Despite what seems like our own (somewhat scaled down) four horsemen attempting to scupper development; illness, storms, paternity leave and poor car parking (the 21st Century scourge of any office) there has been some great progress over the weekend. Which is great as we’re only seven working days away from the launch – and we have to show the trade press on Friday.

With functionality piling on every hour I’m starting to realise that actually a largely social-networking site appears, erm, somewhat empty without people – yes this isn’t the most startling of revelations, but, just a few days away it plays on my mind a bit. A lot.

We’re starting to look around at cool things to add after launch and Martin has been looking at deeper geo-locational stuff for example the Google street level pictures of bookshops in the US, which prompted a discussion and about Spimes and LongPen and that you could have an author having a virtual signing hosted in a physical store with a virtual audience. Which is quite silly, but not completely.

I’m also becoming a little bit persuaded by Plaxo which has a great ability to aggregate Twitter, Facebook, Jabber, etc etc so is a sort of MetaNetwork. Interestingly there aren’t any e-commerce players on here at the moment – bar Amazon’s wishlist.