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A few days ago, we quietly opened our doors and started allowing people to sign up for Everlater without needing a special code. What does this mean? Start using Everlater!

You can:

• Record travel experiences by writing stories, posting photos, mapping your trip and adding all the little details
• Share it with friends and family (your trip has a public url that you can post on your Facebook wall, Tweet, or email to whomever you’d like)

There are many things on the horizon including:

• A better way to follow the travels of your friends
• An iPhone app to make it even easier to record your travels
• Increasing ways to help get great travel ideas from your social network

Are we done yet? Hell no! Everlater is constantly changing (in the awesome kind of way, not the confusing kind of way) and we have lots of exciting things on the horizon. We are truly grateful for all of the amazing feedback we’ve received so far from the Everlater community - the more the better! And to prove we’re serious, there is a “Feedback” tab on every page. (In fact, so far you guys have reported exactly 99 problems, ideas, and praise. Whose will be #100?)

So if you haven’t already, go check out http://www.everlater.com

If you need extra inspiration, check out my trip to Chile and Argentina last December: The Great Tagalong.

There comes a time in the early life of every startup when they want to go big. For Everlater, that day was May 23rd. The Event: Iron Horse Classic. The hook: show off our startup, design skills, and cycling prowess in one fell swoop.

How? Brand spanking new custom kits straight from the long booty shores of Italy. The new outfits arrived roughly 48 hours before the event and like a group of greedy children at Christmas, we tore into the box and gazed upon our new outfits:

(Left to Right: Nathaniel, our friend Nathan, Nathaniel)

Lavender?!?

Secure enough in our masculinity to wear kits representing our future custom white-labeled site http://lady.everlater.com, we rode on with pride. Rumor has it that the group of riders who broke from the pack to stage a competitive push (in what is otherwise a friendly ride) were led by Natty himself. Not until the very last stretch did he graciously let others pass and share in his glory.

The corrected colors should be in our hands soon.

As for the misprints…anyone have any spare blue ink laying around?

If you haven’t been following along with “The Founders“, a weekly documentary about the Techstars experience, you should. These videos tell the story of our summer better than we ever could.

The latest episode, Skills & Persistence features the KKO Poker Night. Bonus: you get to see our man Charlie engaged in an epic arm wrestling match.

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 4 “Skills & Persistence” from Andrew on Vimeo.

If you missed some of the other episodes, you find them all in one place:
http://www.techstars.org/thefounders/

Back in February, we wrote about a few types of travelers who could benefit from using Everlater (Bands, Families, Athletes, Professional Travelers). Today, the list goes on…

Students Traveling Abroad

Eager to explore the surrounding cities and countries of their new continent, students traveling abroad would benefit greatly from being able to easily organize and share their travel stories, photos, and videos. It’s all too easy to ignore the forest for the trees when sharing travel experiences, and friends and family members often need explicit context to fully appreciate the outlandish locales and situations.

Business Travelers

Frequent business travelers don’t have time to set up a blog and update it consistently. However, of all the types of people that might use Everlater, they have the easiest access to an internet connection and the tools (iPhone, Blackberries, etc.) to make quick updates. Business travelers are also often the ones most in need of connections to other travelers and quick recommendations about local events and must-sees.

Road Shows

We know a group here in Boulder planning to travel across the country in a biodiesel bus playing in frisbee tournaments, holding instructional clinics, and educating about the benefits of alternative fuels. How can they share the experience and generate advance fanfare for their arrival? Everlater.

What about a company touring around with their latest product? Not only can they plot out the trip in advance, but an online community can easily grow around the shared experience.

You

Our self-respect notwithstanding, treat us as you like:

• Map your travels
• Update your friends and families
• Share stories and photos
• Blog about the adventure, or just write quick updates

In the end, we aim to do only one thing: Help you share your travel experiences with friends and family.

We recently met with Dave Morin - Senior Platform Manager for Facebook. This was a fantastic opportunity for us at Everlater. We view Facebook as a complement (rather than a competitor) to what we are building, and have spent many a late night discussing their role in our future - then coding away to make it happen.

Always wary of becoming YASN (Yet Another Social Network), we want to leverage as much of your existing social network as possible without fragmenting your content and friends more than they already have been.

Dave ensured us that Facebook’s platform is moving in the direction of openness. This is great news for everyone, as it will hopefully reduce the number of YASN’s. Ideally (in our view) this tact will cement Facebook as the central point of content for the people you care about without becoming a “walled garden” that seals you off from other services that can add value to your social graph.

We’d like to thank Dave for his insights and suggestions as both a traveler and big player in the social networking space. Also, check out <a href=”http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post/113001941/a-day-at-techstars”>the Everlater mention in one of his recent blog posts</a>.

Techstars.tv just released the first of 13 episodes of a weekly webcast called “The Founders”. We’re honored to be one of the three teams from the Techstars 2009 Boulder class that will be highlighted each week as the summer progresses. To be honest, it took a little while to get comfortable with being followed around by a video camera (especially the time Megan followed us down the street and into a sandwich shop).

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Week 1 “The Selected Few” from Andrew on Vimeo.

At least if this whole startup thing doesn’t work out - maybe there is a future for us in reality television? Real World: Startups anyone?

Every software company should have a good strategy for managing their code base.  At Everlater, we’re using git (a popular choice for open-source developers), and loving it.  The same things that make it a great tool for open-source development makes it a wonderful tool for a new startup as well.  We share lots of the same problems with open-source projects, including a decentralized workforce, no central office or server, etc. Git + Github has proved to be a great choice for our version control.

Initially we had a simple flow with no branching; simply basic remote repositories for each team member plus a master repo.  Since we’ve launched our live alpha version, we’ve introduced branching and a more complex workflow — our internal document for describing the workflow is below — we’re publishing this in hopes that it helps other new startups organize the way they develop code on a live web release.  Enjoy!

First, please let me apologize for the recent blog silence here at Everlater.  We’ve had our heads down working and making our dream a reality…

…and that reality has finally arrived!  On 3/3/09 we pushed Everlater up and live in a private alpha launch.  We have about 25 users testing out the basic functionality, providing feedback and suggestions, and finding bugs.  We are keeping the release private to ensure we can act on each users advice.  We are also still building features we want on a more open and widespread release.  We have a nice long list of users interested in participating in our alpha testing process, if you signed up and have not yet received a login you will shortly.  We are phasing users onto the site in waves so we can connect with each user and receive one-on-one feedback.  We expect this process to take a few months before we open up a public launch.

We’ve had good feedback so far and are really excited to have the site up and running!  Thanks to all our current and future testers!  More to come.

As we continue to develop Everlater, sometimes we have to remind ourselves that it isn’t just for solitary or small groups of adventure travelers. One of the advantages of Everlater is that several different people can co-author a trip, while still keeping certain information private (if they so choose).

So besides people like us, who else would be perfect candidates for Everlater?

Bands

Imagine following your favorite musical act as they tour the country. Journal updates, stories from the road, and of course, lots of crazy photos will dot the map. Members of the band can have their own separate pages to communicate privately with friends and family, while pushing up some of the content to the band site, publicly available to all. Rumor has it that Nate and Natty went to school with the Boulder breakout act 3OH!3. Maybe that’s a good place to start?

Families

People, both young and old, are increasingly documenting their lives online so they can easily share the experience (and perhaps avoid retelling the same stories over, and over). Or go all out, like the Cardozo family, and (semi) aimlessly travel the world for an entire year! Families in particular are good candidates to have separate and shared blogs (the children and parents might have very different types of content, and different friends!).

Athletes

NBA players? Yes. Baseball stars? Yes. Rock cimbers? Hell yes! We recently met with Pete Mortimer of Sender Films (the premier rock climbing film production company) who was eager to get his climbers using Everlater to document their worldwide climbing trips. Want to know about Pete’s current trip? Check out the Sender Films blog.

Professional Travelers

Sounds like an obscure category, right? Well, no niche is to small when we fantasize about who Everlater would help the most.

We can’t help but think Matt (of Where the Hell is Matt? fame ) could have used our help before having a custom solution designed for him. Though that ship may have sailed, lucky for us, we were recently introduced to Ian Usher. You may recognize Ian as the guy who sold his entire life on eBay (for $399,300). His current project, which needs little explanation, is 100 Goals in 100 Weeks. We’re excited about Ian’s interest in Everlater, and would be psyched to provide him a way to share his progress with the world.

Stay tuned. If you know how to use a keyboard, and have ever left your hometown…we’ve been thinking of you.

We love developing web applications today, as opposed to say…2001.  This isn’t because the financial state of the tech environment is better now than it was in 2001, or that Natty and I had just graduated from high school in 2001.  It’s primarily because the tools and frameworks available to web developers are just better now.

Gone are the days when you needed an expensive development environment or three programmers with a black belt in Unix and server architecture to run your site.  Instead open source frameworks and hosting services in the cloud make it extremely easy to design and deploy all with an incredibly lean team of designers and programmers.

Web application development is now in its golden era.

Natty and I consider ourselves to be incredibly fortunate that we began working on Everlater right when this golden era came into fruition.  While we are still designing our final architecture, here’s a rundown of the different tools that Natty, Ryan, Charlie and I have used to develop our site:

• Github.  $7/month.  Hands down the best code repository mixed with the best way to socially tackle coding.  Freakin’ Awesome. (And a prime example of what a bootstrapping company of four can do with this exact infrastructure).
• Ruby on Rails. Free.  Super simple web framework — I knew zero about rails and in four months I can develop rich internet applications — I think that says it all…
• RabbitMQ.  Free.  Messaging queue written in Erlang — used by my former employer for their global messaging queue, so I feel good about using it for our backend infrastructure.
• Apache/Mongrel. Free.  This may change shortly to Passenger, but using Capistrano to deploy to our staging server is about the most satisfyingly easy task in the world.
• Joyent hosting.  Free.  Free developer slices for facebook developers — doesn’t get much better than that!
• SQL.  Free.  We use MySQL/SQLite/Postgres in development and PostgreSQL on our staging server currently, but that may change to….
• CouchDB.  Free.  This is going to be awesome — super excited about deploying it across our site in the coming weeks!

So…there we have it — $7/month and our time.  Plus, this software is ridiculously easy to use (and learn for Natty and I).  Moral of the story is that there’s no need to raise a half-a-million dollar seed round to build the next Facebook/Google/whatever, you can now do it in half the time for virtually nothing….

…and I’m SUPER excited to see all of the cool applications that will come out of this golden era!