Due to some excellent feedback we’ve received recently, some improvements have been made regarding task behaviour and ical calendar subscription.

Hope we’ve made the right changes! Thank you, once again, for all the great feedback!

If you have are having any problems receiving emails from Goplan (we were told Hotmail users are having some issues) please email our support team and we’ll activate your Goplan account.

Thanks for all the feedback.

UPDATE: We’re waiting on DNS propagation. Depending on your ISP this issue should be solved in the next 72 hours.

Ooops, minor screw-up there. If you created a free account in the last few hours you probably experienced an error when you invited a colleague into your project, as he/she couldn’t login after accepting the invitation. We found this bug a few minutes ago and already committed a fix. About 30 projects were affected, but it’s all good now.

Sorry if that somehow affected your experience - go back to kicking serious ass! We’ll get back to making sure you do it in amazing fashion.

We figured it was time for a quick post to thank everyone that’s talked about us, sent in feedback and subscribed to our service in these first days since we launched. It is extremely rewarding to know we built something people like to use.

This being said, how (and what) can we do better? What can we do to blow you out of the water? If there’s anything we’ve been missing, do let us know.

Our feedback channels are always open. You can email us directly, or use the “send feedback” link on the bottom of any Goplan application page to tell us something’s wrong or to send in suggestions. We act on feedback almost immediately, and although our email response isn’t immediate as well (it’s been a ton of email from you guys and we hate automatic replies), you can be sure everything sent in is read and acted-on.

Here’s a few interesting tidbits about Goplan that you probably didn’t know yet if you’ve only just signed up or started reading the blog:

• Powered by Amazon: The whole application is built on top of Amazon’s scaling solutions, EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and S3 (Scalable Storage Service). Amazon was kind enough to provide a beta account for us last year, and we immediately launched a private alpha on their technology. Using Amazon’s service allows us to fit users dynamically, making sure workflow doesn’t get interrupted by “slow servers”.
• Microformats support: Goplan’s Calendar supports Microformats, allowing users to easily extract data microchunks even if they don’t use the iCal synchronization. The plan is to export all the data users create through microformats in the future.
• OpenID: We’re strong believers in the need for an open identity system and Goplan will be supporting OpenID in the very near future. This means you’ll be able to login using the same login you use on Wikipedia and several other sites. Which I’m sure you’ll agree, is pretty sweet.

We’ll be releasing more details about how the application was built and some more inside scoops (including some insight on what we have planned for future updates) often, so keep checking back.

After quite a long period in testing, and a longer period of development we’re proud to say we’re officially launching Goplan. We couldn’t be happier, and we hate selling our own solution (because we’re biased - we love it!), but we believe we have a pretty compelling product to manage online projects.

There’s obvious (and great) competition from our friends at 37Signals, the guys at Zoho, and even in the open-source Activecollab. But because none of those actually did it for us and our needs, we decided to build and launch our own product. We have our own set of features, and we have a pretty serious value proposition: giving you the right tools and flexibility, and getting out of your way.

We paid attention to what the blogosphere was saying and to what testers left in our feedback system, and built a solution around the needs of the majority of people. We won’t say we have the perfect product, but the problem is no-one does.

Anyway, get to the Goplan homepage (goplan.info) and hit the application (goplan.org) if you’re ready to sign-up! Oh, and final screenshots are on Flickr!

If you want to stay up to date with what’s happening with Goplan in real-time, add us up at twitter. Twitter is an always-on communication channel over IM, SMS or the web. We’ll be pushing updates as to what’s happening with the service and servers, so either subscribe to the twitter RSS feed or add us up if you want to get 0-second news.

We just recorded a video of how to get started with goplan. In two minutes and a half we create an account, subscribe a free plan, create an initial project and a few tasks. We’re planning on doing a series of videos showing how to use the application, from easy tasks, to complex functionality, to coordinating team efforts. If you didn’t try Goplan out yet, maybe this is a good opportunity to see how to get started. Click here for the first video.

You’ll need Quicktime 7 for the time being - uploading to a site like Youtube or Google Video wouldn’t help because it’d mess up the quality necessary to get the details. Enjoy!