What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

The system is surprisingly solid and is very easy to use. It’s one of those sites that you can happily mess around with for ages.

You can view the epic .gif I created here.

Joe Daley, the sites founder, filled me in with a bit more info.

I started the site around nine months ago, I hired a guy to help with the part of the code that saves the .gif, I knew this was an important piece of the project, the first version took a minute to save the photos, 2nd version 30 secs, still not good enough so we worked another 2 months and finally now it takes only 2 to 5 secs to save a photo.

I always tried to keep these things in mind when building blingeasy.

1. clean interface
2. easy to use and understand.
3. make it fast, fast, fast!

The flash editor was a huge challenge also, we had to optimize gifs as they are loaded so they load fast inside the editor and are not to big once they are placed on the photo.
really the whole project was a huge challenge mentally and physically, I basically had my mind made up I would not stop until it was done right. We went back to the drawing board many times to redo functions and code.

Duncan Riley covered BlingEasy with a blog post entitled “BlingEasy: So bad It’s Actually Good” and I’d have to agree with him. This website certainly isn’t for everyone but for the select few that this does appeal to I’m sure it’s a godsend.

Along with just entering the URL you want to highlight you also have the option of installing the awesome highlighter firefox extension. If you register for an account all of your highlighted pages are stored in your account for future reference.

I made a very short demo of the system.

After talking to the sites founders I got some insight into where the idea for the website came from.

We were working in a shipping yard and there was an accident. A box of
bricks fell, nearly crushing us…but a highlighter swooped in to save us.
From that day forward, we swore to promote the idea of highlighting and
sharing text to the world.

Pretty crazy.

It’s a really simple idea that’s been executed really well. It’s definitely a service I will be using often.

While this might not be useful to a lot of tech-savvy people there is definitely a market for it. Everyone wants their little part of the internet and this service makes that easy. It’s also a great model for promotion with each group owner promoting their specific group and in-turn, promoting the main intodit website.

I spoke with Maurice Sikkink and found out a bit more about the service.

I have a few small communities running on very targeted niches, like home interior pictures and gardening. These sites only allow users to upload their home interior and garden pictures and create a profile. I wanted to create something that people could use to do more than only uploading pictures, so I thought people should be able to create a group for their own interest niche and fill it the blanks the way they want it.

Maurice has developed the entire site himself and to date has only spent $5 on the domain name (excluding server costs).

Tim is a part time wedding photographer (as well as being a professional designer/developer) and after getting sick of using a combination of Outlook, Excell and Word to manage his clients he thought something needed to be done. Strangely enough this is how most really useful web applications come about, someone is in need of it, so they make it.

Tim was nice enough to let me have a look around an early version of Pixifi today and I was generally impressed. I could see how it would be a valuable resource for any freelance photographer looking fir an easy way to manage their work load. What impressed me even more was that Tim has designed and developed this entire thing himself. From the ground up. It’s very rare to find someone who can both design and program exceptionally well. So, to date he has spent $0 on the website. Although… (and this is a wonderful quote)

I had to sacrifice time with my wife and friends to start building it…
You can’t put a price on that kind of startup funding… it’s expensive unless you’re
willing to make the sacrifice in the beginning.

Below is a quick look at the app itself.

Right now, vorolo is a one man band run by Jason Rai. Being a serial designer Jason managed to considerably keep the cost of development down designing the entire website himself. On top of that he spent $700 on the website programming. (According to Jason he would have quoted someone around $1,500 for all of the design work).

Today i was lucky enough to get an early look through the site and system.

The main problem Jason is going to face will be trying to build up the sites userbase. With the social networking market so saturated with large, established players it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this site grows.

I managed to get my hands on 20 beta invites. There is still a bit more work to be done on the site before it’s ready but when it’s good to go i’ll post the invites up here.

Edit: The updates are good to go. Leave a comment if you want one and i’ll send it over.