It has been just about a month since TechCrunch reviewed SlideSix and I wanted to put together a summary of what has turned into a whirlwind month for me. I also have been meaning to put together a quick summary of the recent changes on the site for people who may not be familiar or haven't quite been paying attention to all of the enhancements so I'll cover some of that here in this post as well.

The TechCrunch Effect

As one might expect, The TechCrunch coverage led to an initial massive spike in traffic (as shown in the chart below). I can't really explain the absolute high that comes from seeing your work covered by a site like TechCrunch. I suppose you could call it 'validation' that the year of development, refactoring, marketing, re-developing, re-designing, and yet more refactoring was truly worth my time. But it's so much more then validation. I don't have the personal experience to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that the experience is even more satisfying then a coke fueled 4 day binge. It's unreal - surreal even. But like all good highs, eventually you come down. And to be truly honest, I expected it. It's unrealistic to expect instant Twitter-like fame from a single article in TC. What I did hope for though was some sort of momentum. TechCrunch serves as an introduction to the tech world, only on a much larger scale then just about every other tech news source in the world. Think of it like a physical introduction in front of a very large crowd. You may shake a hundred hands, which is good, but unless you make an impression on some of the people whose hands you shook your introduction will probably quickly fade from their memories and they probably won't go tell their friends that they shook your hand. But if you make the meeting memorable then they'll go tell all their friends what a nice guy you are. So my goal was to smile, wink and kiss a few babies with my introduction. I hoped that what I've done with the site would impress folks enough to generate some sort of lasting momentum. And by the looks of things in the very short sighted period of a month I'm pretty happy that I'm on the way towards lasting growth. Here is a look at the weekly growth over the past few months:

As you can see the initial spike was pretty impressive, but more importantly the traffic in the following few weeks seems to have leveled off, but at a much higher level then the previous weeks and months. Here are a few other items that I'm quite proud of (all stats are as of today):

• 206 bookmarks in delicious
• Now listed in CrunchBase
• Reviewed by makeuseof.com
• Reviewed by killerstarups.com
• Interviewed by indezine.com
• Alexa rank went from 3.5M to 432k in 30 days (per websitegrader.com)

I've also been contacted by numerous sites, companies and individuals regarding potential partnerships or collaborations. I can't really say much on anything at this point, but stay tuned. What's New Over the last few months the site has seen a number of enhancements. Most notable are the new presentation viewer and the Management Console. Both of these enhancements are geared at creating a much better user experience for both presenters and potential viewers. The viewer has been completely overhauled and recreated from scratch. The slide controls are now featured prominently in the center of the toolbar on the bottom for easy navigation. And instead of cluttering the toolbar with various icons for notes, attachments, etc there is now a single button which launches a menu overlay with easy to read icons for performing various actions. The management console is also completely new and presents users with a single interface for managing their presentations, profiles and groups. The console also features a multi-upload utility to let you quickly import all of your presentations in one shot. Trial upload is now handled by a super simple Flex application instead of the previous Ajax/plain old vanilla interface. You can see the new trial uploader here. If you are new to the site, check the about and how to pages for more info. What's Next? As usual I'm still busy in the labs cooking up some cool stuff. My focus remains on enhancements and features that provide a simple but effective interface, so whatever features I implement will be done with a complete focus on being the best in class. I don't want to get into many details on the next major enhancement just yet, so 'stay tuned'. I will say that a developer API is also in the works. It is actually mostly done, but the ever-fun documentation is not complete. Once the API is documented I hope to get some people to test it out before it is launched. I don't want to rush the API or the documentation. There is nothing worse then a poorly implemented/documented API. Let me know if you are interested in testing.