It’s been a long time since we’ve posted on this blog. It’s been a long time since we’ve surfaced at all to let the world know what we’re doing. Our last post, “What the Heck Are We Up To?” explained some things, but some of that has changed in the last few months.

One thing I can do is assure you that we’re not gone. We’re not idle. We’re working on some incredible things. Things so far past the scale of what we’ve done in the past. (Literally and figuratively).

So here’s your update:

The current SocialThing interface has been deprecated (we’ve stopped development on it). We’ll still be supporting it and fixing things where the need fixed (like our Facebook integration), but it’s become entirely too much work to add new features while focusing on what the future holds.

So what does the future hold? To date, we’ve scaled to a pretty good userbase, but have already realized that our back end wouldn’t scale to quite what we needed (or much further past our current state). The last three months have been great for us. We’re working hard and fast at building a new, extensible back end infrastructure that we’ll be able to scale to millions and millions of users. That is an extremely large undertaking, but it’s something that was necessary, understanding the scope of what we’re looking to accomplish in 2009.

So 2009 is going to be a big year for us. It will see new technology, a stronger back-end, faster response time, a new interface, integrations into many other websites and more. We’re not going to disclose a timeline for anything, though.

As we grow our team at the beginning of 2009, we’ll be able to tackle much larger goals and get things done a lot quicker than we have to date. We’ve only had three engineers this entire time, and they’ve been worked to the bone, so it’ll be nice to have a few more talented hackers.

For now, thanks for using SocialThing!