Everything gets hyped…we saw a lot of it in 2007. Anything from Apple (iPhone, new iPods, etc), Halo 3 and Rock Band, Ron Paul…the list goes on and on…The truth is, sometimes it’s warranted (iPhone has been coming for years now) and sometimes it gets out of hand.

It’s when the hype gets out of hand that people start to notice. socialthing! is in that situation right now. In December, we sent out an email announcing to our mailing list that we were in the process of letting people into the beta, something we’ve been working on for over a year now. We were excited. We needed to tell people how excited we were, even though it meant that we weren’t going to have something in their hands that day. The decision (my decision and my words, mind you) was made to send out an email that basically said “hey, we’re about to let you in” and that email was sent on December 18, 2007. It wasn’t a bad decision, just a poorly worded email. Beyond that, a lot of people have been hyping up open movements like Data Portability and OpenID, so we got some of the attention there too.

You can always under-promise and over-deliver, but it’s harder when a service gets hyped. We’ve had numerous blog posts written about socialthing! by other parties, tons of people asking about what we’re doing, and even more emails from people saying how excited they are to use it. When we sent that email on December 18th, we got a lot of attention and a lot of people started hyping things up. Our mailing list doubled, traffic was bigger than when we were on TechCrunch and Mashable, our Twitter mentions were skyrocketing and the number of subscribers to this blog have increased every day since. It was really exciting…that’s for sure.

But then the backlash came and it was all about the wording of that email. We could have essentially said “we’re still here, still working on it, and we’re going to get it to you as soon as possible, but we want it to be the best it can be, so it takes time” and things would have gone much smoother for us. But we didn’t do that, we sent an email that sounded so much more immediate. And there was our flaw. Admitting when you’re wrong is tough to do, especially when the bounce back comes from people you respect. So we have to learn from that.

The truth is, we ARE working hard…and have been all year long. There have been more times than I can count on my two hands that we started working early in the day and ended up going home with the next day’s sunrise. There have been untold meals that we have missed because we were “close” to finishing something. We have been working our asses off because we want this to be one of the best web apps out there.

So here is where we admit our error. We have been working very hard and want to get this in the hands of everyone in the world, but it’s just not quite there yet. I can look over the shoulders of the socialthing! developers and see it working, but letting people in is a different story. We’re wanting to do so, and I can’t wait to see peoples’ reactions, but we screwed up. That hype email we sent a few weeks ago really should have been sent today and not December 18th.

We’ve been called out, had a site dedicated to whether or not we’re live as well as an aggregated list of the three founders’ (myself included) twitter accounts, so that people can keep track of what we’re doing, at the times we may not be working on the site.

We’re only going to deliver when we’re ready…and only going to say “we’re ready” when we actually are.

So we’ll get you your invites out as soon as we can. When the service gets in your hands, we’re hoping you’ll see all the hard work and dedication we’ve put into it…