If you are a Windows user and follow any of the vast number of blogs that specialize in talking about Microsoft and Windows chances are you will have heard about Long Zheng and his istartedsomething.com blog. Long has been blogging for quite sometime about both and has acquired quite the reputation for breaking stories that have to do with Microsoft and its operating system. The great thing about this is that he is still going to school full time while he builds what could end up being a very successful Web business along side his already popular blog.
Recently he changed the name from Windows UX Taskforce to Areo Taskforce and is in the process of redoing the graphics to better resemble the Vista interface colors and style. He is doing this because just recently at the behest of many Mac users he has created the same Taskforce site for Mac users – appropriately enough called Aqua Taskforce. As Long said in the post announcing the new service:
One of the first requests I received after launching the Windows UX Taskforce was “when can you make one for Mac OS X.” This came at a surprise to me because I didn’t know OS X had user experience flaws, but apparently it did and still do. Having said that today I’m proud to launch Aqua Taskforce, a taskforce site for Apple users to submit, vote and comment on OS X user experience quirks.
As Long noted in his announcement post about the Aqua Taskforce site, he has completely revamped the back-end code so that even a single log-on will work for both sites. It also has been re-engineered so that the codebase can support multiple task-force sites with a single log-on as well.
This is were the accidental success could be something that Long Zheng didn’t anticipate. With this re-engineering he has created a backend to a system that will allow him to deploy any new taskforce site in literally minutes. So any company that would find something like this useful could be up and running with their own task-force site minutes after contacting Long.