Koprol goes into public beta today (May 19th, 2009). After testing it under private beta for 3 months and gathering more than 1400 beta testers, we are ready to welcome more people to Indonesia's own mobile social network.

What's Koprol?

Koprol is a mobile social networking site that connects you with people around you. Koprol allows you to share your short postings, location, photos, reviews, with your friends and also other people nearby. With Koprol you'll know where your friends are and what's happening around you.

What's the difference?

While most social networks make you stay in front of the computer, Koprol goes with you as you roll around town and find friends to meet in real life.

How it works: Wherever you go, you can 'check in' to a place (like 'Pacific Place' or 'Bintaro'), and type what you are doing (like 'having the best pancakes' or 'shopping for sandals'), then all your friends in Koprol as well as on Facebook know where you are and what you're doing.

What's more fun, you can see who else is in your area and what's happening around you. You can interact with them by writing short comments and maybe even meet up! Also, you can post pictures, write restaurant reviews, view the map, all from your mobile phone. Koprol is very easy to use, works on any phone browser and doesn't require GPS.

Koprol is designed for Indonesian cities. We started with Jakarta and expanding to other cities and regions based on real usage, like  Bali, Bandung, Surabaya, Surakarta, Sidoarjo, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surakarta, Bengkulu, Medan, Banda Aceh, Palembang, Makassar, Balikpapan, Cirebon, Papua, Singapore, Houston, Indianapolis.

Beta

During this public beta phase, we will regularly add new features. We are already working on features like BlackBerry application, find restaurants nearby, find friends in the map, etc. But what excites us is the positive feedback we've got saying Koprol is easy to use and goes well with people's daily activities. Everywhere you go, you can share recommendations on dining and shopping from local people through Koprol.

So please try it out now at koprol.com and send us your feedback

Koprol was founded by SkyEight, a software company based in Kebayoran Baru, and Tulakom, a web design service.

As you can see in the chart above, yesterday our traffic spiked dramatically. Let's see which of our new features caused our unique visitors to multiply:

Could it be the Auto Check-in?

This is a neat feature, especially when you're on mobile. You can make a post that at the same time checks you in to a place. To do this, start your post with the name of your Favorite between hash characters and follow with your message. For example:

#my campus# going to class!

This checks you in the place that you favorited as 'my campus' and the post will be put in that place. This shortcut feature made it that much easier for people to post right away upon arriving. People have been using it and calling it 'jumper', 'teleport', 'zap!', all sorts of nicknames.

Could it be the Messages?

DM is here! Now you can send direct messages by starting a post with 'to:' followed by the recipient's username. You can also send a message to a set of friends which we call 'entourage', by starting a post with 'ent:' followed by the entourage name. You can create entourage by going to Friends > Entourage. This caused people to send private stuff among their friends that they don't usually share in public.

Could it be the new navigation?

With the new Messages feature, we restructured the navigation. We combined 'Commented' and 'Mentioned' into 'Me & My Friends' and put the Unread link in front. Now you don't have to go to Commented then click Unread, because you can click Unread right from the homepage. This easier access caused people to keep on replying each other and made conversations longer than usual.

Could it be the new mobile features?

We added stuff that wasn't on mobile before, like Alerts so you can approve friends on the go, People search, plus like in the full site the navigation is now simpler with 'Unread' more exposed. More fun on mobile mean more reason to check back while on the road.

Could it be the Email notifications?

This must be it. Now people are notified by email when their friends find them on Koprol. This is a common feature, but we just implemented it and so most members just realized that apparently lots of their friends are already on Koprol. Now that they found each other, it's much more fun to keep testing this beta product.

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So more of our 1300 beta testers are now active on Koprol. We can't wait to show you more stuff that are being prepared in our kitchen right now. Meanwhile have you seen our public homepage design for next week? It was leaked by Daily Social

Last night we have successfully moved to a new and better server. With bigger international bandwidth, those using proxy-based browsers such as BlackBerry and Opera Mini browsers should feel an improvement in speed.

We thank Biznet Networks for providing our colocation and hope to bring more commercial cooperation in the near future.

Have you ever felt someone is talking about you? Well now you'll know, as long as they put "@" before your username.

Last night we rolled out new features to make conversations in the stream easier to follow. Now you can keep track of posts that you've commented (click the 'Commented' tab), or find posts -as well as comments in posts- that mentioned your name (click the 'Mentioned' tab). In addition, in each of those stream you can click 'Unread' to just view the posts with comments that you haven't seen.

Take note that for people to find mentions, you should put "@" right before their username. For instance, typing @Sharon would create a link to Sharon's profile, and Sharon would be able to find that post in her 'Mentioned' tab.

Some comments we got last night:

• anakcerdas: wah keren, ada tab 'commented' dan 'mentioned' plus comment yg belum dibaca pake bold
• Sharon: KEYENNNN KEYENNNN.... mentioned and commentednya KEYENNNN dor dev team @koprol thank you
• ram: the new koprol ... sweet!
• freudian83: koprol makin keren, ada notification untuk unread comments and mentions sekarang! sippp!
• bernard: guys, like the new features! commented and mentioned is awesome! have a pleasant weekend everyone

Please report if you find any bugs, and remember, although we have a powerful conversation tool, it's still all about location and you'll see more updates on that soon.

Surprise! We've added Google Maps for every place in Koprol.

This is only the start. Can you guess what we plan to do with them?

We've been meaning to show off our swagger in writing our website in full ajax a la Gmail and guess what? We just did!

Took quite a while to understand the basic idea of jQuery history and figure out workaround for IE7 (Now we know why this browser is least loved by web developers )

A typical discussion on Ajax