bubbletop news!

and the competition is on!!!

All details over there.
Sydney, Melbourne, the great barrier reef, the gold coast...sounds like something you would like to see? well, then you may want to participate, first price is a trip to Australia!
So widget developers to your keyboard....and bubbletop users: you have a role to play, visit the widget gallery (Add content/browse gallery) and install the latest widgets on your webtop. If you like the widgets you added, rate them (click on edit) and use them... Popularity and rating will play an important role in determining which one the widgets will ultimately win!

and we are live! :)

a little message to tell you, that yes, we are finally live! Woo-hoo!

Thank you all alpha testers for your very crucial feedback in the past 6 months, it has been critical in making bubbletop better...well, we hope you find it better, we certainly do and appreciate your help in the matter :)
Still a few lolcats in the system and tons of new ideas for 2008, but we're getting there so why not opening our doors?
We are very excited about this new phase and about welcoming new users.
Please keep sending us feedback and let us know what you think.

As it is the holidays season, we could not resist another surprise: we are also now on the iPhone.
If you are the lucky owner of an iPhone, you can go to www.bubbletop.com/iPhone
In this first version, you will find back your tabs, your feed modules. You will be able to read your news and share them with your bubbletop friends. If you have a YouTube module, you will be able to view the videos straight into the iPhone YouTube player.

There will be much more in 2008 on the mobile side, so stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, we wish you very very happy holidays,

the bubbletop team

recommend to the world: create your own public page on bubbletop

Discovery though your peers has always been at the center of what bubbletop is about ,as we believe that in this world of information overload, our friends and affinity group are an excellent filter to the surrounding noise and one of our best discovery tool.

 

With bubbletop, you were able to share with your friends and also to discover through your social network public feeds, now you can go further and create your own public page to display your latest sources of interest, an article that picked your brain or your latest rants and raves...

Easily create your public page from what you read, watch, listen, view on bubbletop and let everybody know what you think of it. Share this page through the world through your unique url: your username.bubbletop.com

 

In our first release of this new feature you will be able to:

o publish a module that interests you: a feed, a search module, a tag module (soon a widget)

o publish a news or an item that interests you directly from the reading pane

o you may add a comment to all what you publish, if you so wish, to explain why it is of interest to you. Other bubbletop users will also be able to comment on what you share with them.

o Finally, you can also post your latest rants or raves through our "new post" widget, you can embed a picture or a video in there if you wish

 

Want to see a preview of how this whole thing works? Watch it here.

- soon to come, here is a short list of new features we will bring to you in a near future:

o Publish your favorite widgets -> which widgets do you most use? Would you like to put some of them on your public page? Soon, you'll be able to.

o A guestbook -> people can already leave comments on your posts, soon they will also be able to leave some trace on your page.

o Your blogroll -> want to publish your whole list of public feeds? Soon you'll be able to do that as well

o Subscribe to somebody's Page -> want to keep trace of somebody? Soon, you'll be able to subscribe to somebody's page and to be notified of their latest posts or recommendations.

o The community page -> the place where you will be find other bubbletop users' public page

Invite all you want!

Hey there,

we have a new release with some pretty cool stuff in there:

• first, yay! for our Spanish and Polish friends out there, you can now experience bubbletop in your own mother tongue... enjoy!

• then, to further customize your experience, you can now upload your own wallpaper or choose your own color to personalize your page's background

• popular keywords: we greatly improved our keyword extraction system so that now it can bring some meanings to the feeds you're aggregating. Go to my sources, then look at your popular keywords, this should give you a snapshot of what's hot right now in the feeds you're aggregating. Drag and drop one of these keywords to your page to see what the fuss is all about.

• we also fixed a very ugly bug. Our problem with feed updates -> gone! Old content is now a problem of the past and you will now get up-to-date content allways!

• thank you for your positive feedback on our work on the performance, we continued in this release, you should see even better results now

• all of this leads us to this: you are now free to invite all you want! We feel that with your feedback, we've made much progress and therefore we are ready to welcome more people in our community. So don't be shy, invite, bubbletop is way more fun when sharing and discovering through people you care about.

Enjoy this new release and let us know what you think at support@bubbletop.com

Thanks,

the bubbletop team

parlez-vous francais?

Yes, you do?

Well, that's good because we just released a French version of Bubbletop, but then again, that's not real news from some of you clever people that were able to tweak our url to see the French support since our last release:)

More languages will be supported very soon.

Also in this release:

• new design: we modified our design based on your feedback, now you will see lighter corners, lighter colors and less space between the modules. Let us know how you feel about these changes, we love them!

little trick for you avid customizers: in the edit panel of your feed module, double click on the color you want and the whole module will be in that color, not just the corners :)

Final note on the new design, you can also now change the color of your widgets.

• share with a non Bubbletop user: this has also been a feature you've been asking for. You can now share a news with a friend not on Bubbletop via email. From the reading window, click on share then enter your friend's email address in the input box provided.

 

• see your widget in development in your Bubbletop environment: this one is for you widget developers. You can now see and test the widgets you are working on directly in the Bubbletop environment. Go to "my profile" , select "show widgets development interface", you will see in a new section in your control panel. Upload your widgets there, test it and once ready submit it to the team.

• performance!!: finally but not the least, we've been doing some major tweaking and hope you're seing the results. More tweaking scheduled for next month so we did not say our last words on this topic.

As usual, please let us know how we did at support@bubbletop.com

Thank you,
the bubbletop team

coming back soon!

Hello,

If you are here, chance is that you noticed: we are doing some major major tweaking to our system so we're going to be down for the next 11 hours (we went down at 08:00pm PST time).
However come back to give us your feedback on this new release...we've been listening and we hope that it will show!
   
Thanks and see you soon on bubbletop!

the bubbletop team

invitations and new release

We've been living quite a few exciting moments lately.

First, we are slowly opening to the public.

We invited a good number of persons who expressed interest in testing Bubbletop to get a sneak peek to our service and to get their feedback. And feedback we've got! It's been great to see what's working and what's not working so much, and you will see that we already started making some changes accordingly in this new release.

You can now invite: you now have 5 invitations that you are very welcome to use to invite your friends in. Bubbletop is more fun when you have stuff to share with your friends and to receive from them.

We will be continuing inviting slowly the persons who registered to test our service at our sign-up page, so if you've not been invited yet: patience, your turn should come soon :)

Our new release:

• bug fixes: we shipped a few in this new release, one of the most visible one that many have been reported us is the problem of accents not passing in the messages, it is now fixed and you will not see this anymore
• privacy: when we started working on the profile, we were in our small bubbletop committee and being able to see the e-mails of our contacts was not a problem for us, but you told us and quite so, that you were not comfortable to share this information with all of your Bubbletop contacts, some of them with whom you did not share such a strong tie to be able to see that, therefore your contacts can now just see your screen name and first name.
• wallpapers: you can now choose between a number of wallpapers that we borrow from a sister's project: Soundtribes. Thank you Soundtribes! More wallpapers soon. For this occasion, David quite improved the look and feel of our customize panel, so hope you like it.

That's it for now, more coming soon. Please continue to feed your thoughts back to us at support@bubbletop.com

Thanks!
the bubbletop team

how would you like yours?

Hello,

so we shipped quite a few things in this new release and we hope you will find them to your liking:

• enough of the Grey... what about Orange? you now have some choice of themes to apply to your Bubbletop or to one single module. 6 themes for now, much more to come soon

• free your page!: we heard you loud and clear, you can now hide the control panel if you want, so you have more reading space

• free your player!: now you can move our podcast player out of the preview window, so you can go browse elsewhere on Bubbletop while still listening to your music or talk show

That's all for now, but more very soon as we are approaching little by little our public release!

Thanks for being part of the adventure and for your feedback, continue to let us know how we are doing, stuff we're missing, stuff you love (we like these kind of feedbacks too :-) at support@bubbletop.com

Thanks,

--The Bubbletop Team

New release

Hello,

so there are quite a number of new things in this latest release:

• read/unread: we finally did it! This was the single most requested feature, and very rightly so: you can now easily distinguish what you read from what you did not read yet.
• friends' tags: Click on one person's public tag and it will display the feeds she tagged with that keyword. Another step towards easy recommendation for new feeds, we hope you will enjoy it. (Tip: you can add tags to your feed by clicking on the Edit Option of your feed module)
• the foundry: many of you were asking about it: our widget platform is slowly opening for business! Go check it out there.

• We are very excited to see what widgets you're going to bring, so let your imagination run wild, we want to see the results! It's our first iteration of the platform and the documentation, and Wencheng and Ben are very much looking forward for your feedback. You can tell them what you think at foundry@bubbletop.com.
• Getting a facial: This widget platform is the reason why the widgets we had are momentarily gone. They're getting a facial at the foundry and will be back better looking than ever very soon.

We hope you will enjoy this release, as usual, feedback/comments, we want to hear them at support@bubbletop.com

Yours truly,
the bubbletop team

Bubbletop at Orange Partner Camp

Patrice Slupowski, our Marketing lead in Orange, Wencheng Li, our lead dev, as well as Satya Mallya, director Personal Sphere of Orange Lab San Francisco, showed a sneak-peek of Bubbletop at Orange Partner Camp, in Florida.
The goal was to sensibilize our partners of what is coming soon and to give a preview of the tools we will have for developers.
The presentation was warmly received and sparked quite some interest.
Developers' involvement will be crucial to the richness of our service and we think we have quite a few things to offer them...so stay tuned, more on this soon!

Thanks,
The Bubbletop team