We released start.com/3 to the web last Friday night. And when I say *released* I don't mean it in any grand sense of the word with bells and fanfare and operations teams manning the hatches. I mean a couple of us wrote a batch script to copy it to our servers and voila. And actually we've been releasing stuff for the last several weeks on various "secret" urls for a slew of demos that have been happening recently. Like the all things digital conference where billg demo'd an early incarnation of start.com/3 alongside MSN's new Virtual Earth mapping software. How cool is that? Well, I admit it was cool *after* the demo was done and over with and everything had gone smoothly. My palms were sweating the entire time. :) In any case, we're thinking up features, writing code and shipping bits as fast as our tiny team can manage, and we're loving it!

Anyway, we've been itching like crazy to get this thing out there in front of you guys to use. Being the perfectionists that we are, we wanted to wait until it was super polished and had all the features of the first 2 versions, but man, you guys send such great feedback even when everything isn't working perfectly that we thought we should give you a preview of what's to come so that you can try out the all the *new* stuff before we finish tieing up all the loose ends. That's why we didn't have OPML support out of the box and drag/drop arrangement of the sidebar items, which a lot of you have been asking for (it's coming).

Our goal is still about aggregating the best of what you want on the web, like bookmarks, rss feeds, and news. But it also means that you should be able to write your own modules that you can have with you whenever and wherever, even on your phone, and you should be able to share them with your friends too. But this is the subject of another post :)