February 2019 Monthly Update
Po.et is building the decentralized protocol suite for content attribution, discovery, monetization and reputation.
Our community has been on fire with great conversations in our Telegram group. If you’re not participating over there, come join us at https://t.me/poetofficial!
It feels like February flew by so quickly as we worked to tie up all of the loose ends on the Mainnet milestone. Here’s a quick highlight reel of where we’re at with all of those remaining goals:
- We completed the migration from the legacy infrastructure that existed on the po.et domain; all of our marketing and official roadmap information will continue to stay listed at po.et
- The fancy, new infrastructure is live at poetnetwork.net, including updated documentation on how to use Po.et via the API (shoutout to Wes for the optimizations he’s made recently, especially getting our Docker image down from 1GB to under 100MB).
- The most frequent users of the API have migrated over to the new endpoints, but there are a few stragglers that we’re going to start pinging directly.
- We began the refactoring and cleanup process in hopes of getting Frost open sourced, but we still have some lingering work to do there and are behind where we thought we’d be. We’re right at the finish line there and will start inviting people to help poke holes in the code. If you’re interested in contributing, please shoot an email to contact@po.et.
This milestone has been our focus for the past few months and allowed us to attract some new developers that are actually using Po.et in their applications. There’s nothing quite as exciting as seeing all of this effort starting to pay off. We have a few more finishing touches and then we’re off to the next milestone!
The Po.et Explorer has continued to evolve and received the most traction of all of the public repositories. Back in December, we made a decision to rebuild it from the ground up and surface some additional functionalities that existed only via API. The next step from here will be an official launch of the Explorer product in March. We’re mostly focused on ensuring that it has a super simple, clean interface, but we’re going to add in some additional functionalities that will start to give it a little more functionality, like making claims from a web interface and managing your Frost identity.
Outside of the engineering and product updates, I want to share with you some of the recurring themes that have come from conversations with our community and summarize the responses:
“Market directly to bloggers, not large publishers”
Large publishers will be the ones that can help drive real change at scale and will forever a target audience for us. Our strategy for 2018 focused on listening to what they’re looking for when it comes to trust, privacy, and reputation. Although Jarrod was driving that vision for product discovery, I 100% supported and continue to support that decision. However, we didn’t get as much out of the work we put into the multiple CMS plugins as we had wanted because we didn’t cultivate a better relationship with those communities. I’m currently investigating a few options in how we can better engage with the teams that are leveraging Wordpress at a decent scale (>100k uniques/month). If you fall into this category, I’d love to work with you and show you how you can leverage Po.et.
“More partnerships!”
The partnerships we’ve announced are structured more like enterprise software deals that can take a year or more to actually come to fruition. There was a ton of hype and idealistic visions of when companies would be ready to adopt some sort of decentralized protocol in their business, but as the market cooled off, so did the urgency for adoption. Moving forward, we want to only work with teams that are ready to implement on a shorter time horizon, either in a proof of concept or production environment. Luckily, we have a few promising proof of concepts going now and, hopefully, they’ll mature into awesome long-term relationships.
To tie the previous response to this one, I think we’ll be best served by having a great mix between partnerships and heavy adopters. The end result is to work with teams that share the same vision that Po.et has for a better web, regardless of what we call the relationship.
“Put more time into social”
Yes, agreed. Telegram has been where I’ve personally put the most effort because that’s where our core community lives. The conversations we’re having in there are absolutely fantastic and I hope you’ll join us if you’re not already in there. But, we’re doing a poor job at helping those great conversations escape back into other channels for people that don’t have the time to keep up with Telegram. Twitter is our second best place for engaging directly with the team; Medium is a great place for larger one-direction conversations like this one. We’re in the process of bringing back more support on social now and you should see a change soon.
“What about [some feature]; I saw it listed on this roadmap site as getting released soon.”
We changed our roadmap strategy to only be focused on what’s right in front of us almost a year ago and is not a strategy we’re going to deviate away from. Our roadmaps will continue to consist of a major grouping of related enhancements and new products and will generally last a few months.
Keep in mind that the roadmap is only the implementation of the vision based on the capabilities of the team/contributors, the technologies available to us, and the current users. We cannot predict how each of those things will be impacted in such an evolving and volatile space. My number one goal is to ensure that we are all building towards the vision that is set out in the very first line (minus the legal stuff) from our original whitepaper: “Po.et is a shared, open, universal ledger designed to record metadata and ownership information for digital creative assets.”
We’re a very inclusive team and would love more contributors to step up and commit to building things that aren’t listed in the roadmap we’ve put together.
As for these sites that list the roadmap dates, please double check their information against the roadmap at https://www.po.et/roadmap.
“Would it be possible, and if so, how difficult would the integration of the Po.et API into something like Open Office be?”
This is what I like to hear and probably one of my favorite requests in the past week or so (ht: Kristjan in Telegram). I think it reflects that more people are coming to Po.et and starting to understand the full impact of where we can begin to integrate the protocol. Although we didn’t have a long conversation in Telegram about this, we aim to store every piece of product feedback or potential product idea we get and record who made the suggestion
I’m looking forward to March because we’ll have wrapped Mainnet milestone and we’ll get to publish our next milestone. I know that the team is ready to change it up a little bit. This one will be a little shorter than the Mainnet one, most likely ending somewhere in early summer (we don’t do hard dates, but do aim for some type of predictable scope). The quick preview of the next milestone is that we’re going to focus on the expansion of the metadata fields available, some new types of claims, and API updates on our nodes at poetnetwork.net to allow for some new formats.
Also, we’ve started planning on hosting a few Po.et meetups in Austin (SXSW), New York (Blockchain Week), and San Francisco (Bitcoin 2019). We decided to piggy-back of some of the more prominent events in the hopes that you’ll already be there. We’ll look at expanding on these depending on the turnout we receive. If you’re wanting to attend, send a note to contact@po.et and we’ll coordinate with you as we get more details.
Join us on Telegram! https://t.me/poetofficial
Follow us on Twitter! https://twitter.com/_poetproject
Visit our Website! https://po.et/
Check out our GitHub! https://github.com/poetapp
