bubbletop news!

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

 

Yes...

Yes, that's right, that's a slightly different dimsu you're looking at right now.

This is a tiny step towards our full re-design for our beta launch, we are pretty excited at the changes coming next, so stay tuned!

Also, you may have noticed (actually we hope you noticed!), we've been working a lot lately on the performance side and all of this work is been presenting to you in this release. So enjoy!

As usual, we very much look forward to you comments. Tell us what you think, the good, the bad, the ugly at support@dimsu.com.

Thanks,
The dimsu team

New things for you

Hello fellow dimsuers,

so once again, we are very excited to present you with our latest release. Hope you find it tasty and are awaiting your feedback with impatience.
So what's new?

Our first tool to make your import of feeds easier

 

                             

You have been numerous to ask it, and there you have it: our very first Dimsu Hook that allow you to import a site of interest to Dimsu provided that that site has feeds. You can now import several feeds at a time without having to copy/paste the feed url. Please go to Tools and install it on your browser (ok small not so small details but today only available for Firefox users, actually we encourage you to give Firefox a try, it is a really cool browser)
Hope you like our little hook!!

Public/private, Tagging, Rating, Feed Directory

Personalized homepages are nice to aggregate all your stuffs in one place. But there are so many interesting things out there. How do you do to make sure you know about them?

This is why we believe that the ability to instantly share with your friends is so important. Our peers are one of our most important way to discover new content and services that will interest us.

We went further and added this concept of public/private to leverage the dimsu community in helping each other finding new stuffs of interest.

When adding a feed manually or through our hook, you can choose to make it public and add tags. By making it public, this feed is added to our Feed Directory, in which case anybody looking for potentially something like this feed would be able to benefit from you and discover this new source.

You can now go into our gallery, in the feed directory and in there you will find all the feeds added by the Dimsu community and browse based on your unique interest.

For all the feeds you added, you can give them a note by clicking on edit in your module. This note will be aggregated, this way all Dimsu users will be able to browse feeds by rating.

We think all of these will make it easier for anybody to discover new stuffs of interest to them thanks to the amazingly diverse interests the Dimsu community brings to the table.

My Tags

We offer you several ways to manage and view your content: feed module, search watchlist and popular tags we extract from the feeds you subscribing to.

 

Now, we give you an additional way: in My Tags section, you will not only find the popular tags we extract from your feeds, but also the keywords you associate with the feed you're subscribing to (you can do that when you add a feed or when you edit your feed module).

What it allows you to do is seeing all the content from all the feeds you tagged with one particular keyword in one single module that will refresh itself automatically.

Simply drag and drop the tag that interests you on your webtop and that's it!

Improved Design

This is really the start of the work on the design and you can expect much more sometime in the next 2 months, but already we feel that there are some improvements here, hope you like the new look and feel.

 

That's it for now, more soon….

Let us know what you think, any bugs we missed (oups), things you don't like, things you love…at support@dimsu.com

Thanks!

The Dimsu Team

What's been cooking ...

Hello,

First of all, thank you very much for being part of the alpha adventure and thank you for your continuous feedback, it's been helping us a lot in preparing our next releases.

Talking about releases, here is a little sneak peek at what we've been working on lately:

 

• a "remember me" checkbox as you were a lot to request it and rightly so
• the ability to add a comment to somebody when you share something with them, another thing you've been asking us, you can also reply to that person now
• search my dimsu has been moved to the top. If you did not try it, you should. Pretty cool feature we think that allows you to search through your content. You can use it punctually when you know you saw something but you can't find it back, but  you can also use it as your personalized search on a topic that interests you. For instance, I did set-up a web 2.0 search and everyday this search module gets updated with the latest news related to web 2.0, these news coming from the dozens of feeds I have on this subject.
• a more breathable contacts organization
• tabs so now you can better organize your bits
• refresh on demand: you can now refresh your modules to see if anything new happened, once again something you've been asking
• feed icons so you can better see where the feeds are from
• and we're experiencing with some widgets, our first one was the weather widget, 2 more have been added to this latest release: a search widget as requested by you developed by Wencheng Li, our lead developer here in San Francisco, and a bookmark widget developed by Pascal Bellec from Lannion...these widgets are our first step to let anybody add widget to our platform. If you're interested, let us know. Also let us know which widgets you think we should be working on first.

There are a lot more coming, including a brand new design, so stay tuned!

As you can see, we've been listening and we want to continue to hear from you so let us know what you think.

Hope you enjoy this new release and thank you so much for your support!
--the dimsu team