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 »

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!

We’ve been releasing new waves of services integration since our public softlaunch in April, and we thought it’d be time to elaborate on how we approach the integration of services to add to your cards. To start, let me explain the three levels of integration E supports:

Level 1 – OAuth Integration

We are solid advocates of the OAuth platform, and apply this protocol throughout the whole web service. This standard allows users to integrate their service accounts with E without storing usernames or passwords. By granting E access within a service (if the user is logged in), no longer will they need to provide us with sensitive information. Integration through OAuth is our preferred method of adding services, since it allows ‘automatic friending’ in most cases.

Level 2 – Encrypted Integration

Many services don’t support OAuth yet, or restrict OAuth access. The second tier of integration stores the user’s username and password of the service in the E database. We encrypt this data and don’t perform any actions without the user’s direct consent. Although this method allows for ‘automatic friending’ to take place, we highly suggest integration through OAuth instead.

Level 3 – Linked Integration

Some services don’t support ‘automatic friending’. Not through OAuth, not through encrypted integration. The third tier of integration allows users to supply E with their public profile on a selected service. This way, the service does get listed, but no direct connection is established. Integration usually takes place by letting the user specify their username or public profile URL of a designated service.

If you have a service you want to have integrated with E, or have suggestions about what services to add in the next wave of service updates: please leave us suggestions at our Get Satisfaction or email directly to services [at] mynameise [dot] com

Today’s update is all about fellow startups, more microblogging and gorgeous designer portfolios. We’re announcing support for the Behance network, Plurk, Tupalo and Foursquare!

The Behance Network is a gorgeous collection of portfolios by designers, illustrators, typographers, artists and more. Check out the gorgeous work by Momkai for example. Starting today professional creatives can add their Behance portfolio to their cards.

Plurk is a social journal for your life. We already have Twitter integration, and as we’re open to all, Plurk fits in just as well. Add your horizontal lifestream to your cards now!

Tupalo is a social yellow pages community from Vienna. The guys from Tupalo contacted us directly about integrating Tupalo with E, and we couldn’t respond without giving them some fellow startup-loving. Plus, we’re Eurotrash ourselves, so we just couldn’t refuse especially since they’re also launching support for the Netherlands. Go add Tupalo to your cards now!

Last but not least, Foursquare. This booming company founded by Naveen and Dennis from Dodgeball is getting awesome traction, and I just can’t deny that we’re big fans of Foursquare at E HQ. If you’re not familiar with Foursquare: it’s a location-based game/social network around venues and going out. A service built around pure fun. So after you finish your business meetings with E card transactions, go out and do some Foursquaring.

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.

Time for a short update on the development front. iPhone app is coming along nicely, those of you who are waiting: You might have read that Apple sent an email to all developers about 3.0 compatibility. We’re at that point right now. There have been many questions about how the device connectivity will work: iPhone to iPhone card exchanging will support the ‘flick’ gesture, but the app will support connecting with other phones as well through the m/i.mynameise.com method.

A small and funny detail: E recognises your gender now. You have to specify your gender in E/Settings/Account though, before the Trail messages correspond to you being a boy or a girl. No longer will your connections think you’ve undergone drastic surgical procedures.

We’ve had some troubles with the Hyves OAuth connection, but have managed to solve this fast and properly. If you’ve encountered problems, try to share another card and the automatic friending should take place regardless.

The aftermath of the Next ‘09 conference has led to many cool new things coming up. In the meantime, check out the keynote presentation on Empressr, Slideshare or Vimeo.

Last but not least, our Widgets have been a real popular feature since our last update, so we’re making sure they’ll work on all platforms. We’re working hard to get everything ready for you. If you want to support E, please point to your public profile on your social networks, Twitter bios, etc. Oh, and join our Facebook group!

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.

Enjoy these bits of the new E UI in the regular web browser!

Read the rest of this entry »

While we’re working hard on bringing you masses of Connectors, here’s an update on the service.

As you all know, our next big release will be called Adam Link and will feature many improvements over our current closed beta release, Tin Man. Apart from a massive UI overhaul and an improved and logical flow, you can expect the following updates:

New and improved Trail:
Get updates and more information from your contacts.

Notes:
Add notes after you’ve exchanged contact information.

More services:
We’ve added a lot of new services to the list and have found nice solutions to the problem of closed APIs. You can even expect to share Wii, Xbox and PS3 gamertags with E.

Better phone support:
More on this very soon!

All the other features we’re adding are still top secret, but you won’t have to hold on for much longer. If you want to be the first to see the new release, sign up for the Beta if you haven’t already!