Just out of curiosity, are you a startup, a non profit or a guy doing a side project?
We're Investling, which is a handfull of startups and an IT consultancy. We're for-profit, with some non-profit projects on the side (in part because we'll make more profits if we can help save the world from surprise conversion to paperclips). The majority of our non-profit work is SIAI related.
I predict the site's userbase will not explode overnight but will escalate in the shape of a hockey stick. […]
Some projects follow that pattern. Some projects never hockey-stick. How can you tell which curve you're riding?
We have many projects running: some have maintained exponential growth since we became involved; some are too young to judge; and some are on the low end of a curve that may be a hockey stick and may just be a project that doesn't have any legs. I very much hope that the LW crowd will latch on to PBook (keep coming back, tell your friends, etc.). If you do (we do - several of us are very keen LWers) and we see traffic growing, we'll flood more resources into the project. If it languishes we'll continue to host it and may even open source it, but it seems more sensible to flood our resources into projects that are winning. I really don't want to see PBook die, but I'm trying to count warm fuzzies consciously.
Also, you need to add documentation […]
We know the documentation is sparse (or, more precisely, the user interface isn't intuitive - documentation is evidence of a UI failure and good design is self-documenting). If you guys are still around in 14 days we should talk about more dev resources.
I just signed up and did a bunch of predictions. Here are my initial impressions:
The majority of our non-profit work is SIAI related.
A tool like PB is like spaced repetition flash card programs or writing Wikipedia articles - a long-term tool. Some benefits appear quickly, yes, but the bulk of the benefits arrive over years or decades. (PB is somewhat like Long Bets.)
As the saying goes, "In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end." If I invest time in PB, what guarantee do I have...
Our hosts at Tricycle Developments have created PredictionBook.com, which lets you make predictions and then track your calibration - see whether things you assigned a 70% probability happen 7 times out of 10.
The major challenge with a tool like this is (a) coming up with good short-term predictions to track (b) maintaining your will to keep on tracking yourself even if the results are discouraging, as they probably will be.
I think the main motivation to actually use it, would be rationalists challenging each other to put a prediction on the record and track the results - I'm going to try to remember to do this the next time Michael Vassar says "X%" and I assign a different probability. (Vassar would have won quite a few points for his superior predictions of Singularity Summit 2009 attendance - I was pessimistic, Vassar was accurate.)