As mentioned in our previous blog post (here), we have been in the process of redesigning our logo via a contest on the site 99Designs.  The response was phenomenal and we ended up getting 769 entries during our 1 week contest!  A huge thanks to all the designers who put in the effort to submit their ideas – we were not only impressed with the quantity but with the quality of the designs as well.  With that said, there can only be one winner.

We’ve narrowed the field to 6 final designs and now we’d like to get some feedback from our community to help us determine the winner.  To let us know which one(s) is your favorite(s), just comment on this blog post – note that it’s not exactly a vote, hence we’re not using a poll.  We’d love to get quality feedback on your favorites that also includes a reason why you like them best and why they fit well for Yoono.  A couple things that should be made clear before you do:

1.  While we promise to take community feedback into account, Yoono will make the final call on the winner which may or may not be the community favorite.

2.  Yoono may or may not use the winning logo design as our new logo (we’re optimistic though!).

3.  We are planning to announce the winner Monday, May 17th so get your comments in before then!

Without further adieu, here are the finalists:

We’re finally kicking off our translation project – it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time – and we’re looking for volunteers from our large and growing community of users to help.  We’ve launched a project on Crowdin, an online tool for crowdsourcing translation projects.  If you love Yoono but would love it more in your native language we’d greatly appreciate a bit of your time to give us a hand.  Here’s what to do:

1.  Visit our project page here:  http://crowdin.net/project/yoono-translation

2.  Choose the language you’d like to translate Yoono to (we’re looking for European and Asia initially but if there’s another language you’d like to help with just let us know in the comments on this post, or request it via Crowdin here)

3.  Open the yoono.properties link and begin translating!

You’ll need to create a Crowdin account but it’s free and easy to do so.  If you have friends and fellow Yoono users who would be good candidates to help out, please let them know as well.

Yoono is a small company and your help translating definitely is appreciated by us.  But just as importantly it is an opportunity for you to take the product you love and make it more yours while at the same time benefiting tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users looking for Yoono in the same language you are.

Thanks!

The Yoono Team

Today we’ve released the first beta of Yoono 7.2, available on our Firefox Add-ons page here (look for the link in the Beta Channel section at the bottom of the description or use this direct download link).  We’re eager for you to check it out and give us your feedback.  At some point during the beta period you’ll likely see a survey to fill out and we’d appreciate it if you take the time to do that so we can make key fixes before the final release.  You can also give us feedback anytime on our support site here (please specify that you’re using the beta!).  So what’s new?

• The main new feature for 7.2 is support for YouTube!  We’ll detail the features in a later post but you can get all your updates, comment notifications, see your playlists and favorites, search YouTube and much more – right from Yoono.

• We’ve also added a few frequently requested Twitter features:  we now show your replies/mentions in your main stream, we’ve added a “Reply All” action link to Twitter updates, and we’ve added the ability to Favorite tweets.  Enjoy!

• We’ve redesigned the remove update UI (trash can is now an “X” in the upper right) and the way the “more” action link works (no longer on the bottom of the updates).

• We’ve fixed a lot of bugs as well…

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Update: Today (5/6) we’ve released an updated version of the 7.2 beta with key performance improvements – faster loading updates, switching tabs, etc, improvements to YouTube support on Mac, trending topics integration in the OneRiot search box, and of course some additional bug fixes.  Test away!

The Yoono Team

Awhile back, Google contacted us about porting our popular Firefox add-on over to Chrome as a Chrome extension (Chrome “extension” = Firefox “add-on”) and we told them we were very excited to but at the time Chrome had some limitations that made it impossible for us to do so.  Soon, more and more users started requesting a Chrome version as well.  Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our Yoono extension for Google Chrome as an alpha release (for those non-geeks out there an alpha release is an even earlier preview version of the product than a beta release)!

We’ve worked with the Chrome team to create a version that works in the Chrome environment and replicates the functionality of our Firefox version as closely as we can given some of the differences between Chrome’s extension system and Firefox’s add-on system.  A couple notes before you check it out:

• Chrome does not have support for “sidebars” in the same way that Firefox does (though they may in the future).  Given this, Yoono in Chrome has 2 modes: 1) a popped out separate Chrome window sidebar (default, shown in screenshot below) or 2) a “popped in” chrome tab mode.  Both support extra columns.  Let us know what you think (and prefer) and how this experience compares to Firefox!

• As an “alpha release”, this version of Yoono is not feature complete relative to our Firefox add-on and you will likely run into a few bugs (known and unknown!), so definitely let us know when you do on our support/feedback site here.  In our testing, we’ve found the extension to be stable and reliable.

• In particular, this release does not include any widgets besides the Friends social aggregation widget, does not have pop up alerts or a fully implemented “Share” feature yet, among other things you may notice.

• Yoono for Chrome works with the latest Chrome release, Chrome 4.1 available here, as well as Chrome 5 beta, available here .  Note that Chrome 5 supports more extension features and Yoono for Chrome will be eventually more fully featured on Chrome 5.  Update: Mac and Linux versions of Chrome have different levels of extension support vs. Windows and were not working in our first release – this is now fixed in the download linked below.  If you need to update from first release, check this thread:  http://bit.ly/cxibJK

We’re excited to get your feedback and quickly improve Yoono for Chrome.  You can download it today right here.  To install it, just open the file with Chrome or drag it into your Chrome window.  Once again, let us know if you have any feedback or run into any issues here.

Enjoy!

The Yoono Team