It seems this becomes a little series of tipps, tricks and best practice examples on how you can do cool stuff on Amazee.

So you are running a project on Amazee but don't have a website? Or you have a tiny website but the project magazine totally attracts you? Why not combine?

And exactly this is what the folks of uniRadio 97,2 Berlin-Brandenburg did. They redirect all requests to uniradio.de to their Amazee project magazine. On the project magazine they promote their shows, give contact information so you can participate, see the playlists from past shows and get news on the live shows and streams.

And this pays: if you take a look at the Amazee Hall of Fame they rallied spot 1 within only 21 days! Wow...! Great job!

So why not pay the uniRadio Berlin-Brandenburg a visit and check them out? They definately deserve the attention and as you can see they are also part of the Amazee Contest.

For those of you who missed part one: Amazee projects score great in Google

One week ago Amazee participated in the TechCrunch Pitch! event in London. We were one of 19 companies selected to pitch and won the fifth prize.

The detailed blog entry on the event is here on Techcrunch:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/techcrunch-pitch-in-london-the-wrap/

Thanks a lot to Mike Butcher for organizing this very nice, relaxed and perfectly entertaining event!

Amazee is looking for a passionate PHP Software Engineer! Join our team and grow with us!

Your responsibilities:

• Support Amazee’s Head Technology with the development of new and innovative platform solutions
• Code clean code that is built to scale and last
• Review code of our external developers
• Ensure unit testing, deployment and version control with SVN
• Continually research new technologies

Your professional Skills:

• 4+ years in Software Development
• Knowledge of building secure and scalable PHP applications. Knowledge of OS CMS programming preferably Drupal. You have experience with internet media technology and Web 2.0 architecture
• Strong knowledge of either Java or PHP, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL and Apache
• Experience with JSON and XML
• Experience with memcache and server optimization a plus
• Strong grasp of network protocols, caching, synchronization, pooling, threads, concurrency, distributed computing, transactions and optimization
• Hands-on experience with one or more established software development methodologies, preferably both Agile (UP, SCRUM, etc.) and Waterfall

Your personal characteristics:
You are, hands-on, intelligent, structured, reliable, curious, fast and innovative. You do not think in problems but in solutions. You have a strong interest for Web 2.0, and want to be part of the Web 3.0 movement.

If you are keen on accepting this challenge and working in an ambitious and fun team, please contact Markus Tressl, Head Technology.

markus.tressl(AT)amazee.com

After a short downtime we are back with many cool new features.
There are quite a lot of useful changes, including cool widgets for the project magazine, many new navigational options, enhanced profile options, flexible project ratings and a lifestream. See below for a description of each new feature or just go to amazee.com and check them out in action.

Lifestream
Ever wondered what's going on in your Amazee universe? Or even what's going on on the platform as a whole? Well, we’ve implemented a fully configurable lifestream. The lifestream will show you, in a condensed way, what's going on in your projects and alliances or, if you choose, it can show you every click happening on Amazee. Go to the 'My Projects' tab and click on 'Lifestream', set your options to what you want to 'hear' and you are ready to roll. There is even a RSS feed for this configuration so you can get everything on the feed reader of choice.

Messaging Preferences
Currently you are notified about various events happening on Amazee either by private message (with email alert) or by email. However, as of today we give you the possibility to choose which message to receive when and in which interval. So everybody can set their own notification preferences.

Multiple Choice Polls
Polls for voting got a very important enhancement: you can now set up polls with multiple choice answers. You are free to define how many answers are allowed.

Message all Project Members
If you have hot news in your project and want to reactivate all your members there is now the possibility to send a message to them all or to selected roles only (admins or editors).

Reply in Talk Section and Hierarchy
The talks are getting more structured. You can now directly reply to a message in the talk section, this reply will be indented and the topic will get the prefix 're:'. Just like in old school message boards: perfect for intense discussions.

Projects and Alliances separated in Matrix
Projects and alliances that you are a member of are now separated in the matrix, and so now you get a full overview of your footprint on Amazee. Projects stay on top, alliances are listed below.

Pending Invitations
To keep an overview of all invitations you send out for your projects, each project's member section now has a list of pending invitations. So you can see if any of your buddies are lazy and can send them an extra message if necessary.

Filtering in Member Search
When inviting Amazee members to your project you now have the opportunity to filter instead of search for names. You can display all your current buddies and select from this list, chose a gender (e.g. if you want to do a project with girls only) or do a location search based on the information users gave when registering.

Add new Topics/Areas in Talk & Wiki
Before today, new talk and discussions as well as wiki areas could only be introduced when going back to the project setup. Now you can create new ones directly in the talk and wiki sections. For your convenience, this is very easy to handle.

Make every Member Admin or Editor
When creating a new project you can now select the default role for new members. So, for example, if you want a very creative project where every member is able to add content to the project magazine, you select 'editor' as the default role. This saves you a lot of hassle because you do not have to upgrade all members as soon as they join.

Enhanced Navigator Filtering and new default Setting
There are several new filtering options in the Amazee project navigator. From today you are able to use these filters to filter by: latest update, by rating, by views per day, by number of members, by number of sponsors, and alphabetically. In addition, to reward active projects we changed the default sorting option, from now on the project with the latest activity is on top of the this list.

Locale reflected in Navigator Filtering
The language set in your user profile is now reflected in the navigator as well. From today you not only have the language set for the user interface but also in the filter. So if you set English in your profile, the user interface and the projects you see are English as well. You can always override this by selecting 'all languages' in the navigator filter.

Hall of Fame Graph Widget
Ever wondered how your project is doing compared to others? You can now provide your visitors with the history of your project and how it is doing in the hall of fame. The visitors then can compare your project to others, either by views, member count, or rating - just like in the hall of fame, but visually enhanced.

Timeline Widget
Do you want to show your visitors what is going on within your project? Is your project extremely active and you want to show this off? Add the timeline widget and your visitors can go back in time and see what has been happening.

Related Projects Widget
To show links to related projects on Amazee we provide you with a related projects widget. This widget will display other projects on Amazee with the same tags. If there are no similar tags then it will display a randomly selected list of projects from the same project category.

Matrix with Status Icons and visible Changes
The matrix also got an enhancement and now displays your status and additional information next to the updates. When you click on an updated area we will display what has changed in that area. E.g. new members or changed member status, and new talk posts.

More Information next to Project Goal
We realized some of you need a long project goal description. So we did not want to short this down to X characters, but no longer display the whole goal in the short view. Instead, if you mouse-over the goal you will see the full text plus additional information for the project, like the tags, the category, and the location of the headquarter.

Project Rating always changeable
Projects change from time to time - and your opinion on a project might as well. Now you can change your mind daily if you want, and rate a project as often as you like. But remember: only your last vote counts... ;-)

Captions for Image Gallery Widget
You can now add captions to your pictures in the image gallery. So you can describe what happens in your pictures so your visitors get more information on what’s going on in your project.

Enhanced Profiles
This is a very important enhancement for you as a user as well as for the Amazee platform. You can now enhance your profile with additional information about yourself. For example how you can be contacted or with other web profiles you are using, your professional profile and why you are on Amazee. These enhanced profiles will be part of Amazee's future advanced search.

UPDATE: the release is done and we are back online. Overall it took us 21 minutes, thanks a lot to the whole team! Release notes will follow.

We just wanted to announce a short downtime today in the afternoon at around 13:00h CET.

Amazee will get it's monthly update and there are again lots of new things and improvements for you.

Just to tease you a little bit...:

• Amazee Lifestream
• enhanced navigator filtering
• three new magazine widgets
• ... and much more

We will keep this post updated on how we proceed.

UPDATE 9:49am CET: Firefox 3 is downloaded 5'000'645 times!

They are pretty close... nearly 5'000'000 downloads for Firefox 3!

Luci and I fired up the big screen to see when Firefox 3 reaches the 5 million mark. You can follow the counter at the Mozilla website.

If you still have NOT downloaded Firefox 3 go ahead and do it now. You can also join the 'Firefox 3 - Guinness World Record' project to show your support.

Are you thinking of running a project on Amazee? Ever wondered how people should find your project outside Amazee? You do not know that many people to reach your goal?

Google might be your friend in this case!

Just as an example I want to show you how successful search engine project marketing (SEPM) is done:

Think of a unique but self-talking project title. Your search key words should be included. And Amazee does the rest.

With a nice title, good content in the project magazine, and a speaking URL the rugby team of Bremen 1860 did everything right.

And so the Amazee project scores number one in the Google SERP -- even above their two club homepages. Strike!