So prove it!

When you are listening to a software development guru, do you ever get a strangle, niggling feeling in your mind? Something like "if this guy is so awesome, why doesn't he go build something awesome instead of preaching to me?"

Now, let's be fair. A lot of the people who speak publicly about software development do have day jobs and do build working software. The vast majority of them have done some software dev or testing at some point.

But consider Eric Reis of imvu. He's given talks and run seminars on continuous deployment. Yet when a few master tester's went and actually tried to use the software, they found plenty of room for improvement.

So what about that "Matt Heusser" guy. Wouldn't you like to be able to use the software he is responsible for testing?

Well, folks, I don't push Socialtext much. It's a web-based product you can use to improve communications in your business, with everything from project plans to business process to tracking status across timezones. I believe in the product, I took the risk of my career to come here - and if you really want to know about it, you'll ask.

Then, today, came the big news: Socialtext is giving away a fifty-seat license of our product. That's right, you can get a business wiki (editable web pages), blogging platform, people-tracker package, twitter-style secure micro-blogging for your business. You also get access to our web-based distributed spreadsheet currently in beta. And we support firefox 3.0x, safari, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 for everything but Socialcalc, which is FF 3.0 only.

Of course, we have a premium model with more support, more users, integration into a directory, hosted behind your firewall, and so on.

But if you want to see what Matt has been up to, you can check it out for free, right now, hosted on our severs over the web, so you'll have nothing to install:

Press Release

Media Coverage

Click here and give your email to get start.

The intention here is to give the software to businesses and small business units, so you'll want to use your work email and invite other people from your work. The license does not provide support, but if you have questions of the "ok, what is Socialtext and how can I use it" nature, I'm happy to answer and can talk you through it.

Outside of the day job, I do think Socialtext might be a good fit for a secure, invite-only network for expert testers. More to come ...