Thanks again,

Bob

I back out and try to log in and it says “account not found”

Have you talked to the guys at Bible.org about getting the NET Bible translation? Since they are committed to open source. It may be an easy addition.

Congrats. Will you be including the New Living Translation in the mix soon as well?

Beta is beta, I admit it’s not fair to compare it to eBible. And I do know that you have spoken to eBible.

Great to hear that you’ve thought about the initial view. That is totally where you can innovate especially if you can figure out how to draw in non-Bible readers using user-generated content.

Great that you will be working on a way to extend YouVersion off the domain via widgets.

Critical mass for user-content, great!

Does that mean we can look forward to an API? That will let me post to WordPress and push it over to YouVersion? Or something like that…

I hope that you (and your team) get that its will a passion for great Internet products that I do agitate a little bit. Thanks for the response.

I don’t know that I will be able to deliver the “smackdown”-flavored response that you might be looking for. I’ve talked with the guys behind eBible and I think what they are doing is great…and even getting better from what I hear.

In regards to your post…first, thanks for catching a few of the (likely thousands of) bugs. I know that the team is working very hard to fix all of those, but it does help to have many sets of eyes on it. Second, I don’t think you are wrong…I think you are right…we are in beta and there are LOT of features and work to be done still. I did not take the time to explain all of what is to come in my post, but to address most of your thoughts…

FINDING CONTENT:
the Bible reader view will not be what people see when they come to the site after v1.0 launch. Instead it will be a dashboard view that draws out content and verses in a manner that is much more targeted to a non-Bible reader crowd. We also have several widgets that are in development that will pull both scripture and contrib/scripture content to the edges (blogs, etc)

CONTRIBUTING CONTENT:
As far as the chicken and egg problem…we understand that and agree…that is why we have started this public release and are working behind-the-scenes with several media producers and churches to create some critical mass for content in the coming weeks. Content producers have seen the value in this tool and have been contacting us to find out how to become involved. Regarding your suggestion that people should(or will) continue to write their thoughts on their blogs…I agree with that too. That is why we are working to make it very easy to pull and post content to YouVersion from wordpress (and likely others) simply by tagging your posts with verses. In general, we are looking for many ways to “automate” the process of content contribution and have it work with other workflows easily.

In general, I agree with most of the issues that you point out…we just hope to have many of them addressed before the first version is complete.

We have a great team of people who have worked very hard on this project in addition to many other projects we have cooking (but, I am sure you understand that). In their effort to put their heads down and deliver this beta version, I’ve not done a great job of publicly painting a clear picture of what the long-term plan is. So it’s more about why I’m wrong and not why you are.

Thanks for the feedback…I hope that helps.

Posted a review here, love to hear comments as to why I’m wrong.

Nice. Nice. Nice.

Todd

Kurt, the guys at ebible are great, I’m sure you’ll remain sold out.

Steve, we have a few things in process…at this point the focus is on getting the app to work well and getting critical mass on the contributed content…then I think you’ll start to see some relationships and “mashups” present themselves.

Jeff, I don’t have a stats summary yet. In the first few hours, I believe we had hundreds of registrations. We’ve done extensive load testing on the servers, so we “should” be ready for a decent amount of traffic should we get it. Now we are focused on getting some real-world traffic and feedback. :)

By the way what sort of traffic are you experiencing?

I’m going to give this a serious test drive.

Steve Brewer
Communications & Technology Catalyst
http://www.communitychristian.org
http://www.newthing.org
http://www.3cms.org

I’m continually inspired and impressed by the content and innovation that you produce. It’s amazing.

I wrote my thoughts on it here.

Thanks so much for all you’re doing!