Good news, bad news
Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.
The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.
What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.
While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.
