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Merit Exchange to Move from Alpha to Beta Testing
By Alex Zorach, April 13th, 2009
After two-and-a-half months of alpha testing, Merit Exchange is ready to launch for beta testing, and will launch on Saturday, April 18th. Current testers will be allowed to invite their friends to join, and these users will be gradually allowed to begin inviting new users.
I would like to thank not only every person who has helped test the internals of the site, but also the numerous people who helped through conversations and sharing of ideas and advice.
During the alpha testing phase, we have implemented a number of new features and improvements, and we have a few small celebrations:
- The classified search has been made more useful and its speed greatly improved.
- The site has been made much faster and more scalable.
- The first merits were sent on Mar. 15th. A very modest total of
m150 have been traded by 5 of the testers, all in non-binding thank-you transactions. This amount corresponds very roughly to a dollar value of about $55 worth of favors that users have provided for each other. - The mechanism for automatic regulation of the supply of the merits currency was put into place starting Monday, Apr. 6th.
- A number of bugs have been fixed and small cosmetic changes made to both the private and public parts of the site.
The end of alpha testing is only the beginning. While the core features of Merit Exchange for individuals have fallen into place, we anticipate continually growing and changing to accommodate the needs of our community and carry out our challenging mission of bringing prosperity to all people. We have also only begun to create the framework for businesses to use Merit Exchange, and the features to allow users to publish public content for the whole web to see. Stay tuned...we are evolving quickly and hopefully these features will arrive very soon!
