Fiestastic's official blog

Eventually I decided to drop the whole invitation-only system and just go all in with Fiestastic. If I am so lucky as to “crash the server” with the amount of people who sign up, then I’ll deal with it.

If you’ve checked out the site before you’ll see there’s a brand new design with sliding panes inspired by Twitter.com’s interface. 

Go check out the new design and don’t be shy about giving feedback (in the comments below, by email, whatever) or inviting your friends to the service :D

I’ve set myself the arbitrary date of August 1st to release the new version of Fiestastic, more robust and with a pretty cool new design inspired by the new Twitter.com’s design (once you’re logged in, that is). The whole sliding panel concept works really well with Fiestastic as well.

I’ll also be sending out invitations to the service to those who show interest before August 1st as I want to expand the number of testers who are trying out Fiestastic and giving feedback. Now it’s only a handful of my friends, and since I got a shiny dedicated server for the site, I might as well make the damn machine work a little!.

How do you get your invitation?

Step 1. Go to www.fiestastic.com and log in with your Facebook account. You’ll be told we’re in private beta, and get asked if you want us to let you know once you can start using the service.

Step 2. That’s all :-)

I was half-way through a “Can’t launch due technical problems” post when I fixed what was preventing me from launching. Well, it kind of magically fixed itself. 

Anyway, the good news is private beta for Fiestastic starts today and the (very) few beta testers are trying out the app as we speak. Early feedback is being good, although a few bugs have been spotted (of course).

I’m aiming for a public launch in two to four weeks, so stay tuned :)

If you want to get notified when we launch, try to log in to Fiestastic and we’ll put you on the list.

I’m just starting to realize how useful and awesome Fiestastic can be. Point in case: testing the app today I came across this awesome event that my friend Jan is attending, and most probably I would never have found out about it if it wasn’t for Fiestastic.

I can go to bed feeling proud and satisfied today.

I don’t know about you, but countless times I’ve wanted to go out and have fun, but I wasn’t aware of any good plans around me that I would like to join. How is it possible that in today’s day and age, with such constant information overload, a geek like me can’t find a good plan on a Saturday night? Enter Fiestastic.

I had the idea for Fiestastic about a couple of weeks ago. The whole first week went into thinking and researching Facebook’s API to find out if what I had in mind was doable. After tweaking my idea a bit, it turned out it could be done, so I started developing a prototype right away. Some people will think I should spend some time looking for validation of my business idea before jumping into development, but to be honest, I would love to have and use something like what I’m building, and I have some friends in the same situation. So worst case scenario, I would have spent a couple of weeks building a really useful tool for myself :-)

What is Fiestastic, exactly?

Fiestastic helps you discover things to do that your friends will be attending and that probably, you didn’t know about.

Here’s how it works. You log in with your Facebook account, and it gathers your and your friends’ events and displays them back to you in a cool map of your city. Note that most of these events you probably aren’t invited to, only some of your friends, so you haven’t received any Facebook invitation about it. Of course, private events won’t be displayed unless you’ve been invited.

You’ll see only events happening in the next 24 hours, that at least one of your friends is attending, and centered around your current location (as stated in your Facebook profile).

I’ve set myself a private beta launch date of Thursday June 23rd. On this day I’ll invite some of my friends to try the app and give me their feedback. If you’re interested in trying out the app while it’s in private beta, drop me a line to manuel@fiestastic.com. 

More details and screenshots coming up soon :-)