A light at the end of the tunnel
This is the first new blog post in quite a long time, largely due to the fact that Traffic Android was closed down for a while and development on version 3 was suspended for quite a while too, due to insufficient resources to commit to it.
Now, however, work has been going on for a while on Traffic Android 3, and I thought it would be worth putting up a short post to let you know about it!
Previously, Traffic Android was mainly an automated bookmarking service with some tacked-on features such as RSS submission. Traffic Android “Pro”, which was the online hosted version of the product, was really just a port of the original desktop software that was written for Windows and as such, had a lot of limitations. In addition, the decline of social bookmarking and an attempt to transition it to a new architecture ended up causing a lot of problems and in the end, due to insufficient resources to properly support the customer base at the time, the service was shut down. As you might imagine, some customers were more than a bit annoyed about this, though most were understanding.
What was needed was a complete reenvisioning of the product and a few months ago I pulled out my ideas list, dusted it off and began to build a new mindmap of how a new Traffic Android would look, modelled on more up-to-date traffic-building processes yet built with the importance in mind of keeping the product super adaptable as people’s automation needs evolved with the times, and taking into account all the various feedback that had been given with the two previous versions.
What has come out of that is Traffic Android 3, which is more than a traffic-building platform; it’s now a very capable general web automation platform. I’m expecting to be running some proper automation tests this month and hoping to have a beta ready next month, so keep an eye out and make sure you’re on the mailing list.
In the next blog post, I’ll talk about how Traffic Android 3 works, how you can build your own automation products with it and how it offers a level of versatility and scale in your traffic building (and other web automation processes) that have previously been unheard of in this industry.
In the mean time, follow me on Twitter at @NathanRidley for updates on my progress. The design and resultant flexibility and stability of the new system means that version 3 is going to be around for a long time!
