Yoono Community

One in a series of ongoing posts that feature video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use.

One common point of feedback we get on our sidebar add-on version is that some users don’t want to have the sidebar open and constraining their viewing area for web content.  We get it – sometimes we feel the same way, especially on our laptop screens for example.  Yoono is very easy to minimize and you still are notified when new updates come in – check it out:

For a long time we didn’t have spell check.  Users frequently requested it.  And misspelled stuff.  We added it.  That was easy, no?  Simply right click on a word that you spelled incorrectly and you’re given a a few options of the correct spelling – check out this screencast:

When we released Yoono 7, we took a new approach to how you are notified of a new update, IM, or message from your friends. Even the pop-up notifications have been revamped both technically and visually to allow for better performance, readability and usability over the notification window in version 6.2. Since releasing Yoono 7, there are a few users that don’t like the update numbers and how they continually go up and up, finally reaching 999+ unread updates. I’m going to write this blog post about the changes we made in Yoono 7 but I’ll be showing you screenshots and writing this using Yoono 7.1 (currently in public beta) as we’ve improved the UI a bit to make managing the update count and display a bit easier.

Yoono 7.1 makes it easy to mark updates as read, clear them from view and increase the size of text for better readability. We’ve also introduced multi-column view so you can view updates from many networks across multiple columns without switching tabs in Yoono for various networks.

If you have a question or piece of feedback, please connect with us at http://support.yoono.com so we can use your valuable feedback to improve our product. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Let’s start by discussing the UI of Yoono 7.1 and how it displays unread updates.

As you can see from the image above, each network has an icon. Twitter accounts (I have 5 of them) are signified with a small Twitter icon in the bottom left hand corner. Facebook, Flickr, AIM and other networks are pretty easy to see because their icons are recognizable.

Red Numbers: Signify unread updates. These can be updates from friends, photo uploads, new IM conversations, Twitter replies, DMs and Facebook messages. All has the number 567 and that’s calculated based on the unread updates from all networks combined.

Blue Numbers: Signify search results. Blue is tied to Twitter search results. In Yoono, you can search Twitter and save those search results so Yoono will search and show you a number of new updates. For example, I have the Twitter account for Yoono set to search “yoono” on Twitter and there are 9 new mentions of our application since the last time I refreshed.

We don’t count higher than 999 updates given the limited space available in our sidebar’s interface. When any one of the networks reaches 999 unread updates, the number will go no higher. How do you “read” updates to reduce the count signified in the red boxed text? It’s pretty easy.

As you can see in the image below, unread updates are “yellow”

After 3 seconds of sitting on this current screen, those updates will fade from yellow to white and the unread count will drop since those have been read. Of course, having 900 of these will take a while and we don’t expect you to scroll all day to mark all of these as read. Yoono 7 and Yoono 7.1 are pretty similar in how you mark all as read or clear all updates from view but we’ve improved the UI a bit in the latest version.

In Yoono 7, simply right click on any of the tabs that show unread updates and click “mark all as read” The red numbers go away and the yellow updates all become white. Below, is how you do it in Yoono 7.1

All Tab:

As you can see, I can mark all as read or remove all from this list. Marking all as read clears the yellow highlight on all updates in all tabs and removes the red numbers.  On a related note, you’ll see that you can now filter the view to show you only unread (select “All unread updates”) so you can skip things you’ve already read and focus on new items.

If you simply want to mark all as read on a single network, that’s possible as well. Take Facebook for example. The drop down arrow shows up on the “Updates” tab, messages tab and notifications tab depending on which one is selected. We make it easy to fine tune what you mark as read.

Note that when you select “mark all as read” for the updates stream it doesn’t always mark all network features as read – we’ve done this on purpose to make sure you see important items like Twitter Direct Messages.  After clicking mark all as read on all networks, see before and after screen shots:

Before:

After:

Notice that there are still a few unread notifications. By marking all as read, Twitter replies & DMs are not marked. We consider these important enough to not be marked as read because these are updates directed at you specifically and not updates from your friends that are going to everyone generally. The same rule applies if you have any Facebook messages that are unread. Also notice that the search result that I have saved under the Yoono Twitter account is still showing 9 new updates. We also feel saved search results should be prioritized to show as “unread” even after you click mark all as read.

Overall, we hope this approach meets the needs of our users and it’s been implemented this way as the result of direct user feedback.

You can also “remove all from this list” which will clear all of the updates from the list. It’s pretty self explanatory.

Before:

After:

As you can see, all of the updates (aside from replies and search results) have been removed from view and in the all tab, it shows “You have new new updates!” This is a great way to start clean with a simple view free of any updates. If you want to remove a single update or notification, you can now hover over an update and a trash can icon appears in the lower right. (shown below).

Clicking the trash can removes that update. Remember, the update will still be on Twitter.com or whichever service it came from, you’re just telling Yoono to hide it from view.

Finally, on a semi-related note, Yoono has a new feature that enables you to tweak the size of text in Yoono so that you can make the updates stream font size best suit your individual needs.  We’ve had a lot of feedback on this point and are happy to finally be able to provide this functionality to our users!

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These are a few of the ways to help you manage notifications and unread messages better in Yoono. We’ve made great strides in the past few months that makes it easier to find updates, manage updates and stay up to date with your social circle without the headache or being overwhelmed by information overload. As always, we welcome feedback and comments!

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days.

In today’s Yoono Tips post, we cover an advanced tip that allows you to show or hide someone’s updates quickly and easily. If you have a friend who you don’t want to unfollow or unfriend but who you’d rather not see updates from, simply hide them for a bit (you can easily unhide them as well). This comes in handy on days when someone is at an event or simply updating way too much.

You can take this one step further by actually hiding Facebook application updates that sometimes show up in the stream of updates. I’m sure you’ve seen Mafia Wars updates a few too many times on Facebook and within Yoono (who hasn’t??).   Time to hide those forever.

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days.

Today, we’d like to talk about sharing and how easy it is to share rich media with friends across your favorite social networks. For starters, let’s talk about sharing images with your friends. In Yoono 7, we make this even easier and we’ve also added a new photo sharing site, YFrog.

First up, let’s talk about YFrog:

As a follow up, here’s a more advanced video that shows how to share links to friends in only 2 clicks.  Yoono will automatically insert a shortened bit.ly URL of the page you’re looking at when you double click on the share icon in the status box.

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days.

This post covers a Twitter basic – staying on top of your mentions and direct messages, and a quick way to optimize Yoono for netbooks or other machines with small screen real estate.

Our first video shows how Yoono 7 makes it easy to never miss a direct message or mention on Twitter ever again.  One of the consistent points of feedback we get from new users is how they have always missed or not even been aware of mentions or direct messages in Twitter until they started using Yoono.  These are great features of the Twitter platform that are of course only great if you know about them!

Up next we have a quick video to optimize Yoono for use with a netbook. Check it out.

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days.

In today’s post, we will show a few more tidbits about Twitter. The first is an advanced tip about searching your updates stream and the second is a  basic tip on previewing images in your stream.  Have a suggestion or question for a tip? Let us know in the comments.

First up we have a video that explores the ability to do a full text search across updates on all networks that are added to Yoono.  Yoono stores up to 25,000 of your recent updates (on your computer, not on our servers) and let’s you search them instantly.  Trying to find that tweet from a friend?  Want to know what your network is saying about Tiger Woods?  Now you can with our search capability.

Our second video in this post shows how you can easily preview images that are shared out by your friends via Twitter or your other networks.  Just hover over the image and get an expanded view in an overlay on your browser window (without navigating away from the page you are on).  Very handy!

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days. Today, we take Twitter a step further with two more great tips! Let’s take a look at how you can translate tweets and view Twitter conversation threads via Yoono. In Yoono 7, you can translate a tweet with two clicks!  This can come in handy if for example you’re following a particular search keyword with the Twitter saved search feature and are getting results in foreign languages.  Check it out: You can also track conversations in Twitter simply by clicking “more” under any tweet.  If there is a series of replies to the tweet, you will see them in the expanded view.

We’ve created a series of video clips that will help make Yoono easier to use. Our team has put together these quick screencasts as a way to make everyone a Yoono Power-User. Expect more of these videos every few days.

In today’s series, we take a look at Twitter and how Yoono 7 has become the best always-on Twitter client available. We’re going to start with the basics and slowly move forward to more advanced tips.

Yoono lets you reply to tweets directly from the update itself, making it quick and easy to communicate with your Twitter friends in real-time.  Here’s how to reply to a tweet with Yoono:

Yoono 7 supports the new Twitter retweet design so you can retweet with one click.  Retweets will also be displayed in your timeline the same way they appear on Twitter.com with a retweet icon next to them.  Here’s how to retweet in Yoono:

For more updates and news about Yoono, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.

Here at Yoono, we aim to improve and make our products easier to use with every new release. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone can be an instant expert from the moment they start using Yoono. With that in mind, we’ve created a few screencasts to help new users get started.

The following screencast explains how Yoono can be used to manage your instant messaging conversations across multiple IM services. We currently support MSN Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and Gtalk. For today’s video, we highlight how to use AIM to chat with friends, share things and a know when a new instant message has been received.  Have requests for certain features to be explained this way? Let us know!

Our first Screencasts were posted on this blog post.