rock) get to go first. It's only fair (don't be sending me photos if you weren't in this initial group, I know who they are)
  
• Then we'll do a slightly larger group, chosen by the size of their datasets (yes, size DOES matter...;)) - they have been pre-specified and verified...and we need them to test HUGE datasets and the stability of the system.
  
• Then I will be sending out invites in blocks of, like, 50, in order of your requests...
  

...all the while, testing, gathering feedback and trying to respond to the buzz in the blogosphere, etc.

I will be including this in the alpha invite email as well, but for those of you wanting to blog ahead of time, these are your tags:

Good review of Riya = riyarocks
Bad review of Riya = soalphaithurts
General tags = riya, autotagging, photosearch

For those of you who aren't familiar with Microformats, here is an example of the code:

href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagexample"

rel="tag" so I'm being lazy and wanting to find the posts easier...as well as I'm being blatantly self-promotional. There's my disclosure. ;) But, hey, Microformats are good for everyone!

Welcome Mario! Any more alpha requests? alpha [at] riya [dot] com (there is a majore queue, though, so it may take a while...oh...and IE6 support right now only...I know, I'm a Firefox / Flock devotee...you don't have to tell me)

Technorati Tags: microformats, tags, photosearch, riyarocks, soalphaithurts, riya, alpha