The state of followmy.tv, past, present and future.
First of all, thank you for all the users that still use followmy.tv up to today! I love how active the users are in our community. Followmy.tv would never existed without our awesome users. And a special thanks to all of the users that donated, without you guys/girls followmy.tv would not be possible to maintain. And I'm grateful for having built a website that is used by 10s of thousands users worldwide daily.
Second, and the most important thing, we as the staff of followmy.tv have to say 3 important words to our users "We are sorry". We are sorry for being inactive this long, we are sorry for features that were promised but never came, we are sorry for not answering support tickets in time.
Now that those are out of the way, lets explain what is going on with followmy.tv, what the future holds and what the reality is.
Followmy.tv was founded 3 years ago as a side project by Jasper and me, we had big dreams, dreams like "We will have 1 million users", "I hope we can work for followmy.tv full time", "I hope followmy.tv becomes profitable enough for us to hire additional staff". None of these dreams came true so far, but I still dream of at least making one of those dreams reality.
Currently the state of followmy.tv is that we are in a hibernation state, the website is working stable, we are still growing daily with an average of 30 signups / day with over 30% active users. We have awesome crew members that moderate and add content daily. But all of this is overshadowed by the fact that our core developers are not developing any new features or are very slow in answering support tickets. Ofcourse this is unacceptable and I hope we can change this in the future.
Of course we do not do this by choice but the sad fact is, we just don't have enough free time to assign to followmy.tv to handle all of the feature requests and/or support tickets. We both have full time day jobs, we both have relationships, we both have a lot of other responsibilities that are more important that followmy.tv. Followmy.tv started as a side project and is still a side project.
The last update to followmy.tv was almost 2 years ago, but we have been doing a lot of development since then. Currently followmy.tv runs on an older version of the CakePHP framework, the moment CakePHP 2.x came out we started re building followmy.tv from the ground up resulting in a much more stable and faster website. This development project has been going on for over a year now and we are close but not close enough to release it to production. This is the reason why there are no features being released to the live website because we would have to build them twice, for the old site and the new site.
One of the biggest requests is the API and the mobile application. I have been working on the API for over a year now and it is complete for about 75%. But due to lacking free time to work on it, it has been delayed immensely. We were also working on a complete new redesign of the website which we scrapped for now because that was going to take too much time to complete now. All in all, the new version of followmy.tv is very close to be finished but not yet. Its the last push and testing phase that is taking a lot of time, and currently we both have almost zero time to commit to followmy.tv.
Financially followmy.tv is costing us a considerate amount monthly to keep it in the air, the combination of ads and donations is just not bringing enough cash in to cover all the costs, let alone hiring software developers to develop for us.
How does the future of followmy.tv look like?
This is unclear, one thing I'm completely 100% sure off though, followmy.tv will keep existing as long as I'm existing. Its my biggest software passion and will always be my biggest passion. Some things have to change though, our crew has to be more active. I personally vouch that once I'm settled in in my new home (I'm in the middle of moving to a different country) I will make more free time to work on followmy.tv.
We will also start looking for extra developers / designer within our community that share our passion and want to help out and want the opportunity to make followmy.tv better.
If you are a software developer with a lot of experience in CakePHP (or PHP in general) or if you are an awesome UI designer, please drop us an email on info@followmy.tv.
I hope you (the awesome user) accept my apology, and I hope you will keep using our website and have the patience. We really appreciate every one of you that use our website daily, weekly or just once.
Cheers, Jelle
Comments
I think that followmytv it's perfect also in this current state. It's minimal but it's what a telefilm addicted need! So don't worry if you can make future updates...we love follow!!! Also without big features ^^
Please, keep up the good work!! Thanks forever.
Glad it's not shutting down!
followmy.tv is the best TV tracker out there IMO. I feared the worst when I saw the blog post title but happy things are carrying on. I try to donate here and there as much as I can as I'd hate to see the website die. Please keep up the good work. And if things do ever come to an end, open source it as other users have suggested. Thanks Lemon.
keep up the good work! I love how it is and it can only get better ;-)
love followmy.tv! when you started with "we're sorry" I was afraid it was going to lead "to we're going to close". phew.
Just keep doing what you do, when you can! You have an excellent site and I'm sure your core users also believe in that.
@bellarosemand Haha, same. Glad you guys are still going through with everything.
I've been using this site for three years now and I realize I haven't made a donation. I'll do that right away!
Keep it up.
Thank you :-) Glad to see this blog update! We believe in you and as long as you're committed, I am sure there will be users who feel the same way!
i really like this site, thx for the good work. its a pity that twitter sharing thing but not a big problem, im glad ure really excited about this project yet, i know how tiring can be these things sometimes
I almost had a heart attack thinking the site would come to an end, thank god it's not. Keep up with the good work! Thank you for this useful site :)
I'm very content with FMTV in its current state, and I almost forgot that there aren't any ads either (which is rare nowadays). Thanks for the work so far, and I'm looking forward to future updates. Take all the time you need, and I hope my (small) donation helps.
This little side project website of yours is a blessing. I love it.
well i love this website, it's a big help! so you don't need to apologise , really.
I'm just happy that followmy.tv exists and will continue to exist. I've tried other TV tracking sites and they've all been inferior. Future development and developmental updates are certainly appreciated but take it at whatever pace is financially and personally feasible -- as long as the site is here tomorrow, and the next day, etc., this user at least is happy. :) Thanks to you and your crew!
No need to apologize. The site is great, so no changes isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even if some things stopped working (twitter sharing) and if there are one of two things I think the site should have and it doesn't, it's still the best site of its kind, in my opinion. I hope it grows enough to make your dreams come true.
I use this website daily, and I'm happy with how it is. I have no complaints. :)
Looking forward to the future.
This was nice to read although you didn't really need to apologise. this is the best site for tracking tv i have come across and even though it would be nice to have developments i understand completely.
I must say I truly appreciate the apology. Although I don't blame anyone for anything, I think I would be untrue to myself if denied I didn't feel some of things you are apologising for were justified (mostly the lack of (visible) development).
But I don't want to be negative, despite any criticism I am still very happy with followmy.tv. One out-of-the-box suggestion for the delays in development: have you considered open-sourcing the site and surrounding platform (e.g. API and related stuff)? I'm sure that in the 10s of thousands of users there are some that would be more than willing and able to contribute to some of the features that are being requested!
For years I had been looking for a site to keep count on all the shows I follow. I stumbled on to followmytv.com last year. My life was changed after that. Thanks guys and keep up the awesome work! :)