Heading over to Facebook

[Brad Winney]

Dear Beta Participants,

We're going to try Facebook out as a discussion manager for our beta programs. At a minimum, we'll cut down on some of the spam-like email issues related to using Google Groups. We'll see what transpires. 

We've really appreciated your participation in our beta program's thus far and if you're interested in hanging out with us on Facebook (dig at Google / pun unintended), please do come over. We sent this (below) out to our general mailing list earlier today and has the "how to's" included. 

Thank you again! 

Brad

Co-Founder, EarthNC, Inc. 

We are, in fact, looking for a few good men and women... to become beta testers of EarthNC products.

As most of you know, we update our marine charting and weather products fairly frequently...and we don't always get everything right. We miss features here and there and we then, sometimes, we compound the error by breaking things in the process...which leads to unhappy customers. Very...unhappy... customers. 

So, with your help,  we can avoid a lot of that pain and suffering and make much better products in the process. With your help, we can get a much better feel for what's working and what's not working, what features need to be tweaked etc., etc.

In exchange for your help and time, we'll be extending special offers, promotions etc. We know that many of you simply enjoy testing products and otherwise helping a company do a better job building great products, but we'll extend the offers just the same. 

Interested? Great...but before you sign-up, a couple of house-cleaning items: 

1) We really need you to test the releases as they come out. Generally speaking, we'll issue a new release every two months and we'll have a week to test (and fix things) before we submit ito the appropriate markets. If you're up for that activity level...great. 

2) We're moving our beta testing comunity to our Facebook page. Ok, ok, we know...we can hear the collective groans from here. That said, the truth of the matter is that Facebook is a really powerful platform for managing on-going discussions about product releases...and its far better than everything else we've tried thus far. So, we're going to give it a shot. 

Still interested? Great. Then please go to our Facebook page and "Like" the similar post we made regarding the Beta program (its got the same picture of Tom whathisface in it). Also, if you don't mind, leave a comment as to whether or not you want to be in our iOS beta, Android beta or both. That will help us manage the groups better. We'll be posting the program next steps in Facebook (once we've reached our target of 30 users in each group). 

We really appreciate your consideration and patronage. 

Brad & Virgil (a.k.a. "EarthNC")