OK. I just decided to let the cat out of the bag.
For all those interested, here’s the link to our beta site:
We still have lots to do before we open it up on Friday, but thought I’d give you a chance to see the “before” so that you’ll be able to (hopefully) appreciate the “after”.
Some good things we’re doing:
1. Friendlist - users can create unlimited friendlists and assign their content on friendlists. This will allow several layers of privacy - controlled by the users
2. Dashboard - when user logs in, he / she lands on a personal dashboard which has message inbox and event invite inbox, plus it highlights new content posted by friends. This helps them see what’s new at a glance.
3. Colts Cred - this is a social currency system we’re developing…gives users a chance to compete for fame (leaderboard reflects point leaders). We’ll also layer in special promotions / opportunities to gain inside access for Colts Cred leaders
4. Available channels - this hasn’t been turned on just yet - but soon we’ll have multiple sites popping up on this platform…Eagles and Falcons are both launching sites…plus Colts are launching “MyIndianaFootball” which will give each High School team in Indiana it’s own publishing platform…connected by to MyColts.
5. Search - the search tool is pretty powerful - you can search on just about any attribute users put into the system as long as the users don’t friendlist that content. If it’s friendlisted it’s not searchable.
6. Tony Dungy Blog - We got really lucky. Tony has already begun to blog. We expect this to be pretty popular.
There’s a lot more to the system…we have all the expected stuff like personal profile pages, photo uploads, blogs, groups, and events. We’re also planning a whole slew of improvements both to features and funcitonality as well as user interface. But this is the basic site that will launch this week.
Due to the fact that we’re going to continue changing stuff around, we’ll probably keep the beta tag on the site for another month or so until we release the new version of Colts.com which will be integrated with MyColts - again so you can log into either site with the same username and password. Colts.com will itself get some new “Web 2.0″ features. So it should be much improved.
