This morning brings the exciting news that as of Monday, LocateTV moves from the rawness and elitism of private beta into the democratic love-in of PUBLIC BETA. Hip, hip!

Over a month of fantastic feedback from our triallists has enabled the development team to create a whole new ‘fuzzy’ search function, to greatly expand our TV and film listings data prioritised according to the content the testers have been searching for, and to iron out a whole raft of glitches and design details that has made the site even clearer, easier to navigate and more elegant.

Not to mention the evolving embed design, which has been a very important bit of collaboration with the online community. We believe that the widget is one of the most useful and interactive features of LocateTV. It allows site owners, bloggers and forum members to directly connect their audience to the content or actors they are discussing, which will remain relevant for whoever clicks on the page, dynamically updating depending on the time and the region of the viewer. We hope that this will become one of the ways LocateTV provides a daily service to bloggers, and continue to appreciate feedback from the authors and readers of posts and articles integrating the embeds.

One of the biggest challenges has been ensuring an acceptable speed, something very important for a Google-like site intended to save time and hassle and bring you accurate, personalised listings information in under a second. This has improved incredibly since our first days in private beta and by next week all these basics should be watertight so that searching for content on LocateTV can become an effortless, instinctive habit.

Of course, this is still only the beginning. We will remain in public beta for a short while so we can deal with any issues due to the much larger volume of traffic, further hone our data according to what is being requested, and respond to a much wider sample of opinions. The collaborative and flexible development model is one we will hold onto towards launch and beyond, and our loyal early testers will ever have our attention and our thanks.

Now, do spread the word if you have a moment, as we’d love to meet our public with open arms (sweetie, little child?) and quite simply see if we’ve got what it takes.