Welcome to Web Connections!
Today we're launching, and we have a few goodies up our sleeves for launch, as well as a few in the pipeline coming up, and during, the conference.
Subscribe to the team webconnections RSS Feed to stay up-to-date as we add new bits and pieces.
By demand from chezza, I've added email notifications to taggings, so when somebody tags your profile you get an email telling you about it.
We've also taken the suggestion from usability guru lisa herrod and added a "Add this tag to your profile" button on the tag page, so you don't have to remember or copy & paste the tag name into your profile if you find one that ticklesyour fancy.
...and yes, I am aware that the "connection" stuff isn't quite XFN. We'll get round to fixing that soon.
We've just released a vastly improved UI for the "Connection" page where you define your relationship with another person. It now allows you to define XFN 1.1 compliant relationships.
Go find somebody, connect, and check it out.
Dude,
Excellent work on the 'Edit Your Profile' form - looks *Heaps* better!
SG
Great work. Well dome Tim and Cam.
This shit is bananas. Nice work chaps.
Thanks guys!
I've just added the ability to change your password in "Edit profile".
Well done folks!
I've just fixed a bunch of bugs surrounding the pulling in of flickr photos, for those with (*gasp*) one or zero flickr photos.
I've also added an RSS feed for newcomers on the people page.
Hrmm... seems there's a few bugs in the deployment process and the application freaked out there for a while. It's working for now, and we'll continue to iron out those bugs.
It isn't buggy... it's called "agile development" people!
This is so Excellent! Well done alround.
"Quick agile development"
This is good!
To make connecting with people even easier we just added a BFOB to the profile pages:
Great application, guys!
One small point: the start and end times on the events page are all encoded for the same day, the 27th. The title attributes of the dtstart abbr elements need to be updated.
Ah, the perils of cut'n'paste. ;-)
I wouldn't want you turning up in your party shirt on the wrong day, Jeremy, so I fixed it for ya. :D
If anybody was having problems with the ATOM feeds they've now been fixed
BFOB! You're a funny MF, Tim ;)
Big on the MFs today, Hardy.
I've noticed a few people having trouble uploading their profile photo. I've fixed the problem so at least you get a nice error message asking you to email the photo to us so we can help.
All is now revealed in the tags section on people's profile pages. Muhahahahar... Let the war begin!
That is awesome!
This is going to be *so much fun*!
Tim: how's your tags db table holding up? lol, it's being pummled! Awesome job, btw :)
You got a nasty bug with the Flickr script. I can't link to my own profile, but it has no problem finding any variant of my name on Flickr. Any attempts to change it go nowhere.. Any chance of a database clean / purge / whatever for that field, so people can either change or edit it.. (my real Flickr name is absalomedia)
Just fixed a long-running problem with people entering long strings of tags such as "mobile xml bluetooth mobile social networking wikipedia hyperpeople vrml".
Andrew: 547 tags and 1301 taggings over 103 people. Will get worried if the tagging hits 50k. Get busy!!
Lawrence: will check out what's goin on.
I just added a Recent comments on all tags feed as well as updated the links on the home page to include all the web connections feeds of interest (hicksdesign style)
I love the homepage, where the user photos are hidden and displayed according to who has used a particular tag.
I also like that I can comment on each tag ... starting a conversation, of sorts. Very cool.
The mapping, XFN relationships, etc. is all good.
Nice work guys. ;-)
Great site guys - adds much to the WD buzz.
One thing you could do to cut down on the number for tags and add some "value" would be to add a link to the "Organisation" field that linked to a page showing all the 'people' from the same biz. (assumption: everyone from the same biz enters the biz name the same)
Thanks gang!
Glad you got the hang of the comments Adam. I've a feeling people don't really understand why they'd do it... I see it as a way of creating shared and public conversations about common interests... could be to organise a meetup, or share baby photos (the cutest use of connections yet!)
Rowan: Thanks! Yeah a fair few people have already started doing it: news interactive, virgin money, ninemsn, optus, UTS and a bunch more... I reckon we can probably get away with how it is... but I love your idea.
Remy released an oh-so-cool Microformats bookmarklet which you can use to extract the info from profile pages, the events page, etc. Check it out.
Sorry guys... finally we're all back and running smoothly... turns out it was a foolish bug in my code! Won't be making that mistake again.
Hope you all enjoy continuing to use it, and look out for some exciting announcements (hint: opening up an API for mashups and showing off Cam's HIJAX and the rails backend)
A super special thankyou to our sponsors SegPub, who stuck with me and helped figure out what the hell was going on.
Is Web Connections going to WD North or SXSW?
Possibly, but we're still recovering from last week's drinkies to have thought too much about it :)
So I am not the only one ;-) still running in the caffefine + nicotine + alcohol fueled and sleep deprived mode.
A small request:
stick a rel="me" on the link to the user's blog URL ... that way smart things can be done by some XFN robot
I believe the idea of rel="me" is that you link to your connections page *from* your blog with rel="me", not the other way around... or am I just reading the XFN identity consolidation stuff all wrong?
I have a suggestion – for tags which have comments posted against them, why not show the number of comments in brackets next to the tag eg Adelaide (2), for any instances where the tags are listed (such as users tags lists or on the main Tags page).
This will allow users know if the tags have any associated comments, without having to click/open the tag to check.
Just my two cents. Well done on this great site/app and keep up the good work :)
I recently tried to Export Vcard so that i could create a group of the ppl "I know" and realised it was for each individual (which makes sense). Connect us up.....it would be great if the people "I know" could be exported into a group contact list so i can email everyone at once.....i know im lazy.
Something to think about.....
Cheeky.
