Ducati Delivers

About two months ago, I mentioned the Ducati project, with the hard hats and hanging cables necessary when camping out on an in-construction floor.

I’m pleased to announce that Ducati shipped last Thursday, on time, thanks to the great work and heroic efforts of a core development, project management, design, and operations team. We even moved the team to cleaner, if less bright, environs once the conditions became unsafe for human habitation.

So what is Ducati? It starts as Add Your Cell Phone, which Alex introduced on our main blog and which you can do here. It’s the first time that we’re enabling our millions of searchers to explicitly improve the results that they get, and allowing people who want to be reached (and know that WhitePages.com is the most common place people look for other people to contact) to provide their information in a fast and simple process. We’re going to continue to improve this product and ones like it over the coming months.

This project also had a number of interesting technical components, including

–Our first read-write, immediately-available database. Our requirement was that by the time you committed your listing and searched for yourself, you would find it - immediate feedback is the key for users to think “it’s working.”

–Our first use of YUI’s JavaScript libraries, both for the DOM and for Shadowbox, Michael J.I. Jackson’s great lightbox implementation with YUI integration. It’s our long-term plan to standardize on YUI and some carefully-selected extensions, and this is a great start.

–The introduction of ReCAPTCHA, which we first tested during Hack Week.

–An obscenity filter best not discussed in polite company.

We’ve been running in production for a week with no hiccups or customer service complaints. More to come!