Traffic Android Pro – Update
Have had a few people testing the web-based version of Traffic Android (aka Traffic Android Pro) and things are mostly humming along smoothly.
I have now finished integrating a live human-processed CAPTCHA service into the system. What this means is, any time a task executes that would otherwise require you to read some text from an image and type it into a box, the system grabs the image, posts it off to the service with which I’ve integrated, then within a few seconds a person on the other end, hired to sit there processing CAPTCHA images, translates the posted image and it’s posted back to Traffic Android which finishes processing the task. This means that Traffic Android Pro can now process the hardest CAPTCHA images out there in near real time with almost 100% accuracy. Pretty cool, huh?
As soon as I finished implementing this feature I updated a script for one of the sites Traffic Android is supposed to support that requires CAPTCHA input and “turned it on”. Several testers have imported their databases from their local desktop versions of Traffic Android, so this particular task has been disabled up until this point, meaning that seeing as I turned the task “on”, the task processing queue suddenly went to full steam running through processing all the new suddenly-ready-to-execute tasks that had been sitting dormat until this point.
The result? Seems to have worked reasonably well! So I’ll keep an eye on it from this point onwards and start adding new task types, such as Digg support and others. Once I have a few more tasks implemented, I have a few minor upgrades to do to the user interface based on feedback from testers and then I need to implement billing which I deliberately left until last seeing as it was the least important item to test up until this point.
In other news, one of my friends showed me another social bookmarking product available that I wasn’t aware of and it claimed the ability to post to over 120 sites! And this was a small product developed by a single programmer on the side of numerous other projects. I must say I was a little suspicious. Now, I’m not going to test that particular product out, at least not at this stage, but feedback from some of my customers has largely been that a lot of these other products are quite unreliable for the simple fact that they code them up and and leave them alone without taking into account the fact that many of the social bookmarking sites change their interfaces periodically, new sites pop up and old sites close down, which means that many social bookmarking products get out of date very quickly. One prominent social bookmarking service I was looking at the other day is still advertising posting to over 100 services, yet when I clicked through the sites they say they are supporting, half of them are no longer even in existence! So if you’re looking at buying a different product or using someone else’s service, make sure you do your due diligence first. These things require ongoing support to maintain and keep updated, which is one of the reasons Traffic Android Pro will need to charge a monthly fee.
One last thing, some people have asked if this means the desktop version will be going away. The answer is no, it will be staying, although it will require you to create a once-off user account so that the application can pull its updates and task scripts from the web, which is how the desktop product will stay up-to-date.
