To celebrate the launch of our new site, Odadeo, we had a small party at home on Fathers’ Day.

Odadeo’s very simple aim is to answer the question “How am I going to be a better dad?”

The party was a fun day, and we had our first ‘brand new users’ sign up, as well as a nice time catching up with friends and family.

We’d decided to make it a pretty quiet day, with the aim of getting the word out slowly about the beta launch.

Because it was Fathers’ Day, one of the big social networking blogs Mashable had a story running about sending a message to your dad. I couldn’t resist posting a plug for the site as a comment after uploading the new homepage graphic.

Announcing the news

I didn’t think much more of it until I woke up the following morning to a message on Twitter about how Mashable had written a follow-up article about us. Thanks guys!

Within that first day, we welcomed over a thousand people to the site which was great news. We’d hoped to get maybe a hundred dads signed up as beta testers for the site within, say, the first month and we had more than that in the first couple of days! Since then Jason and been frantically trying to personally respond to all the invitation requests that continue to come in.

Dads from all around the World

What’s amazing is that in just the last few days we’ve had dads sign up from all over the world – UK, USA, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, and I’m sure there are more… so yesterday I made a quick ‘dad map‘ of where everyone is. To see yourself on the map, make sure you edit your profile and put in your ‘location’ – mine is “Birmingham, UK”.

You’re invited!

Apologies if you’re waiting for an invitation from us – we have something of a backlog as well as a load of glitches and errors to attend to. Not to mention all the great ideas that people are continuing to send through – thanks everyone!

If you’re not part of the site and you’re interested in signing up, head over to our Contact page and request an invitation. Then when you get it, go to the Sign Up page and put the code into where it says ‘invitation code’, and choose whatever username you want.

And if you’ve just joined us, nice to have you with us!