About Us
Why Im-Ok.org is Different
Sincere appreciation goes out to Cathy Muth, CEO of O.R. Colan Associates. Her company manages land acquisition programs for public agencies and has worked with FEMA in the past. As she watched events unfold, she saw the need for a registry and immediately contacted Brandon Stone, the programmer behind Photoblogs.org and Management Skills Blog. We knew that time was of the essence. O.R. Colan Associates stepped up to the plate with funding for the project and within hours, im-ok.org was born.
Here is the essence. Someone searching im-ok.org can pinpoint their search for another person and find information in three seconds.
We thought long and hard about how to handle the data requests, how to make the site quick, accurate and simple. We looked at other boards and noticed that they were jumbled, jammed with messages, unfortunately irrelevant to their search for a family member or a friend. In the vast majority of the searches, it was all noise. With im-ok.org, the user puts in a phone number and immediately finds information about a person.
Or not. If there is no news, please let people know, immediately, that there is no news! With most message boards and other registries, if there is no news about a family member, it might take an hour or more of desperate searching to find that out. With im-ok.org, using the person's phone number, the search is immediate. If there is no news, the visitor knows right away. We do not want to string someone along for an hour searching a database in vain.
We observed other message boards that became overloaded to the point where users experienced significant slowdowns or even problems logging in. We looked at how we would parse data requests differently. We knew that if the site was successful, it would get hit hard. We could not afford a system slowdown. All of this was carefully considered in the architecture of the site before a stitch of programming was done.
The idea was simple, yet overlooked by most people trying to create registry sites. Tell a database programmer that thousands of people are going to input data and watch him cringe. How many different ways can you spell New Orleens, Biluxi and Metaree? Designing a site using a traditional database approach is flawed before it gets out of the gate. The overhead to handle the queries and the variations of queries is of immense proportions, which is fine if you have three or four months and a budget to work with. Im-ok.org was structured in a few hours and up within 24. We chose a single piece of meta data (a person's telephone number) and created message boards around that. The site was up and scalable.
The launch was critical. Friday September 2, 2005 at noon, the site was up and no one knew about it. We contacted newspapers, television stations and networks. We quickly understood that traditional media outlets might not be effective or fast enough. Because of our active participation in the blogging community, we knew the success of the launch would depend on the power of the internet and its connected groups of people.
The momentum began to pick up steam with blog postings, email lists and message boards. After two hours, people were posting real messages on the site. Within 24 hours, we sampled traffic rates running 1200 hits per hour. We put a referrers stream on the site, so visitors could see, in real time, who was clicking through links from other sites all over the world. After 36 hours, we held the number one listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for "Katrina I'm OK". MSN search showed us number one for I'm OK. Our Alexa rating for the day of September 3rd hit 45,006, just 48 hours after launch.
The success of im-ok.org will ultimately be determined by how useful and helpful it is. It was created so other people could assist in its proliferation throughout the internet. It was a simple idea, to create a scalable application, using message boards centered around phone numbers so people could truly help each other in this time of chaos.