Crowdmap's One Week Anniversary

One week ago we launched the beta of Crowdmap, our cloud based service making it easy for users to create their own deployments of Ushahidi. On Monday (August 9th), the release was announced simultaneously on our blog and Twitter feed. It didn't take long for people to notice. We were ready for the masses to come in and set up their deployments. However, we weren't anticipating a nasty bug that had gone unnoticed in internal testing. For those more technically adept, a caching issue was swapping sessions between users when they would visit the site simultaneously. We had to take the site down for a couple hours while we diagnosed the problem and promptly applied a patch for the bug. In the mean time ReadWriteWeb was quick to get the first article out about the service highlighting some of these very issues. Needless to say, Crowdmap is now running smoothly. We have seen some innovative ideas already that we never really imagined. Gregory Hill wrote an article and produced a video highlighting how he was planning on using Crowdmap, "Equitable student sourced mapping: Crowdmap". He's looking at taking community mapping to the education space, having students report on happenings in their community in Spanish. These are the types of innovative uses we were hoping to see coming out of Crowdmap. What can you come up with?

Just to share some interesting statistics with you all, since we launched, we have seen over 1,500 deployments created by almost 1,400 users. When Lifehacker posted, "Crowdmap Puts Any Data on an Interactive Map" last night, we saw an immediate increase in traffic, boosting the number of deployments significantly. You can see this on the graph bar chart of Crowdmap deployments created since launch. We're working extra hard to make sure all bugs are patched and suggestions are considered. For those of you looking for more expanded functionality, we will be implementing Ushahidi's plugin and theme architecture in the coming months. It is currently under development for the second version of the Ushahidi platform. Please, keep your bug reports and suggestions coming!