Actually, it’s been way too long. There are a lot of things happening behind the screens at E: new team members, restructuring, and a lot of development. We’ll be gradually releasing more and more details about what exactly we’ve been doing for the past couple of months. We’re extremely excited about it, and hope you’ll feel the same way. There will be major announcements on every front, in terms of functionality, accounts and company wise. I’ll leave you with a little something:
Today we’ve introduced wallpaper ads on E. Your Public Card can now display wallpaper ads curated by Nalden. Now I can hear you say “Yikes. Ads. No, thanks.” But trust me, you won’t notice them if you don’t activate them.
So with that out of the way, let me explain what our partnership is all about! We’ve partnered with one of the coolest lifestyle blogs on the interwebs, Nalden.net. Nalden came up with an innovative way of connecting brands to users, by serving high-quality downloadable wallpapers. Advertising partners include Vodafone, Jameson, NBC Universal and Nike. These wallpapers are designed for advertising brands by some of the best designers out there. And they’re really awesome. Plus, they work in your desktop browser and on your iPhone or Android.
How do you activate them? Simple. Log into E, got to your Settings/Public Card and select Nalden wallpapers. It’s that simple. Now you’ll have a different wallpaper every once in a while, handpicked by Nalden.
We partnered with Nalden to come up with an advertising partnership that our users get to decide about. We believe in creative ways of serving commercial content. That’s why we’ve given you the option to activate or deactivate the wallpapers whenever you like. We’ll be monitoring the activity for the next couple of weeks and touching ground on how we can make this even more beneficial to our users and advertisers.
Download our press release or read on to view it. Read the rest of this entry »
We just launched a new version of the webservice, which I’m sure you’ll like, though the visual changes are minimal. Here’s the breakdown of everything we changed (and fixed!) and added to our service.
Mobile Public Cards
Your Public Card, http://eee.am/username, is now fully optimized for your mobile browser. Place direct calls, emails or open address information directly in Google Maps. Connect with someone remotely, and get a clear overview and direct access to the social media profiles. They especially look great on iPhone and Android devices (hint: turn your phone to landscape mode!).
Added support for Custom Domains
This feature is still in beta, so we encourage you to test it. Custom Domains allow you to automatically redirect your URL to your Public Card, a feature that was requested by many. Please try it out and support us with your feedback. You can access Custom Domain settings in Settings/Public Card.
Added support for Gravatar
Don’t feel like uploading a profile/card picture? Just use your Gravatar. It’s located under Settings/Pictures.
Redirect to Trail when previously logged in
Small, but significant in your user experience. If you’re logged in to E and visit the website, it’ll take you to the Trail directly instead of the homepage.
Smaller updates
• Updated image selector on Cards
• Deleting your public card bug fixed
• Delete your background pictures
• Address info on your Public Card now has a better structure
• Image uploader now fully supported by Internet Explorer
• Disable/delete account bug fixed
A lot of people ask me why we don’t support Twitter’s OAuth yet. Let me explain why it’s taking so long.
When we launched E about a year ago, Twitter had no OAuth support. That’s why we intregrated it by using regular HTTP authorisation, which requires the user’s username and password (which we store encrypted). A few months later, when the Twitter API team released their OAuth Beta version we immediately started implementing it. While doing that we noticed a substantial problem popping up. E was not built to support two types of service integration, which meant that if we’d implemented OAuth, we’d have to ask all users to integrate Twitter credentials again. Which we, and our users, would obviously find ridiculous.
We’re currently rebuilding the complete system that supports multiple types of integration. The cool thing about this is that we’ll be able to offer additional advanced features after this release. Those features will see the light in our next major version, codenamed ‘Gundam’.
This problem is not only related to Twitter, but to all services we’ve integrated on the second level (http encrypted auth) that now support OAuth.
Since we’re advocates and members of multiple open standards workgroups and associations, we do our very best to implement solutions for privacy issues and the password anti-pattern. Sometimes, we have to stick to the lesser of two evils for the better of the user experience.
We hope this explains the situation, if you have any questions about this topic, please don’t hesitate to comment, email or post in our Get Satisfaction.
We’re very happy to announce that from today, E offers support for over 50 online services. We added a few last week, and with the ones included today, we support a total of 52 services. The ones integrated today:
Hulu
Watch your favorite videos right from your browser, anytime, for free. With full episodes of TV shows both current and classic, full-length movies, web originals, and clips of just about everything, Hulu is the place to watch and enjoy premium videos from the biggest names in entertainment.
Google Profiles
What do people see when they find you online? You can control how you appear in Google by creating a personal profile… …and people will see it on their results page when they do web searches for your name.
Google Reader
Google Reader lets you subscribe to your favorite websites so new content comes to you when it’s posted. Reader keeps track of which things you’ve read so that when you only see unread items when you come back. If there’s a dark blue border around an item, Reader is marking that item as read.
Google Talk
See real-time availability and status of friends online, send instant text messages, easily go from text to voice chat, chat right from your desktop or from Gmail.
Identi.ca
A micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.
Qik
Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world—right from your mobile phone!
Readernaut
Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and meeting fellow readers.
TipSpot
TipSpot is an event calendar for your computer and mobile – it gives you a personal overview of all the action around town. tipSpot is smart and takes into account what you and your friends are into. You see where your friends will be going and which events they recommend.
TripIt
Organize trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites. Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary. Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary. Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary
Twones
Twones is a music service and a new way to store, organize, find & share music played all over the web (i.e. YouTube, Myspace, Last.fm, Hypemachine, Favtape, Blogs and many more) or on your computer (i.e. iTunes) to one single point of access. Twones ties all music and music services together and lets you share your taste with others in the most direct way.
Ustream
Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. In less than two minutes, anyone can become a broadcaster by creating their own channel on Ustream or by broadcasting through their own site, empowering them to engage with their audience and further build their brand.
Virb
Virb is a community and a place for you to contribute the stuff that interests you. Virb is your social network, your photography portfolio and your band’s website. Virb is the collection of all that you share online, from what you find to what you create.
Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger is a free product that makes it easy and fun to communicate with friends and family around the world. Enjoy real-time text chats with friends, make free PC-to-PC voice calls, send SMS messages from your PC, plus share photos and files instantly.
Update your cards now!
Lots happening here at My Name is E. We decided to push out support for some of our favourite online services and networks today. So I’m happy to announce that we’ve added support for the following services:
• deviantART
• FriendFeed
• MobyPicture
• Picasa
• SlideShare
• Soundcloud
• Wakoopa
We’re working out some OAuth quirks which may require a smaller update later this week, to give some additional ‘auto-friending’ support to the integrated services. Stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, enjoy the update and go update your cards! I already updated mine.
Thanks to iFranz.tv
Today we’re presenting E at the Next ‘09 conference in Hamburg, Germany. And what good would conferences be without product announcements? Today we introduce the latest build of the E webservice to you, codenamed Marvin. Apart from minor bugfixes supplied to us by our lovely community, we have a couple of unique features ready for you.
Today is not about hardware, but how E will behave on the web. One of our most popular features right now is the Public Card. Your Public Card is basically one of your cards you can make public, which means you get a mynameise.com/yourname url where you can list the contact information you’d like to share, as well as your social networking profiles. You can customize it by adding a HD background.
One of the most popular feature requests was to be able to connect online, not just in real life, through the Public Card. We’ve added that functionality. Whenever you visit a Public Card now, you’ll see a lovely shiny button in the top right which will allow you to send a connection request. Select one of your own cards to share, and wait for the other to accept. The receiving party can also select a different card upon receiving the connection request.
The second new feature we’re announcing is also based on the Public Card, and shows you the first moves into our upcoming API. Want to share your public card on your site or blog? You can. You’ll be able to export your public card into a widget of your preferred size. The Public Card widget comes in the sizes of small, medium, large and megatron. You can download these as Wordpress plugins, or just embed the code on your website. It will always stay up to date.
Us here at E hope you’ll enjoy these new features and perhaps you’ll be able to draw some conclusions about what kind of platform we want to be. Just a little reminder: Sharing your cards is just the beginning. We have a lot of cool stuff coming up.
We’re very happy to have won the Next Web 2009 Rising Sun Startup Rally award on Friday. It has been such an amazing week for us, and we couldn’t be more excited. We’d love to thank everybody that made our success possible. Special kudos go to the Yunoo team that were runner up in the people’s choice, well deserved for their fantastic product.
We’re very happy that we got selected out of 200 startup submissions to present on main stage at The Next Web 2009 conference in Amsterdam.
900 internet professionals from over 25 countries come to Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference. The most influential entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, corporations, developers, industry bloggers and journalist are all present at the conference.
We have a lot of things to announce, on all fronts, and we’re extremely stoked to show you our hard work. We’ll be rocking on stage, and if you are attending, don’t hesitate to come up for a chat.
