YouAre WordPress Theme. Promote your real-life identity
We are proud to announce the release of YouAre WordPress Theme 0.1.
YouAre Wordpress Theme is a free, complete and elegant Wordpress 2.8+ solution released under GPL License to promote your real-life identity and professional profile.
YouAre Theme is recommended for people who have an estrategical online presence. Our motivation to release YouAre Theme? It fits clearly in our strategy to create aplications and addons to promote your true self. Your true self is the what you build through everything you do throughout the day.
YouAre Theme · LIVE DEMO · Download YouAre Theme
Google Reader’s ‘Send to’ Feature. Share news on YouAre
Google Reader just added an awesome feature that lets you share news directly to Blogger, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter… and a bunch of other places.
To enable it, click on “Settings” in Google Reader and then click on the “Send To” tab to choose which services to add (make sure you disable pop-up).
Settings for Send to YouAre
Name: YouAre
URL: http://youare.com/?text=${url}&t=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.youare.com/i/favicon.png
Click Save and voilà.
Now at the bottom of each reader entry, you’ll see:
If you have problems please email us to use {at } youare {dot} com
Web Life: Import your blog posts
YouAre has a dream: to be the go-to site for managing your identity. When someone wants to know whatever became of you or get to know you better, we’d like them to go to Google and to YouAre. :)
To that end, the content that you publish on other sites and on your blog is very important. A few hours ago we activated the feature which allows you to insert the URL for your blog or website to grab the RSS. As with YouTube, Flickr and Delicious, content is imported every 6 hours. We’d love to be able to do it in real time, but for the moment it’s not possible.
We will periodically be adding more services.
The Statusphere is beginning to become more popular, but we can’t sacrifice blog content in this day and age, among other reasons because blogs are key to promoting yourself and managing your reputation and identity online.
Content imported from your blog will be cataloged as with other content on Web Life and YouAre Search.
Import your Twitter archives into YouAre
One of the reasons why we started building YouAre was because it was so hard to know what we published on particular day on Twitter and this impeded our ability to have an ordered, chronological archive of our lives.
If you were thinking of migrating from Twitter to YouAre or if you would like to have your Twitter archives in YouAre, we just activated in your settings menu the option to import the tweets that you’ve published to date. Twitter allows importing of 6.400 tweets and as with each YouAre update, they will be saved via a URL like this:
http://youare.com/username/year/month/day/idnum
When we built this feature, we had 2 options: allow you to import tweet without having to enter your password or with your password. What you publish on Twitter, as with what you publish on YouAre, is very personal content. To ensure we aren’t allowing others to take your identity, we decided to password protect this feature.
Your Twitter account will not be infringed upon.
When Twitter allows general authentification without having to enter a password, we will implement this.
Settings: Import your tweets into YouAre.
Update March 26, 2009: We can’t activate OAuth just because Twitter only let us acccess Twitter API URLs. Twitter API has 100 requests/hour, not enough to import the contents of a unique user (6400 updates maximum). 1 request = 20 updates maximum.
YouAre Search
Since we first came out in private beta in summer 2008, we provided the ability to search for people by name or city. Today, YouAre is open to everyone and we have improved our search feature to include content search.
YouAre Search lets you search:
- Published updates
- Content published in Web Life (YouTube, Flickr and Delicious)
- Professional profiles (Resumés: bio, work experience and education info)
- People (by name and cities)
YouAre is here!
After six months of invite-only beta, we’re proud to announce that today we’re making YouAre available to everyone. Thank you very much for all beta testers support and feedback.
What is YouAre? What’s YouAre offering as new? Before reading our About Section it might be better to read what others have said about us, like: Duncan Riley (The Inquisitr) or Genbeta (Spanish blog).
Picking up the pace to open up the doors
Since the beginning of this month we’ve been feeling pretty satisfied with how the development of YouAre has been progressing. We’ve fixed a few bugs and have implemented a few small features. We will continue the development on the API and features such as:
- Search content
- The option of editing the type of relationship you have with another user without having to delete and re-add the contact
We’re working on this right now.
When we started sending out invites in July, there was too much going on in the microblogging scene. It wasn’t the best time to introduce ourselves, but we didn’t care and we still don’t. The positive feedback we’ve received gives us a lot of energy. We are still happily working away, and at a rhythm that may not be as fast as we would have liked, but the fact is that we are also organizing Evento Blog España, the second-largest blogger and web entrepreneur conference in Europe in terms of attendance, and that takes up a lot of our time. This year we’ll welcome 900 attendees.
We now have a date to “open up the doors” on YouAre: the end of this year.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0U53KOSbQU[/youtube]
YouAre can be updated from HelloTXT and Ping.fm
A few hours ago, Ping.fm and more recently HelloTXT have added YouAre in their list of sites to be updated.
Thank you very much to Fabrizio and Sean & Adam. The number of users and updates have increased a lot since then.
These two great applications helps you posting to multiple social networking sites at the same time without even considering going one by one to do so. Instead of updating Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr… separately, you can do it all at once.
HelloTXT
HelloTxt was founded in Italy in 2007 with the aim of making life easier for people who belong to multiple social networks and has support for Jabber and gTalk.
Ping.fm
Ping.fm was launched in march 2008 and has an MSN & IM & gTalk bots. Great API, too.
YouAre and the little details
One of the advantages that a product like YouAre has is that it was inspired by other applications that we realized had unsatisfied needs or missing things that we took care of in our own application, greatly improving user experience.
In addition, these other services were developed from an English-centric point of view. Although YouAre is in English, one of our areas of improvement is the optimize usability to provide for the particularities of other languages.
Here are just a few of the small details you might be able to notice on the user side:
- Filtering of updates by type of contact
- When writing or pasting in a URL, characters aren’t subtracted
- Recognition of URLs that have been shortened
When you publish a URL with more than 50 characters, our system automatically shortens it to a URL like this one: http://micurl.com/0hupfc. If are logged in to YouAre, place the cursor on the link and look towards the lower left of your browser. There you’ll see the source URL.
This is convenient because it lets you see if you really want to click what’s there, if the content is NSFW, etc. - Many languages use accent marks. YouAre doesn’t subract characters for those.
This is a highly requested feature in Twitter that tends to annoy many users.
- Same search results, with or without accents.
When you look for a person or a place that contains an accent mark in the name and you don’t include the accent, the search engine doesn’t filter the results and will return results for both. For example, if you search “José”, the YouAre search engine will also show you users who spell their name (no accent) and vice versa.
While it might seem like a minor detail, most social applications only show you results for exactly what you have written, which makes users or places which accent marks “invisible”, since users who aren’t used to writing accent marks are the majority.
- Friendly URLs
While this might be an widely spread idea and not very innovative, very few networks really pay attention to having friendly URLs. In YouAre, permalinks are similiar to URLs used in blogs:
http://youare.com/username/yyyy/mm/dd/idnum.With this URL format, it’s easier to keep an ordered record of what you did on a certain day or month. The URLs for files are also friendly (http://youare.com/username/videos), as well as location (http://youare.com/country/city) and search results (http://youare.com/search/name).
- Instant erase of content without reloading the page makes things a lot faster.
- Link to print a resumé within the profile. A detail that is quite simple but also very useful if you are the process of recruiting candidates for a certain position.
- If you publish links with .pdf or .zip you will have a small icon reflecting it.
- The email that lets you know you have a new follower includes the 140 character bio of the user. That way, if you don’t know the person, you have more information about them which will help you decide whether you want him or her in your network.
- When you reply you do not have to begin the post with @username.
- Videos on popular sites start automatically. Following the philosophy of “as few clicks as possible”, when you publish a video and you go to the permalink, you won’t have to play, as it will play automatically.
- QR Code for each update
Any and all feedback is welcome!
The ‘Dayflow’ Era Begins
Last week, Facebook’s redesign (though it may sound pretentious) marked a change in social networks that is perhaps greater than what it looks like on the surface. Last week marked an “official” confirmation that the microblogging or lifestreaming interface and publishing by typology (photos, text, video, etc.) are indeed valid for the public at large. The Dayflow Era has begun.
Facebook has had its “activity stream” — a list of the users actions (logins, recommended links, etc.) — up since 2006 but it hadn’t been afforded the attention on the homepage that it has now.
We aren’t going to analyze why Facebook has become more like FriendFeed, especially since it could be said that FriendFeed was inspired by Facebook’s activity stream, which itself was inspired by LiveJournal.
For now we’ll just focus on the elements that for us have a Dayflow application.
What is Dayflow?
Dayflow is a term coined by myself and Luis Rull which we use to define services with:
- Timeline plays an absolutely essential role on the homepage (Twitter, Friendfeed, YouAre and the new Facebook…). The latest updates are the most relevant and the newest things always are seen first.
- The power of just one click.
All you need is a click to publish and mash together content. You don’t need to log in like on a blog or visit another URL to see the content you’ve published. Now all of your content and that of your contacts can be seen on one site only. This is the greatest innovation that microblogging and lifestreaming services have offered to date.
- Publishing and archiving of content differentiated by type: video, photos, text (Tumblr, Facebook, YouAre). You don’t always want to only publish messages in text form, sometimes you want to show another user a video and comment on it.
YouAre
If you look at the screenshot of the before and after of Facebook and the YouAre interface you can see how the two services have the timeline in common, with immediate publishing for photos, video and text.
YouAre has been working internally since December. Back then, we put some images of the interface up on Flickr. Lots of people tend to think of YouAre as a Twitter clone, forgetting that the focus is different and the potential of our domain name. In reality we consider YouAre to be:
Twitter + Tumblr + Linkedin + Del.icio.us (coming soon!) + our innovation = YouAre
The redesign of Facebook further cements our vision of what a social network should be like. And we feel quite proud of that.
We believe that Twitter and other services should make a move towards publishing video and photos. CEO Jack Dorsey has commented that they are analyzing the possibility.
Hola!
All about the making of YouAre and other fun things.
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