bubbletop news!

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

new stuffs again

hello,

so once again, we rolled-out quite a few new stuffs and we're pretty excited about them.
The 2 biggest ones in this release:

• Share from preview: you can now share directly from the preview window. Peers recommendation is really at the core of what we are doing as we believe that our peers are one of the best way to discover new things that we would actually care about. From the beginning, you can share with your contacts by dragging and dropping a piece of news or a feed to your contact. Now we added the extra cerise on the cake: you can also share a news directly from the preview window right when you're reading/watching/listening to it and you think others you know may be interested in it. You can also share with several persons at the same time.

• other exciting new feature: you can now browse your contact's profile to see what public feeds (you can choose what you put public or not when you add feeds or by clicking on the Edit box of the feed module) he is subscribing to, his public tags, as well as his contacts so that you can discover new stuffs through him/her and your extended network. Any feeds you see in other persons' subscription list that you did not know about but want to try, you can do so simply by clicking on Add. Pretty cool no?

Also in this release:

• import opml was done, now you can export opml
• since some of you people swear only by the drag and drop and some others just like the simple click to add, well we decided to enable both on our feed directory (in Gallery/Browse feeds). So now when adding a feed from our feed directory  you can choose between dragging and dropping   the feed to your page or clicking on add, so you can choose the method you fancy the most.
• also, did you know?: when browsing the feed directory or your friend's profile, you can click on the feed to get a short description of what the feed is all about.

all right, we hope you like this new release, as usual the good, the bad, the ugly, we want to hear it at support@dimsu.com

Thanks,
the bubbletop team

dimsu is gone, long live dimsu...welcome Bubbletop

dimsu is gone, long live dimsu...welcome Bubbletop

As we were saying in our previous post, as we are moving closer and closer to a public release, we are also being rebranded to Bubbletop.

More on that new name soon...

one step closer

As you may have noticed, there are quite a few new things shipped with this latest release

• general inbox, messages and sharing
  

Some of you made the comments that sometimes you could not see easily see who wanted to add you as a contact or who shared something new with you.  Now you should allways be able to see that easily, thanks to our general inbox. In there you will find all the new requests sent by other members, what's been shared with you as well as any other replies, messages sent to you by other members. 

You also told us that sometimes you saw this "shared" module on your page but it was hard to remember why it was there or who shared it with you.
You can now preview directly in your inbox what's been recommended to you without dragging and dropping it to your page. Only when you want to also subscribe to the feed that has been shared with you, only then it will be added to your page and your sources. This way you are more in control of what is display on your page, as well as what you subscribe to.

We hope you find all of this more intuitive. Let us know what you think.

• invitation process

Another improvement there is that you will only see someone in your contact list if he accepted you or you accepted him. No more pending status or interrogation point in your contact list.

To accept somebody, go to your Messages.

We hope you will find it much cleaner this way.

• bugs fix: save preference

yeah we know. That was one of your biggest et-peeves about dimsu, we sometimes totally messed-up your page's layout. We are hum very sorry about that and this is normally fixed. Play with your page's layout and let us know if you still see some bugs.

• some more fine-tuning for the performance

finally, we did some more fine-tuning on the performance's side, like some much needed caching. Hope you can feel the difference!

There is still much more to come, some I am pretty excited about like sharing directly from the preview or finally doing something useful with someone's profile. Don't you wish you could see more about your friend's preferences?

As we are also approaching the public beta, we should get a brand new name as well, a more Orange-friendly one. So very soon, you should see a new logo and be redirected to a new url.
We will keep you posted.

In any case, thanks a lot for your support, and do continue to give us your feedback at support@dimsu.com,

Thanks!

the dimsu team

at lunch

In case you were all dying to know who we all were, we're sharing with you a little Kodak moment we had last Friday. 

David, our developer from  France  with us for 2 weeks, so we all went out for lunch on Friday.

This was the occasion for the Kodak moment and we thought that it would also not be a bad time to introduce the team developing dimsu.

 

So without further due, here we are, starting from far right:
At the far right is Wencheng, our lead developer for dimsu. He has been working on it from its inception end 2005 and is right now overviewing the whole technical development as well as actively developing the platform's side.

Next is Tom, Tom joined us in February 07, so a pretty new member, he's been working on the front-end side and is also behind a lot of the performance's improvements you can hopefully feel by now. Tom has also been the first true native English speaker in our team, so he also has been giving us  some much needed  English lesson.

At his side, is Ben Metcalfe who joined us end of March 07. Ben is British brings us his past experience in opening up BBC to the developers. He is also a blogger and a passionate supporter of open-source, APIs and user-centric applications. He is helping us in developing the right platform for our developers, and will be our community evangelist, bringing us the developer's perspective and making sure we have this developer's best interest at the core of what we are building. Incidentally, Ben has alos been the second native English speaker to join our team (although Ben and Tom speaks nothing like each other). Side's activities of Ben include: insights into British humor, introduction to East England slang and daily rants on various topics. Sometimes we have absolutely no clue of what he is saying, but still pretty fun.

Next on the front right we have Sundar. Sundar is working on the back-end side both on the feed aggregation as well as in developing all kind of cool APIs. He has been the third person to join our team in August 06.

Continuing on the left side, on the front left is Venkat. Venkat joined in January 07 and is working on the back-end side together with Sundar, he is also responsible for the Firefox extension that allows you to easily import new content into dimsu painlessly without the copy/paste of the feed url.

Next is Kavitha. Kavitha joined in March 07 and is providing much needed support in terms of testing the service and discovering the big bugs before you may notice them. We still let some slip through but trust us much less than if she weren't there.

Then, next is Virginie. Virginie has been working on dimsu since beginning 06. She is running the dimsu project, also trying to bring the user's perspective in our sometime heated debates about what's best for dimsu. Incidentally, Virginie is also becoming an expert in delivery and take-out for the 94080 zip code  (where our offices are). Any questions on the best Tai or the worst chinese for late deliveries in South San Francisco, she can answer.

Finally, last one but not the least, on the far left side is David. David works on the front-end side and for instance you can thank him for the brand new look. He normally sits in Paris but it was not too hard to convince him to spend 2 weeks with us in beautiful San Francisco (okay our offices are in South San Francisco, so technically speaking, next to beautiful San Francisco, but still we are very close to beautiful San Francisco, so enough of a draw to get him here).

There, here we are. So the next time you sent us some feedback, you can picture us better.
It has been quite a journey from being a team of 2 pitching our ideas back in July 06 to NExT.com, our Orange's marketing sponsors, to now all actively working on our public release.

Your feedback and goodwill for our service all along the way has been great and we hope you continue to support us in this next phase.

Thanks!

The dimsu team