Recent Posts
A new home on .net
The Tracour that you know and love has a new home. We have moved from Tracour.com to Tracour.net but the service is exactly the same as when we were on the .com domain.
So why did we move? Well, without giving away all of our secrets, we are building something awesome and are going to use the .com domain for that service. In short, it’s an extension of what we already have with Tracour.net but as part of our investment, we agreed to use the .com domain for the future service.
So, to make room for our upcoming launch (September) we wanted to start the transition from our .com domain to the new .net domain to ease the move.
For now, if you go to Tracour.com, you will see a yellow banner at the top that tells you that we have moved. By clicking on any of the links, you will be redirected to .net.
As the service continues to grow (nearly 850 rumors!), the new .net name will become the new home for all the tech rumors on the web.
Thanks for checking in, now back to the tracouring.
Tracour has received a seed investment
On June 29th, Tracour was launched and what followed over the next 10 months was nothing short of a rollercoaster ride of emotions and hard work. From the moment we launched, Tracour changed the game. No longer were rumors forgotten but authors were finally being held accountable for what they penned.
Through the highs and lows of running the site, we have learned a lot about what drives content and how to properly utilize our tool. One important factor we discovered about our technology running the site was that it was not a commodity and was a unique set of assets that has exponential potential.
Tracour has received a sizeable seed investment to allow us to take our platform and fully build out the vision we set forth back in June. With Brad Sams as CEO and Braeden Petruk as our CTO, we are taking Tracour and building something unique and we are pretty damn excited about it.
Our private investors will be providing resources that Braeden and I could have never achieved on our own and they will be the guiding hand to make sure our final product aligns with market needs. Our plan involves using Tracour’s technologies and pivoting them to build out a horizontal path of tangible data that is actionable and relevant to consumer and professional needs.
It’s been a long journey to be able to write this post but as we transition from a side-hobby and into a startup, we hope you join us for the crazy ride.
Thank you for checking out Tracour and making it the success that it is today. Your rumor submissions and feedback has shaped the tool you see today but now it is time for us to get back to the whiteboard and make good on all of our promises.
Look for us in September.
Leader board, rumor cards and improved search
Features, features, features, that’s what we have been hammering out for the site. Over the past month we have pushed out a new search algorithm, the coveted accuracy leader board and rumor cards.
As we hoped, when the leader board went live, we saw a large influx of content as authors tried to either boost their own ranking or discredit authors above them by submitting rumors they got wrong. This influx of content helped us to grow the database and we are now at 750(!) data points.
The rumor cards solved a lot of logistical problems we had including how to properly permalink rumors and add a social sharing function to the site. The permalinks make it easier for a third-party to share an individual rumor, as opposed to the entire domain page; we love them.
We have a lot of content in development and the likely next feature update will be an improved submission feature. The submit button will remain on the site but we will be incorporating Twitter submissions too.
In the near future, when you want to submit a rumor, simply tweet “track @tracour LINK” , this will start the workflow and insert the rumor into our moderator queue. We hope this will encourage more submissions and streamline the input process by using a friendly medium.
We have also kicked-off work on the advanced analytics portion of the site. Design work is still in process, but we have the first draft of the feature set complete.
The site is moving forward, content is being submitted and we are gaining influence; onward and upward.
Tracour hits V1.1, new features arrive
There are times when you sit back and wonder if what you are creating is worth the time and effort that you invest into your products. While we created Tracour to isolate an issue, the end result has become much more expansive than we first, or ever could have imagined.
Last night, Tracour received its first update since launch (official update, not a bug fix). The update introduces a new feature on the front end a bit of optimization on the back end too. First the front end, author pages are now live. What is an author page? It is a page that tracks all of the rumors propagated by a single author. Now you have the ability to see how accurate any author is in the database, independent of domain. So, if one author starts on site X and then moves to site Y, you can track them on an individual basis rather than their domain.
We have also improved searching, while not perfect (more updates to come) we have improved how it functions based on your feedback. Previously, you had to search Techcrunch.com to land on the domain page, now, if you search Tech Crunch, you will find the domain page…a simple, but important change. Currently, searching for authors is not active, we have a small hurdle to overcome so you must manually find the link on the domain pages to see the view; this will be fixed soon.
Now that the domain templates are completed, we can begin working towards one of our next goals, the leaderboards. While we don’t have anything else to share on this at the moment, it is in the pipeline.
Over the past week, we have had two important events for Tracour, one is that our video interview with Robert Scoble went live and that WPcentral is going to use our data for news posts. We could not be more excited to see our data being used to help make posts more robust, you can see how it works with this post on WPCentral. Our hope is that more sites will join WPCentral’s lead and use our data in their posts to help paint a more complete picture.
We could not be more happy with the reception of Tracour, while the work is far from over and the data base is growing (550 data points!); the fun is only getting started.
Tracour V1.1 is live.
A humble response and our next step
When we started building Tracour, we had a modest goal of building a simple platform to track rumors across the web. While our ambitious have grown significantly, they have been fueled by your enthusiastic response to our site.
When we launched, we did so quietly, or so we thought. Our little corner of the web got more attention than we had ever expected including a re-tweet from Kara Swisher (800k followers), a delicious write-up by The Next Web and another posting by Nibletz.
Our humble beginnings are a testament to the need for such a tool and without sounding overly zealous; I think we nailed the implementation.
We have a couple of features in the pipeline, ok, a lot of features in the pipeline, but one that I think most will find compelling is the leader board. We are in the early stages of building out what we hope will be the most coveted leader board on the Internet, our own Honesty Tracker board (name of the leader board still up in the air) that will highlight who is the top name, by accuracy, on the Internet; we will also have leader boards for sub categories like Microsoft, Apple and Google.
I would say that fun is only getting started, but we have been having fun the entire time and thanks to all of your kind words, we have no intentions of stopping.
Welcome to Tracour, the fud stops here
Welcome to Tracour and it feels damn good to be able to say that. The site, that started with a conversation about holding bloggers and journalists responsible for the rumors they initiate, has been in creation for 6 months.
What you see on the front page is only the start, with nearly 300 rumors in our database, the foundation has been set. Over time, the database will grow, baselines will be established and Tracour will become the definitive source for researching the credibility of rumors that are propagating the web.
There is one person who has been crucial to our launch and is our sole developer; Braeden, He has been instrumental in bringing this site from concept to what we see today. He put up with my complaining, tweaking, late night emails, Twitter DMs and much much more. Without him, this site would still be a rough sketch on a sheet of paper.
We have a lot planned for the site, including a custom report writer, API, and much much more.
To the start of our database and an end to Internet FUD, welcome everyone.
