Roadmap for LifeCast

Today I'm allowing myself to leak a little bit of information regarding our plans for LifeCast. Many of you have asked questions such as, "When is support for X-BLOG coming in?" or "Will I be able to do X-ACTION to my posts?". Here is the start of 'the answer'.

In September (week starting 22nd) we plan to release a new LifeCast product, 'LifeCast Pro'. As the name implies, the Pro version will have more functionality than the free (and always free), lite version. LifeCast Pro will have an associated price (as yet undecided). Both LifeCast and LifeCast Pro will continue to be supported and enhanced - we have no desire to discontinue the free version nor do we wish to disenfranchise those users who to date have used the application for free and wish to continue doing so at no cost to themselves.

We're going to be able to achieve this because after a great deal of thought and consideration we have refined our LifeCast design philosophy to the point where we believe we can keep both our (future) paying and our non paying customers happy with our software while at the same time allowing ourselves to monetize our offering and thereby help us to keep our team paid etc.! So how is all this going to be achieved?

Both LifeCast and LifeCast Pro will interact with blog APIs (more on how this will happen in another discussion). While it may take a couple of releases to bring LifeCast and LifeCast Pro to the point we wish them to be at, our intention is that any blog we support, will be supported by both versions of the software so no matter whether you pay or not, the difference between the two versions will be one of functionality only.


Example:

LifeCast will be able to post images or post text to Wordpress whereas LifeCast Pro will be able to, in addition, post audio or a mixed content post of text and images.


Now it may take a while for the functionality set of LifeCast Pro to emerge (i.e. we are not promising audio posting in September - it simply isn't ready yet). In fact the offerings of both LifeCast and LifeCast Pro in September will probably be mostly the same (So you may wish to stick with the free version until more features emerge) but consider this LifeCast in comparison to LifeCast Pro, will remain a Basic text or image poster to blogging APIs whereas LifeCast Pro will allow for extended functionality and access to web APIs that are not just blogs, for example ping.fm.

So what is our target for September? Two versions of LifeCast, both supporting Wordpress.

In another post I'm going to let you in on a new technology which we are going to introduce called, 'reblogr.com' which is going to be our enabler for both versions of LifeCast and essentially is the mechanism that will allow us to provide both LifeCast and LifeCast Pro in paralell.

Regards
Damien