Hi gang, and greetings from my hotel room in Denver. :)

Just a quick update on what’s been going on, because I know a lot of you have questions about cities, sign-ups, and stuff.

First off, things have been crazy on a scale we hadn’t anticipated. Our first problem arose when we learned that we had over 20 million inquiries on the PhotoWalk web site in the first 24-hours. We weren’t fully prepared for that flood of traffic, and neither was our hosting company, and we are struggling to keep the backend working properly, and we’re patching and fixing things as we go. The good news is:  we already have thousands of people signed up for walks, and new walks coming online daily and….

….well….just thanks so much for your patience through all these growing pains.

Last year, by the day of the actual Photo Walk itself, we had 236 active cities. We had more than that in our first day this time around (we have 316 active cities as a write this, and more than 340 walks already approved).

That brings us to the reason for this post: if you go to a city page that says “Page under Construction,” that means that we have approved that city’s leader request, and we’ve sent them an email with their user name and password. However, nothing further happens until that leader updates their city page with a description, starting and stopping times, the location on the map, their photo, the meet-up restaurant and all that stuff.

So, at this point, we’re not in control of when that city is available for sign-ups—the leader is. When the leader completes the info for their page and hits the submit button, that’s when that city “goes live” for sign-ups.

Also, there are some cities that have been approved for walks, but since their city hasn’t “gone live yet” other people have requested to lead a walk in that same city. I’m waiting a few days to see if the original leader gets their page up and running. If that city start to fill up fast, I’ll release the next leader request for that city.

Also, anytime a city fills up, we start looking for other people requesting to lead a walk in that city. If we have one; we release it (like I did yesterday with a 2nd walk in San Francisco). A number of cities have their first walks already full (like Washington DC, Portland, Guadalajara, Mexico, Baltimore, Detroit, New York, one of the Chicago walks, Philly, Ybor City, FL, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Portland-Washington Park, Stockholm, Sweden, and Austin, Texas).

A number are getting close to being full, like Vancouver, London, Laguna Beach, Brooklyn-Coney Island, Boston, Tarpon Springs, FL, Bangkok, Falls Church, VA, and a few more, so if you want to participate, make sure you snag your spot soon!

So that’s the late night update. Thanks to everyone who has been so patient through this. We are making progress every day, and we’ll be adding new features, bells and whistles once we get everything settled down.

-Scott

P.S. I’ll have some cool news about some new prizes, new sponsors, and other stuff on Thursday, so I’ll talk to you then. :)