Add-on Conference takes place on December 11th in Mountain View, CA and focuses on the ever growing and constantly changing atmosphere of web browsers and the add-ons that extend their functionality. This is a great time in the add-on sphere. Mozilla just announced that 1 billion add-ons have been downloaded for Firefox from their add-on website. Internet Explorer 8 is just around the corner and Google just released their Chrome browser in public beta.
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Add-on Con will focus on this emerging market, “Organized by members of the Add-on community, the one day conference brings together platform vendors, developers and marketers, with the goal of facilitating communication, and sharing knowledge.”
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Click the button below to check out the full schedule of speakers and register. Using the code yoono at checkout will equal 1/3 off the regular ticket price.
We’re reaching out to our community to help us make Yoono even better. The contest is coming out this week and you wil have a chance to help us out, see your work in the the next Yoono update and win some OMG awesome prizes!
Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, released Fashion Your Firefox. This site contains various sections of add-ons bundled together and is a way that appeals to different audiences.
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Stan Schroeder of Mashable calls it, “It’s a simple directory that organizes some of the best add-ons for Firefox in several easily understandable categories.”
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Personally, I love the idea of bundles and this appeals to users who don’t know what bundles are or don’t feel like navigating add-ons to find one that works for them. Yoono is excited to be a part of Mozilla’s new initiative.
Mozilla included Yoono in the Social Butterfly section. The description is, “Social Butterfly: Share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via an array of social networking & bookmarking sites”
Over the summer, we teamed up with Mashable and embarked on a summer tour across the US to 7 cities. In each city we took photos in front of the Yoono / Mashable backdropp and showcased each city on our website. Winners were chosen from each city and received a Chumby. Chumbys are small entertainment system that are a lot of fun. We’re pleased to announce these winners.
This past Thursday (the 6th) we held our 3rd Tweets and Dreenks here in San Francisco. The party drinkup and party tweetup was more intimate than our last affair at House of Shields. This time, we moved it to Mars Bar on 7th street and all of the drink tickets were gone by the end of the night. Our co-sponsor, CrossLoop was there as well. Thanks everyone for coming out.
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I hope we can do a December Tweets and Dreenks but it may be postponed until January due to another social event we’re doing in December. Stay tuned!
Over the weekend, the latest version of Yoono was released. This is the version that has an enhanced UI among other enhancements that help improve the speed of Yoono with less impact on your computer’s resources.
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Last week, I posted about some changes to Yoono. The three main highlights were a brand new UI, a shopping widget and a version of Yoono for Internet Explorer. The shopping widget and Internet Explorer sidebar are right around the corner but the latest public release provides a solution for feedback we’ve received since launching the public beta in May.
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1. UI Improvements: The friends widget is extremely simple for new and long time users.
2. We’ve added 4 skins that are available in the “add widget” toolbox of Yoono. Now you can customize the look & feel of Yoono. More skins are coming soon!
3. Yoono’s requirements for system resources has been dramatically reduced to allow for Yoono and the rest of your computer to run at peak performance. We received feedback from some users that Yoono was slowing down their computer and this release fixes that.
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Another great achievement of this release is that version 5.1 is no longer considered a beta. Yoono is no longer in public beta so that’s big news for us! We hope you’ll head over to Mozilla and download the new version. It’s an update that every user should be using. Thanks for your support and feedback. Keep it coming! Download Yoono 5.1
I attended SalesForce.com’s DreamForce conference this week in San Francisco and thoroughly enjoyed the keynotes delivered by Michael Dell of Dell, Sheryl Sandberg of FaceBook and more. These companies are truly innovating and they’re doing it but spending less money on R&D. Their formula is listening. They’ve taken a step back, looked at their enormous customer base and turned that base into their R&D, Marketing, Sales and Management teams. The great thing about these new employees is that they cost nothing to employ.
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Michael Dell showed a video of how their choice to integrate a backlit keyboard was submitted in to Ideastorm (their community collaboration portal). I believe it was a borrowed idea from Apple but I’ll give Michael credit for this one. Ideastorm is a site where users can submit ideas, those ideas can be voted upon and commented and then Dell can respond. There are statuses like, “in production” or “implemented” to show the community that Dell is actually doing something about it. Dell also has an amazing set of blogs, is using Twitter and has a community forum that allows customers to talk to the company.
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It’s pretty amazing stuff and I think Dell’s choice to do this is what will keep the company ticking while their large corporate customers cut costs. Yoono is doing this as well. We don’t have a portal for our millions of customers to talk back to us but there are some ways that you can reach out to Yoono.
We’re a small company with a lot of users and I feel that this is a good system for now. Any other ideas to help us listen to customers; just sound off in the comments.
I’m sure many of you remember the Yoono Orgami that I posted back in September. Well, one of our Yoono SF team members made an awesome Yoono Pumpkin in celebration of Halloween! Guillaume did an amazing job!
Last night here in America, we spoke and elected our next president. That president was Barrack Obama. Both candidates for the position had been campaigning for nearly 2 years and they both used social media to rally the forces but did it actually make a difference?
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Let’s be honest. The vast marjority of social media users are members of the 18-27 year old crowd. These users are vocal, transparent and honest with their online personas and they lifestream a lot of their life moments to the web. The users are well connected, always asking “why?” and vocal about their choices. Every election, the presidential candidates do a bit more to reach out to the Internet population for their vote but those efforts fail because most of the youth in my age group don’t actually take the time to vote.
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There were a few blogs and websites that had polls and nearly every user on Twitter that tweeted who they would vote for, typed the words “obama” on their keyboard. Barrack Obabma had succeeded in wooing the Internet populus but what was he going to do with it? Obama’s campaign had a game plan.
1. Raise awareness
2. Educate voters
3. Increase volunteers
4. Raise donations
5. Win the election
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How were they going to do this? What was the game plan for actually winning an election by spending millions on the Internet generation? Barrack Obama made a point to cover net neutrality, populated his Twitter stream and YouTube channel with exclusive and personal content and the campaign operated an extremely relevant blog. If you’re a young person and you’re trying to figure out which candidate you’d like to vote for, a simple check of the two candidates’ MySpace, Twitter and YouTube content would give you everything you’d need. Obama was clearly the winner based on Internet buzz and now it was time to capitalize on it.
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I received emails from Obama asking me to volunteer, make phone calls and donate. Friends were calling me using the Barrack Obama iPhone app and young people were knocking on doors and holding up signs in downtown San Francisco urging people to vote for the candidate. The buzz around McCain’s campaign was linked to Sarah Palin and most of the talk about his actual plans for our economy were discussed at home around the dinner table and not on the web. The web became Obama’s playing field and he used every outlet. Even last night, when the Obama won the presidency, I received another message from him thanking me for my support and that he would be contacting me very soon for more change.
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This shows that Obama as a president is going to be the first leader to leverage social media to raise awareness for high profile bills, issues that matter and other grassroots campaigns to “write your congressman” in relation to various laws that are being voted on. I can see Obama’s blog, Twitter account and Facebook group to become his way, as president to reach out to young people who no longer tune in to CNN or read The New York Times. This is a new era in our government and country and this connected president is making me feel like I’m a part of the goverment and not a citizen looking in the window.
You may have seen the headlines that we’re launching an update to the wildly popular sidebar. Our press release is in the wild but I’d like to review our announcements on this blog from a user’s perspective.
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The shopping widget is my favorite new feature. Many users don’t know this but Yoono started as a recommendation tool that would recommend websites similar to the one you’re currently browsing. At this time, Yoono is offering millions of recommendations to our users every day. The recommendations really make the web a lot more fun. My favorite tech forum is Sharky Forums and the recommendation tool gave me two other sites that are similar. That’s really cool! The technology behind the recommendation engine is being applied to our new shopping widget. It’s the easiest and most convenient way to save money when you’re shopping and it’s totally unobtrusive. When I am browsing Canon SLRs on Amazon, the shopping widget is there to show me that the same camera is available with a $100 off coupon at Buy.com. It’s incredibly easy to use and will be a perfect compliment to the holiday shopping season. Oh and we also added some “social shopping” features that enable you to share that link wit friends and family so making a Christmas shopping list for Mom is going to be really easy.
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The feature I use the most is the friends widget. It enables me to easily stay connected with everyone across a multitude of social networks and I never have to browse all over the place to always stay in touch. Of course, we needed to work on the usability and features of this and I’m incredibly excited to announce some big changes. First of all, we added MySpace and imeem to the friends widget. Then we made Facebook integration so much better. Finally, we simplified the interface, built in an awesome filtering tool so you can see updates from a specific friend and added some status lights that show which networks you’re connected to. Yoono is now the hub of your social lifestyle. You can also chat with friends via AIM, MSN, Y! and GTalk but that feature was already there.
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Another widget that I always have open is the music widget. It saw some improvements as well. We already had the music widget configured to connect with Last.FM and stream music but now you can stream music from imeem as well. The imeem widget is a fantastic extension of the music service and brings it to your browser whether you’re on the site or not.
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One final announcement that really should have its own blog post is that we’re releasing a version of our sidebar for Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s web browser still has the majority market share and we want those users to feel connected as well. Yoono has put a lot of muscle behind the development and created a version that works beautifully in IE. I know a lot of the readers of this blog use Firefox but there are so many millions of users that want to use Yoono and simply can’t because they’re in IE. This update is going to expand our market and help everyone be more social and we’re so happy to have it out the door.
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I’d be happy to demo this for you and we can chat for an over the web demo. My email is ajackson@yoono.com and I’m @yoono on Twitter
