A Quantum Immortal

After more than a year of work, we have finally released Delver beta – a “social shopping platform”.
You’re more than welcome to check it out at http://delver.com/

We are still in “closed beta”, which means you need an invite to get in (but can then forward invites to your friends).
If you want one, drop me a line with your email.

Big big thanks to everyone in our team for making it happen!

Still in beta (not announced on the SO blog yet). A shirt is $12, shipping to Israel is $11 fixed price + $4 per shirt. Let me know if you want one and we can do a shipment together.

I blogged before about the StackExchange platform for questions and answers.

A few months have passed, and a whopping 218 different “stacks” emerged (there might be some more off the radar). While most of them are still ghost towns, a few are starting to be rather useful (some more and some less):

• MathOverflow – Higher math. I haven’t personally used this one myself, but it seems to really take off.
• Force Close – Android
• Basically Money – Money & investments
• Smarter Gamer – Gaming. Not super active right now, but still.
• Draw3Cards – my own site about Magic: The Gathering. Picking up quite nicely over the last few months.
• Epic Advice – World of Warcraft, one of the largest stacks.
• Outflopped – Poker
• ZergOverflow – Starcarft
• Moms4Mom – Parenting
• AskSci/Science Stack – Science (These two should merge IMO)

Regarding my own experience, I am nowhere close to breaking even. Until now, StackExchange has been a free (beta) platform. When it come out of beta, they will start charging $120/month. But, I’m optimistic, and I don’t mind funding Draw3Cards from my own money for the next year – it is picking up in terms of traffic. Meanwhile, I have also done a little bit of development of a similar open source, though I hadn’t perused it beyond a “programming exercise” yet.

P.S.

Needless to say, the original Trilogy – StackOverflow, SuperUser and ServerFault – continue to be an invaluble assent in programming, using a computer and IT. Rock on!

P.S.S.

I just found Shapado, a free, open source hosted version of Stack Exchange. They are taking a lot of heat from some of StackExchange’s users, but I think their existence can only be good news to StackExchange’s users. I probably won’t be switching Draw3Cards to Shapado any time soon because the platform is still not ready (less features, not as smooth), but time will tell.