Today, Teens In Tech, a much hyped blogging network for teens is finally open to the public with some “goodies” to boot.
According to TechCrunch, Teens In Tech (which Daniel Brusilovsky, CEO of TIT writes for) has made an acquisition at around $15,000 for a Twitter/FriendFeed clone, Yazzem. The public release also came with a site redesign and future plans for premium features.
It took four months to release this?
To be quite honest, I expected more out of Daniel and his team. The public release offers nothing more for teens that are involved in tech than any other blogging network does. You don’t even get a subdomain, according to a comment by Daniel himself on TC, that is going to be a “premium” feature as well. From the sounds of it, you can get more out WordPress/Blogger and completely for free. On top of that, TIT is poorly designed.
The redesign is not complete and unlike their PR screenshots (smart) here is what the site actually looks like:
You cannot click over on the tabs as of this current writing
No sidebar? come on...
Currently the team page...
In all honesty, this is a pretty poorly conceived public release and is quite embarrassing, especially when you are being covered by many major tech blogs, which some startups would go nuts over (and put to good use).
Teens In Tech is in no way, form or fashion benefiting teen bloggers. It is simply a poorly designed WordPress MU install that requires some CSS edits and very basic knowledge on how to work with PHP/MySQL.
I have been a supporter of the network since the get go and I am sure many others expected a lot more, and all we got was this? Come on now, Daniel, according to the people I have talked to. You’re better than this.
Holden,
I'm sorry to hear that the site wasn't working properly for you during the time you visited. As I'm sure you can imagine, as we encountered more traffic, more parts of the site started breaking, and since our engineering team are all high school students, it was very hard for them to leave school and fix the site.
As of my comment, the site is back to normal as we expected it. We are launching with base features, and will be adding more on top of that, so I can assure you that everything you mentioned in your post will change.
Thanks for the feedback, and I hope you get to try out this version of Teens in Tech.
Best,
Daniel Brusilovsky
Founder, Teens in Tech Networks
Daniel, as a high school student myself, I understand.
This reflects poor planning on your part though, we both know TechCrunch would've covered you on the weekend and we all know weekends are dead for content, so the same people would've picked it up.
Also, with your note on traffic, if you are hosted (which I am assuimg you are since they are a sponsor) on MT I am well aware MediaTemple can handle excessive loads of traffic. I run multiple sites on the lowest level server, and three of my articles have been on Digg amassing 40,000+ in traffic, 10,000+ of that in less than an hour without a hint of slow down and on a WPMU install. So I am sorry if I highly doubt that traffic was a reason for you being down.
As for features, what features are you going to add that will help teens that surpass other networks? You still have not answered that question and to be quite honest, I wonder if there ever will be
Holden,
Personally, I am a little disappointed that you would make assumptions like these not knowing under what situations we where under for the announcement. We picked this date for a reason, and several media outlets covered it.
Yes, MediaTemple does host Teens in Tech, but when I was talking about traffic, I was saying that due to the traffic, the database was getting hit harder then we had expected, and we had to adjust over time. MediaTemple has been nothing but great for us, and we really appreciate their support.
When you look at Teens in Tech, you can not compare it to Facebook — we are not a social network. We help youth publish media content online. We don't focus on profiles, or writing on each others “walls” or any of that other stuff. If you wanted to compare us to Facebook, Youth Bloggers Network is probably the better or our network sites to compare it to.
We are launching several premium features in the coming months, like mentioned by TechCrunch. Until then, we are keeping our product strategy internal. If you have further questions, please email me, and I'm more then happy to chat with you. My email is daniel [at] teensintech.com.
Thanks for your response,
Daniel Brusilovsky
Sure, actually, a direct call would be a bit more convenient and more forward (imo).
Set up a time?
Feel free to text/call @ anytime 3202861025. Of course, skype works as well – id: holdenpage
Great, just added you on Skype. Thanks for taking the time to chat.