The Amazee Blog

Archive for April, 2010

Only twenty days after the last update we already released another new Amazee version today: 2.1.1, Codename “Groupazee”.

As you can tell, it is all about groups. We changed from “projects” to “groups” because our users better understand the word “groups”. And if you check our most successful “projects”, they are groups, in fact.

But that was not the only change: We had more than 130 different small and big changes in our code, here are the most significant (and if you’re interested in the not so significant ones, ask Michi or Luci :

• Facebook Connect & Facebook Like: We reprogrammed the Facebook Connect Module to work with the new Facebook API and implemented the very new Facebook “Like” button. Now you can share the groups which you like most directly on Facebook with only one click;
• VCard: As in the past it is possible for you again to enable the VCard download of your profile. Go to your “Edit profile / Password” tab to enable this feature;
• New Button Styles: The web and its standards develop, and so we implemented some new CSS3 features to give you great looking new buttons;
• Background home page element saving: In the past, for every position change of a home page element you had to wait until it is saved. This is now done in the background, so you can directly proceed with your work;
• Improved search: We implemented some new, advanced algorithms to the search. Now you get the groups which your profile on Amazee best (at least we hope so!);
• RSS feeds for blog element: Every blog element in your group home page now generates an RSS feed. You can publish your Amazee blog entries to wherever you need them;
• Spam prevention: Over the last few months we occasionally had spammers misusing our platform for their dirty business. In order to prevent spamming in the future even better, we implemented some new Captcha functionality to keep these evil doers away from Amazee;
• JQuery UI calendar: As in other places on Amazee, we are now using the very stylish and nice JQuery UI for our calendar as well. It’s much easier for you to select date and time in a calendar element now.

As you can see, we are not only going from projects to groups, there is much more to discover!
And there is more to come! Stay tuned for more speed improvements in the next days. The best thing to do if you want to stay up to date: Include the RSS feed of this blog in your feed reader.

If you have an idea or an improvement suggestion for Amazee, don’t hesitate to send us an email to support@amazee.com or write a comment!

Your Amazee Tech Team

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Last night saw another installment of the Marketing Chuchi meetup, the first one actually that involved some rudimentary form of cooking (aka heating up deep frozen, but yummy, stuff in the oven). Wuala hosted the event and Tao Tao of GetYourGuide.com presented their Marketing strategy.

GetYourGuide is, in a nutshell, a market place for event providers in touristic destinations. The traveller can, after she has decided upon the means of travel and accommodation, book something to do on GetYourGuide. We got the impression that the team is well set-up and that this is a company very likely to succeed, if they manage to become a big player in their niche as quickly as possible.

As far as their tactics are concerned, they seem to apply a very down-to-earth mixture of Marketing & Sales. The advantage of GetYourGuide is that there aren’t that many players in their field yet, that the biggest competitor seems to be a bit slow-moving (our impressions, not Tao’s words!) and that they have a clear revenue model.

If you are working in Marketing and live in Switzerland’s Zurich area, feel free to join the Marketing Chuchi group!

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With summer at the horizon, they are coming out again: Mosquitoes! To us in the Northern Hemisphere, they are merely a nuisance, but in the South, the little sucker still is a deadly insect. The sole carrier of the Malaria disease, mosquito bites are responsible for around one million Malaria deaths worldwide each year. 95% of them occur in Sub-Sahara Africa, most of them are children under the age of five and pregnant women.

Malaria is both preventable and treatable. There are simple measures of prevention, the most common of them are insecticide-treated bednets, under which whole families can sleep, thus protecting them at night, when most transmission occur. One of the projects on Amazee has exactly this goal: The Hope Foundation‘s project “Mosquito nets to fight Malaria” aims at providing people in Cameroon, one of the Sub-Sahara countries in Africa which is heavily stricken by Malaria, with bednets for their homes.

A bednet only costs ten Euro (or a little over thirteen USD), but many families in Cameroon can’t afford this. Therefore, The Hope Foundation is asking for your donation. Apart from buying and distributing these nets they also provide education and raise awareness and offer medical assistance.

I have just recently had the pleasure of meeting Gerald Bobga, one of the initiators of the Hope Foundation, in Berlin. He told me about Hope Foundation’s projects with great enthusiasm. Although I haven’t been on the ground myself I believe they are doing good work. This coming Sunday is World Malaria Day. Please consider donating to Hope Foundation’s cause via the Amazee project, it can save lives!

If you’d like to know more on the Malaria issue, check out the World Malaria Day Web site or the WHO’s site on Malaria.

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Big kudos to Om Malik. He either has some good sources or is a real fortune teller (I suspect the former). Yesterday I wrote a few notes on his predictions on the future of Facebook, which were basically about a more omnipresent connectedness with Facebook all over the Web. Today, two of the features he predicted are already implemented.

If only on selected partner sites, the future of Facebook is happening now, and whether you are skeptical of the development of the World’s biggest Social Networking site or not, this actually might be a game-changer in the making. When I logged into Facebook this morning, I found this on top of my friend feed.

You can find more on the new implementations on this site. Basically it is supposed to enhance your sharing experience on Facebook. You can now like content on other websites (thus far, only on a few partner pages, but this will expand soon), just like you do on Facebook. This will then show up in your Facebook feed and be posted to your Facebook friends’ feeds.

Furthermore, you can see on these partner pages what your Facebook friends have done/liked/shared on this page. Take Foreign Policy for example: I can like their photo reportage about ugly statues via the button below the article and at the same time see what other Facebook users have been up to here on the right (although I don’t think these are my Facebook friends, are they?). Click on the picture for a bigger size.

The second implementation of the day is what Om Malik described as a toolbar of sorts, in the picture below seen on top of Facebook’s partner page Yelp. I am not sure yet exactly what it does, but I suppose it works similarly to the like button and the box on Foreign Policy, telling me what my FB friends have been doing on Yelp as well as letting me recommend things. Again, click on the picture for bigger size.

What are your thoughts on this? Is Facebook getting too big-brotherish or is Facebook merely understanding what the future of the Web looks like and is it actually enhancing your personal surfing experience? I want to know!

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It’s my latest read on Amazee’s road to usability zen: Crumlish and Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces: Almost 500 pages of useful examples, packed into a brilliant analytical framework. If I would have to declare one of my latest UX reads a social media design bible, then

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Just a quick reading recommendation for you Social Network savvy followers out there: Om Malik published a highly interesting article with a couple of thoughts on the near-future development of Facebook on GigaOM yesterday. He closes with a jaw-dropping “If Mark Zuckerberg and his troops execute on their plan, the web is going to be a lot different. I believe that Facebook will rival Google’s current domination of the search and online advertising business. These guys are ruthless, unrelenting and singleminded in their quest for success”.

Today, Facebook holds its f8 developer conference in San Francisco. In his post, Om writes about what he thinks are the four most likely new developments coming to Facebook over the next weeks and months. This includes an enhanced Facebook Connect, a toolbar-like tool that can turn pretty much any web page into a Facebook page, Share and Like functions that go with this tool and more location-based interaction.

Om’s detailed predictions are well worth reading, and if they prove to be right, then his conclusion might also be true: If these new features are implemented on Facebook, it may turn into a game changer, even more than it already has done. These are exciting, yet slightly scary times.

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Wow, this Re:Publica (my first one, to be honest) flies by faster than a volcanic cloud! The last three days were quite packed with input, meeting people and exchanging ideas. Unfortunately Internet connectivity has not always been our best friend, but this is one of only few downsides of the conference.

The subtitle of this year’s Re:Publica is “nowhere” (which turned out to be funnily true, but more of that later), which obviously consists of the words now and here. Real-time, of course, is a big buzzword, but also, nowhere can read as a hat tip to the other buzz of the hour, cloud computing. Pretty meta, all that.

Wednesday’s highlights included a very well presented train of thought by Austrian publicist Peter Glaser about our online lives and the ever-so energetic, inspiring (if not always agreeable) and funny Jeff Jarvis, who talked about penises, saunas and prostate cancer.

The day was rounded of by a great talk by American Melissa Gira Grant on Sex and the Internet and what society, sexuality and gender issues are dealt with on the Web. Towards the end of the talk in front of some 300 listeners she suggested to go to Chatroulette, since she, so she said, had never checked it out before. If you have heard of Chatroulette, you might know what she (and all of us, for that matter) were in for. I’ll leave it at that, but let me assure you that it was hilariously funny.

Yesterday saw me in some panels on Online journalism, Community Management and Sexism on The Internet, with a nice one-hour rant about “Things we hate on the Internet” by some fellow bloggers. Today it’s more Social Action and consumer technology. Overall, the range of panels seems pretty wide and well-balanced, from serious to controversial to simply quite funny issues. With a conference this big (about 2,500 Websters from the German-speaking countries are attending), of course there are brilliant and not-so-brilliant sessions, but in general the quality seems to be sufficiently satisfactory.

Plus, there’s tons of interesting people to meet and old acquaintances to catch up with. I’d say: Well played, dear organizers! (And it has to be said again: Johnny from Spreeblick is the best dressed man at the conference!)

(Photo by jabka., CC)

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It was by far the most fascinating presentation I’ve seen at Berlin’s re:publica today: Prof. Peter Kruse on the question why the Web is mostly being discussed in a heated manner.

Based on his crunching and mapping the team could divide the web’s heavy users into two surprisingly homogenous groups, each showing an opposing set of values: 1) the digital residents who love the social web and know it’s important and 2) the digital visitors who don’t love the Social Web, but use it because they know it’s important. Let me not waste your time – enjoy his (German) slides and presentation…

republica2010

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