The Verge launched yesterday in the early a.m. without a hitch: a sleek tech news site complete with longer analysis, forums, a product database and a Q&A with insanely-popular Apple blogger John Gruber to ensure a nice inaugural traffic boost.

"For me, this was an idea that was forming for a long time," said Josh Topolsky, former Engadget editor and current editor and co-founder of the new site. The editor—Jimmy Fallon's gadget consultant and electronic musician—was getting notes from co-workers as he spoke to Betabeat this morning by phone ("26, 27 editorially-focused employees? Okay, I'm being told it's 29"). 

"I wanted to build the perfect tech site that was accessible, not like a brick wall of nerdiness, with longer form features, more reviews, more editorials, get columnists and freelancers coming in to write the in-depth stuff..." he trailed off. "To me, design is super-important."

Mr. Topolsky and the former Engadget employees who followed him to the Jim Bankoff-bankrolled venture had been squirming over the lack of resources and other obstacles that come with working as a subsidiary of Aol.

Engadget bled writers and editors after the acquisition of The Huffington Post; Mr. Topolsky actually stuck it out after his colleagues including Chris Ziegler, Paul Miller and Ross Miller ditched (all three are now working at The Verge). But with The Verge, they had a blank slate. In six months, the editorial team worked with the product designers to build a site tailored to The Verge's mission: delivering breaking gadget news, hardware reviews, tech analysis and longer-form features in a beautiful format (let's not call it sexy).

But as they built the site—figuring out what they wanted a new tech site to be with a completely blank slate, what they needed built, how the workflow would go, what it really means to give a phone an 8/10 score, and so on—the editorial team found it impossible to stay out of the news cycle. "For the past few months we’ve been working on building The Verge while we were publishing news on This Is My Next," Mr. Topolsky explained, referring to the placeholder site where the future Verge team has been publishing three or four posts a day, often scooping Engadget and getting more traffic than they ever expected. TIMN now redirects to The Verge.

"That’s actually really difficult, which we kind of learned by accident. We didn’t intend to do This Is My Next. We were all publishing on our own blogs, and we're tweeting everybody else's links, and finally we said 'this is stupid, let's just write in one place.'"

As tech becomes more mainstream, Mr. Topolsky expects The Verge's audience will too, part of why the presentation was so important.

"It's not just about great content," he said. "You gotta present content to people in a way that is beautiful, not only something they like to look at but also functional. This is something that can be combative, trying to make it beautiful and useful, but we’re striving to do both. That was one of the first conversations we had [with Mr. Bankoff]. We said, 'if we’re going to do this we have to think of it from a design standpoint, not just about content.'"

Now that The Verge is live—"the sense of relief was incredible when the site went from not being there to being there," Mr. Topolsky recalled—it immediately started doing six times TIMN's traffic numbers. With some writers based in Europe, the site's been cranking out posts 24-7. The startup tech news site is scouting for talent from editorial to video production to sales. They're also looking for new space; the team is already "crammed in" a Flatiron office they picked up as a temporary home while getting off the ground.

Any closing thoughts? we asked Mr. Topolsky, who immediately gave a shoutout to the devs. "The product team is incredible," he said. "We work really closely to them. It's a huge relief to have been working on something for 6 months, and it’s finally real."

Since we lasted spotted Mr. Sacca getting his mind blown over magic tricks with Turntable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, we took him at his tweet. [Avatar] heads started bouncing when Mr. Kweli put on some "H&O," which we, naturally, take to mean Hall & Oates. ("I Can't Go For That"? "Rich Girl"? Wait, wait, no, don't tell us . . . "Maneater"!)

But apparently not all Turntable.fm's brushes with fame have ended so pleasantly in the streaming music/chatroom/chance to DJ service. Take, for example, Paul Miller's account on This My Next of the time he walked into Turntable.fm's VIPfest room to find Diplo, Gorilla vs. Bear, the founder of Pitchfork, and Carles from Hipster Runoff. "That’s when things got weird."

When I was in the room earlier I had failed to notice it was being helmed by Gorilla vs. Bear, of Gorilla vs. Bear fame. Next to him was Ryan Schreiber, founder of Pitchfork. In chat was “the REAL DIPLO,” who turned out to be the real Diplo. Through the magical celebrities-are-people-too power of Twitter, Diplo had followed Ryan into the room, and now GvB was attempting to get him on the decks.

. . . It was pretty fun, but I was more caught up with the idea that some nice celebrity man was playing music that he’d clearly uploaded from his computer onto a bizarre new service where you choose an avatar and pretend to be at a live concert while you’re actually talking in a circa 1990s chat room.Nobody else seemed to be so enamored — Diplo was winning plenty of followers and some of my fellow Zynga-alikes were bobbing their virtual heads, but the haters were much more vocal: “Diplo? More like DipNO!” After GvB and Ryan played some tracks, Diplo hit us with another new one: “Untitled.” By this point the room had basically gone insane. Many of the people GvB had booted to get Diplo on the decks were griping about it, others were spamming the chat with requests to play, promising great selections from their musical catalogs. Others had given up on begging, and were instead spamming links to a new room they’d created. But everybody else seemed to be trashing Diplo, Major Lazer, and “Untitled.” After finishing his playthrough, Diplo left because of all the “h8.”

Once Diplo peaced, this insanity happened:

I haven’t seen a room this wild since my AOL Chat days. A ton of users had changed their names to celebrities. There was a Lady Gaga, a Bon Iver, and a Joanna Newsom, to name a few. None of these checked out on Twitter, sadly. A DJ named “Carles” (who turns out to be Carles of Hipster Runoff, completely unknown to me at the time) played “Mandolin Rain” (a hilarious juxtaposition to the chat that was ensuing) and Pitchfork Ryan tweeted about it. Bon Iver became enough of a meme that GvB played “Beth / Rest” off of Bon Iver. It was seriously chill, the best song I’d heard all night. The chat turned on Pitchfork’s 9.5 score of the album, almost as if Pitchfork Ryan wasn’t there. Some people just typed “9.5″ into their chat box and then hit enter. The virtual Ryan, nodding his avatar’s head to the beat, asked us all: “can u feel the 9.5… all around[?]” Carles “spun” a dark, terrifying spoken word track he’d recorded about VIPfest called “VIPfest is s0 VIP.” I was scared.

Does this mean we have to count Diplo among the early Turntable.fm enthusiasts who burned out too quickly from the "alive web"? Of course not. After Carles stepped down from the DJ booth, Diplo came back into the room and tried to win the crowd over with another track. After all, Turntable.fm knows how to make a product sticky: tune it in to users' egos.

Nilay Patel, Paul Miller and Josh Topolsky.

Engadget veterans and gadget fetishists/heroes Josh Topulsky, Nilay Patel and Paul Miller started work "a few weeks ago" on a consumer tech site that will launch under the sports-centric SB Nation brand, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff tells Beet TV, and will be setting up an office in Union Square.

Already, sources are leaking information to the Engadgeters' interim project, thisismynext.com, the crew's informal gadget podcast and blog. They've also been joined by former Engadget reviews editor Joanna Stern and former Engadget writers Ross Miller, and Chris Ziegler.

The former Engadget editors cited various reasons when they left AOL, including conflict with the parent company over the infamous "AOL way" commoditization of content.

The editors are preparing content--"plans, writing all sorts of reviews and other things"--while the company works to finalize the publishing platform and the site, Mr. Bankoff said. The new site, whose name has not been announced, is scheduled to launch "the next great tech publication" in the early fall.

The next podcasters.

Former Engadget Show netcasters Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel and Paul Miller hit the web yesterday with This is my next Podcast, a show and blog that will serve as an outlet for their collective tech wisdoms during the between-jobs period before the launch of the much-anticipated tech site at SB Nation.

The network of sports sites seems an unlikely fit for nerd news, but Mr. Topolsky et. al. say it's a leaner, meaner, better-equipped platform for tech news than the bloated and unscrupulous company that still umbrellas Engadget.

"As you probably know, Josh, Paul and I are hard at work on a new tech site with the awesome team at SB Nation, but we wanted to keep podcasting in the meantime," Mr. Patel wrote on the blog. "So welcome to This is my next Podcast, our temporary home until the new site launches sometime in the fall."

The inaugural podcast was yesterday; the team says they'll be broadcasting on Thursdays. "Wow, This is my next Podcast is number 1 in all tech podcasts on iTunes right now! WOW. We love you, whoever you are," Mr. Topolsky tweeted. And in fact, it is.

Over the weekend Miller announced his departure by blog post, noting that, "I’d love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution."

With the recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, it's clear CEO Tim Armstrong is trying to sharpen the focus of AOL during its transformation to a media company. But the relentless drive towards profit doesn't sit well with editorial staffers like Miller.

"As detailed in the 'AOL Way,' and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive," wrote Miller.

On Sunday Associate Editor Ross Miller announced his departure from Engadget as well, citing the AOL way as a catalyst. Josh Topolsky, editor-in-chief, tweeted this out in response.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper