What Blastoff Has Left to Do Before Launch
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It’s Sunday, October 11th, the day before Blastoff was supposed to launch for all PPL Associates. I had prepared all of my promotions for Blastoff in advance so I’m really just twiddling my thumbs today waiting with baited breath for news from PPL about the new launch date.
Since the bad news the night before last night, we’ve only gotten one other hint about the launch, on an internal PPL page :
Blastoff is currently working night and day to communicate with the main webmail services across the US to make them aware of the email volume to come, and keep all Blastoff members using the invitation service provided SPAM compliant. Blastoff needs a little more time to secure this effort. Due to this, we are postponing the launch.We know you are anxious to hit the ground running (and so are we, and so is Blastoff) but we want to take the appropriate precautions for lasting success – which includes remaining SPAM compliant.
What this means for you is that Blastoff will NOT launch on Monday. They simply need more time. We anticipate being able to announce a new launch date very soon and don’t expect the launch to be more than a week away. We will post more information on this website as it becomes available.
We realize this announcement may be discouraging for some, but rest assured that while this delay was not anticipated or desired by anyone at Pre-Paid Legal or Blastoff, we both believe it’s the best course of action to ensure the compliance necessary to continue doing business into the future.
Hopefully they don’t mind me posting this here, I may have to remove it at some point if they contact me about it. I can’t imagine why though, no secrets are being spilled that would hurt anyone. It sounds fine that they want to make sure that none of our promotions wind up in spam folders on launch day, but from the state of Blastoff itself right now, I get the feeling that there are one or two other issues holding up the launch. (Just my opinion.)
For instance, on my blastoff page right now, I can count _3_ issues that are completely not finished yet that they have indicated will be working in time for launch.
1. The Social Media panel is missing. Facebook, Twitter, all of the cool SocMedia ‘portalets’ are not there because there is no panel at all for social media there on any Blastoff page to date. If you ask me, one of Blastoffs biggest selling point is the ability to connect with everyone from different social networks all in one place. It really is a revolutionary concept, and they have told us since the beginning that it is a core part of the system… Yet there’s no sign of it.
2. The Downline viewer, “My Network” link is still inactive too. PPL members have a way of referring our own PPL downline to Blastoff as Blastoff referrals without the need of the sign-up forms or email invites that aren’t enabled yet. (Those are disabled until launch day on forgiveness, of course.) So many PPL associates DO have blastoff downlines already, yet we can’t view them at all with that broken “My Network” link not working. When I click it, it just reloads the page. 
This is clearly not something that they would need to disable before launch, and without getting in there I can’t tell if I’m going to be able to see things like how many people are in each of my 1st-generation downlines’ tree or even who exactly is under me on the 1st level.
3. The Earnings viewer, “My Rewards,” is doing the same thing that the ‘My Network’ link is, which is precisely nothing. We’ve been told already many times that earnings are already accruing, so if you were to click on my Mall and buy anything through it, I’d get some earnings today… Which is nice to be able to confirm, you know?
Again, this is not something they would need to disable before launch, and really makes us feel blind and uniformed if it isn’t enabled the very moment that earnings can be made.
So that’s my big rant, three major issues that would seem to not be solved yet on the Blastoff site so far, that perhaps could be giving Blastoff technicians more to work on this week than anti-spam certification. We’ll see.
None of it is stopping us from getting our promotional ducks in a row and preparing to promote Blastoff once it’s ready. Hopefully the launch schedule will just be set forward one week. (So the prelaunch would happen on the 19th, lasting for two weeks until the 3rd, when the world gets it all.)
I do feel sorry for other promoting partners like the United Way, Pizza Hut, and the Dallas Cowboys though, surely they had planned something for the 27th that is now causing them major inconvenience with the delay.
It doesn’t really matter though in the scheme of things if they promote or not, however, since we were told on a conference call Friday that over 100,000 PPL associates all have blastoff accounts now and all plan to promote on the prelaunch day.
Can you imagine if they all have lists of just a 100 people each? There could be 10 Million Blastoff members signed up within hours! Given Blastoff’s ultra-viral nature I don’t think the ‘public’ push will be felt two weeks later, to tell you the truth… Everyone on Earth could already have an account by then.
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There’s several problems of performance that can hopefully get worked out in time.
1st – Loading is slow. My computer on a high speed T-1 line still takes longer to load than my iGoogle homepage. This will need to be made more slick and quick for people to adopt as a homepage.
2nd – Link Reputation. Sending the whole PPL network online to promote a url or series of urls is a spam intitiative. I think the spam compliant portion has the most to deal with. For instance, I can take my link on my page for the mall, put it on a URL shortener and then load it into a auto-form generator and spam the living beans out of craigslist.
3rd – Visualized Discounts. For a couple stores I tested to buy something, the redirect just placed me at the store’s website with no mention of a discount or rebate from blastoff. Though there is a warning about checking for the discount or rebate before you buy, there isn’t a course of action to take if it is missing.
I’ve worked in launching socail networks and this is an ambitious effort and I feel for the developers. There’s never enough coffee!
Hi Eric, thanks for writing in.
I agree with you on all three points, for the most part. Loading time isn’t a real issue though, it’s just barely noticeable on our cable-modem connection. The test will come when their server is slammed soon after launch, however.
As for the discounts being more obvious, it should only be an issue for people who are just smart enough to realize your point, but aren’t so smart that they’d have no trouble checking their cookies to see if the one named ‘blastoffnetwork’ is present. (At least until they trust it.)
Hey, that gives me a great idea for a future post here. Thanks for mentioning that.
And as for the developers, yes, I know their back is to the whip right now. Perhaps I should reserve my resentment for the Blastoff executives who agreed for the developers on a launch date… Those guys need to step back and really take stock before they give us another launch date!