On Monday, Smarr opened himself up for questions on Q&A website AnyAsq.com, a Y-Combinator-backed site reminiscent of Formspring.me where users can invite others to “ask me anything.” People sign in to post questions on AnyAsq through their Twitter accounts, but a host’s responses can be longer than 140 characters.

Smarr has already answered 270 queries, and as of press time, his AnyAsq page is still open for questions. Here’s some of what he has revealed so far:

• Google+ fast tracked its development from the start
  “We put extra emphasis on engineering speed/agility–we try to release code updates on a daily basis while still keeping quality/stability/latency as high as you’d expect from Google.”

• New features are absolutely on the way
  “…Personally I’m eager for many of the features other Google+ users have asked for recently: smarter ranking/collapsing/filtering in the stream and notifications… integration with more Google products… and an API so I can start hacking on cool uses of circles, etc.”

• Hashtags are on Google+’s radar
  In response to a question about adding hashtags to help filter Google+ posts, Smarr responded: “Personally, I want this too.”

• There was some fancy footwork on the programming front
  “A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive.”

Although none of Smarr’s responses have been shockingly revealing, the AnyAsq activity is just the latest example of how Google has worked hard to project an air of openness throughout the entire Google+ launch. Where the now-defunct Google Wave was developed with an air of secrecy that ultimately confused users as to its purpose, Google’s strategy with the Plus project has been one of transparency and agility — a “done is better than perfect” attitude. So far, it’s been a refreshing approach. The challenge for the future will be maintaining that flexibility as Google+ grows.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Chris Hughes, who co-founded what became one of the world’s largest social networks and then just a few years later orchestrated a social-media campaign that helped put Barack Obama to the White House, has launched a new, non-profit startup that he says will create an “online platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” He launched the new entity, called Jumo, not on Facebook simultaneously on Facebook and through a post on his Tumblr blog and on Twitter. He didn’t provide many details about the venture or what it intends to build, but said:

To do this well, I’m firmly of the mind that we have to foster relationships between everyday people and issues and organizations that are personally relevant to them. It’s now possible to provide each person with information and opportunities for meaningful action tailored specifically to who they are. If Jumo can make sure that happens and offer opportunities for meaningful engagement alongside it, I think we can speed the pace of global change.

Hughes told The Huffington Post in a phone interview that he was looking for something to do after the Obama campaign ended, and knew that “I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and technology.” By global development, he said he meant a “broad umbrella including everything from health care and education to agriculture. He said he spent the past year “traveling and talking to people — researching, studying, learning everything I could in the space.” Jumo is opening an office in Soho next week, Hughes said on his blog, and is also looking to hire a developer, a design director and an “outreach director” who it says will require a “wide-ranging, nearly unparalleled command of the global development field and the ability to see through ideological constraints fairly and analytically.”

To some extent Jumo — whose name means “together in concert” in a West African language called Yoruba — may wind up competing with Hughes’ former company once it launches. Not only do many charitable groups use Facebook pages to gather support for causes, but former Facebook president Sean Parker has a Facebook application called Causes that has attracted millions of users. There are also several other Web-based platforms that are trying to connect people interested in global development, including Ushahidi, which pulls together information to help in crisis situations such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

Hughes left Facebook, which he co-founded with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, in 2007 to lead the social-media efforts for the Obama campaign, including helping to develop My.BarackObama.com, and was the subject of a number of flattering profiles in mainstream media outlets such as Fast Company magazine — which called him a “boy wonder” — and the Wall Street Journal. After the campaign ended he became entrepreneur in residence at General Capital Partners in Cambridge. It’s not clear whether General Capital has funded Jumo or not — a spokesperson said it is “a non-profit venture and we’re raising funds from both foundations and individuals.” Hughes told Fast Company he is looking to raise about $2.5 million.

Hughes said in an email sent to friends that he believes Jumo can “leverage the participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are relevant to each individual. Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.” After the “soft launch” of the startup, Hughes got a number of congratulations on Twitter, including one from Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital in New York, who said that he was “excited @chrishughes is back in the making the world a better place business.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Steve Rhodes

If you work for the U.S. Army and spend all your spare time hacking the iPhone and Android or fooling around with HTML5, this is a contest for you: The Army’s Chief Information Office is launching a competition aimed at mobile and web apps, with cash awards totaling $30,000 and the chance to get your application the military seal of approval. The contest is a joint venture with iStrategyLabs, and is based on that company’s successful Apps For Democracy project, which was a joint venture with the Washington, D.C.’s Office of the CTO in 2008.

iStrategyLabs founder and CEO Peter Corbett describes on the company’s blog how the contest will work. It starts with a press conference and media (and blogger) roundtable on March 3 at the Pentagon with Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (the Army’s chief information officer) and runs until May 15th. A total of 100 teams will be selected to compete for one or more of 40 cash awards totaling $30,000. Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations. The competition comes with a software repository (forge.mil), a cloud-based development sandbox, a collaboration space designed around an Apps for the Army group on MilBook (the Army’s version of Facebook) and a Twitter hashtag: #apps4army.

Corbett says the idea for the project came from O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter after announcing the competition that he had hoped to get the rest of the U.S. military involved as well, but wound up only getting the Army on board. The Army has been making some significant strides in the areas of social media over the past year or two, including the launch of CIO Sorenson’s Twitter account, which the lieutenant-general posts to himself (in contrast to many other government departments). It also recently released a surprisingly forward-thinking social media policy.

Lt.-Gen. Sorenson said in a statement released by the Army today that “We’re building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs. Soldiers and Army civilians will be creating new mobile and web applications of value for their peers — tools that enhance warfighting effectiveness and business productivity today. And we’re rewarding their innovation with recognition and cash.” Or, as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark described it in a blog post: “A lot of people in the Army know stuff and want to serve more effectively.” Well said, Craig.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developers’ Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

Post photo courtesy of iStrategyLabs, thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

Ben writes: “We generated plenty of buzz, brought in some great customers and the product held up to the initial onslaught of traffic, users and feedback. And for about 1 day I felt like everything was under control. Oops…the honeymoon ended pretty darn quickly. ”

Trouble is, Ben explains, at pre-launch you’re focused like a laser on one all-encompassing thing. Once you hit the green light, “you’ll be running on even more paths than before.” The The post, Launching a Startup is Barely Step One, has great details, but we’ll share Ben’s 5 summary tips on how to deal with life post-launch — when “all hell breaks loose”!

…The best thing is to be aware of the fact that this will happen after you launch. And you should take the time before launch to prepare as much as possible.

* Setup the proper infrastructure (for development, customer support, sales management, etc.)

* Outsource those things you really need help with – such as public relations, marketing and potentially even sales.

* Prioritize what you have to get done after launch, and don’t put product development as the top priority (at least not by itself.)

* [Do ONE thing at a time] Focus on getting things done and not on the overwhelming amount that you want to accomplish right this second. You can’t get everything done in an instant; just make progress every single day towards your goals. (Oh, having goals is a good idea too!)

… [Ben concludes with] Take a breather right after you launch, and admire the work you’ve put in to get to that point. Then stop patting yourself on the back and get down to the real work …

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

Creating a web app is like a sprint. Building a business around it is more like a marathon: It may take forever, you will feel like quitting a lot of times, and you may never finish it. It is a lot of fun.

For me it feels so much more like a triathlon. You get out of the water after a long swim just to find yourself jumping on a bike and going on. After a year of development, we finally launched 5pm, “a web-based project management service, offered on a subscription model, with a highly intuitive interface and a balanced set of features.” (This was our elevator pitch).

The launch merely marked the beginning of the next stage — acquiring the actual clients.

Back to the starting line.

I know it’s difficult to get excited about yet another project management application. So why did we develop it? How is it different?

It started back in 2002 when we developed our Project and Team Manager web app – the predecessor of 5pm. We created it to manage our own projects, as nothing on the market was working for us. It’s a typical story. The product was popular enough, so we kept updating it, until one day we decided to rebuild it from scratch. We planned to do it within three or four months. It took us twelve.

Our team is composed of four geeks, and it’s split across two continents – a couple of us are in USA (Cincinnati, good old Midwest) and the other two are in Eastern Europe. We had to work around seven hour time difference and many other issues. Each stage brought its own challenges. During development the hardest part was the implementation of the interface we had in mind. We wanted a dual panel view, no page reloads, everything within a click or two, plus the ability to customize it – resize panels and columns, hide/show columns, sort etc… We wanted it to look simple and elegant on the surface while packing a lot of power “under the hood”. Achieving it turned out to be much more difficult than we anticipated, but we are happy with the results.

The UI design is very important to us. That’s the first thing that sets us apart. When it comes to projects and tasks, it’s usually the same functionality – tracking status, exchanging messages and files and so on. No need to reinvent the bicycle. The way this data can be accessed, on another side, is a totally new game. Our approach is a tight, clean interface that is flexible and customizable, with every function within a click or two. Plus there is the Timeline view – it’s like a small application on its own, developed in Flash. We plan to make it fully editable, so tasks and deadlines could be dragged around.

We started to register our first clients in November 2007 and are using their feedback to decide what features to add next. Our strategy is to be agile and adapt to the market demands.

Here are 3 Lessons we learned from our experience:

* Try it again, differently. Every time you get stuck, and it takes forever to find the right solution, go about it a new way. Think differently. This is just another wall between you and your competitors. The more difficult and time consuming it is, the more difficult it will be for them to keep up with you.

* Set intermediate goals. Coding can be very daunting when you are months deep into development, and the release is still over the horizon. Small goals can cheer up your team. Even if they are not very serious (for example we celebrated our 1000th commit to the SVN repository. Very geeky.) (Editor’s Note: remember the value-add in “Small Successes.“)

* Client Support = Free Marketing! Once you are launched, you will have to deal with clients (can’t live without them). Don’t take it as a chore. Client support is your first source of marketing, and it’s free. Be very responsive to clients’ needs, and take it as an opportunity to differentiate yourself. This may end up being the feature they liked the most.

Have you recently been through a product launch? Tell us about it! And For more on how to build a successful web app, try the Web Apps 101 series on TechCrunch, from last March.

Sergei Podbereschi is co-founder (with his partner Greg Roy) of QG Software, and Theo Worlds, both based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Public Cloud Will Dominate Enterprise IT — One Day
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce