Archive for the ‘Content Discovery’ Category

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New Ping.it release taps into “dark social”

December 3rd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

We’re back online!

The maintenance that started shortly after the Dublin Web Summit lasted a bit longer than expected, but I guess it will be easy to see why, after you’ve discovered how much we improved in Ping.it.

But first, a little story.

Did you know that nearly 66% of all content sharing happens directly, bypassing social networks? They call this vast area of direct link exchange the Dark Social – a term that has been popularized recently by this article from The Atlantic.

What exactly does Dark Social consist of?

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Internet Trends, Privacy, Releases, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

New Ping.it becomes one of the 55 world’s top startups

October 11th, 2012 Posted by Chris 2 Comments

If by any chance you have stumbled upon our homepage recently, you probably know that Ping.it went through a massive change. This time, we’re pretty sure it’s going to stay that way. Our new concept is simple, fresh, and so radical that thanks to the re-designed version you’re going to see soon we’ve been chosen as one of the 55 most promising start-ups to take part both in the closed START event and in the Ireland Electric Spark of Genius startup competition on the Dublin Web Summit 2012 conference.

So, what’s so interesting in this new version of Ping.it?

Imagine you found a page that some of your friends could enjoy. Let’s say it’s a hilarious movie review, with humor leaning a bit on the offensive side. You realize, that a couple of your friends would love to see it. But your other Facebook contacts wouldn’t be interested, and some probably wouldn’t even get the joke and could take it the wrong way.
Whenever you share something on social networks, you show it to a lot of people who don’t care, and in the meantime the “right” people can often miss your update.
What can you do? You can create lists or circles on your social account, but that requires a prior knowledge of what you’re going to post. Would you create a G+ circle for “People who get offensive jokes” or a Twitter list for “People who are interested in strange tofu recipies”? Of course not!

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Posted in About Ping.it, Awards, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Internet Trends, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

Alpha Test Update: Introducing “pings”

June 18th, 2012 Posted by Chris 3 Comments

Recently, in preparation for our final alpha launch, we began to wonder if  there was anything more we could do to make StormDriver better. To make it more unique, rewarding – and simpler at the same time.

After some talking, thinking, and even more talking, we finally understood what lies at the heart of our system, when you trim away all the subpages, functions, options and buttons. It’s the instant discovery sharing – the ability to see when someone, somewhere, somehow discovers something cool you didn’t know of.

We wanted to make this core idea more visible throughout the system. To bring it into the light.

Just imagine tens of thousands of users browsing the Web at the same time. And imagine, that every time any one of them stumbles upon something valuable, he or she sends a strong signal, a loud “ping” that means “eureka!” or “I found it” or, to be more precise, “it’s awesome here, come and join me”.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Privacy, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

Do we really live in the age of Social Networks?

March 26th, 2012 Posted by Chris 2 Comments

Today, I’m going to write something you’d least expect from anyone working on a system that has “social” somewhere in its description. I’m going to say that social networks are really not as big or influential as we make them to be.

They’ve been media darlings for half a decade now, and some people even go as far as saying that we live in the age of Social Media. Is it true? Let’s start our little crash course in perspective with some hard numbers. Because that’s what big apps like to throw around – numbers, numbers, and more numbers (all of them self-reported, of course).

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Social Browsing, Uncategorized |

Imitation of life

February 22nd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

Nothing brings tears of joy to a developer’s eyes like his baby being compared to some of the most interesting projects out there. Recently, the Italian version of Wired wrote an article comparing the features of Italian Volunia with some other star-ups, that pursue the direction of innovative social interactions. As a result, we ended up on the same list as Trap!t, WhoIsLive, Chime.in and some major old social platforms, like Twitter and Facebook. It’s always nice to be noticed.

Volunia’s launch made me think it’s strange how many new systems try to discover some kind of new, involving interaction that could happen in the web. That’s probably because real Internet users showed us they are ready to do more and share more. They want to get involved in new kinds of activities.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Internet Trends, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

Alpha Test Update: Achievements and more

February 2nd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

In the last article, I told you a bit about our new Sources functionality. It was a serious change, that impacts most of the system’s components, but that’s not everything we’ve prepared for our next Alpha release.

I guess the title already told you what I’m going to reveal now. Achievements are the next feature we implemented in StormDriver, and I’d like to tell you both “how” and “why”.

Achievemets

It came to us recently, that we have all the ingredients necessary to create a great achievement system.  We have an established point mechanic. We have streams and notifications that let you know whenever something interesting happens globally or among your friends. We keep track of everything users do through StormDriver for the sake of various algorithms and statistics. We realized, that introducing achievements would be a logical next step.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

Alpha Test Update: “Sources” are coming!

January 31st, 2012 Posted by Chris 2 Comments

It’s been more than a month since the last alpha version of StormDriver landed on test servers. Since then, a lot of people have been asking us on Facebook and in StormDriver to expand our ongoing Alpha tests. We want you to know we really appreciate this feedback. We’d love to open up to the public right now, but the list of planned changes, fixes and updates is still quite long – and we’re not a huge team.

Regardless, we are all doing our best, and this month we successfully created a new version of the system, that’s being internally tested right now. It’s probably one of the most important releases in a long while, as it brings big and bold changes, including “Sources”, a concept we have thought about for quite some time now.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Internet Trends, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

How web anonymity drives innovation

January 23rd, 2012 Posted by Chris 2 Comments

There are times, when research data challenge the common assumptions.

Three months ago, we wrote a short piece about the prismatic personality concept, and how it clashes with real name policies of most social networks. Both Google+ and Facebook were notorious in their attempts to drive away users that preferred nicknames to their actual names, and they went as far as banning prolific artists, journalists with established pen names, and human rights activists that tried to protect their families. We thought it’s not only wrong, but also very counterproductive.

Back then, our article was only a speculation based on a gut feeling, some analysis, and an interesting speech by Chris Poole at the SXSW conference. But recently, real numbers cropped up to support the case, and that’s why we decided to revisit the topic.

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Posted in Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Internet Trends, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized |

Driving the people-content convergence

December 16th, 2011 Posted by Chris 8 Comments

There’s probably more than a hundred popular books and scientific works about why social networks became so popular. Some say it’s because they offer an accessible way to fulfill our basic social desires, like staying connected with friends and relatives, gaining somebody’s attention, gossiping and satisfying our curiosity. Others point to the value of networking and honing real human relations in a digital age.

You could say that metric tons of printed paper can’t be wrong, but I think you could say just as much in a single sentence.

Social Networks are popular because we like the experiences they provide.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

StormDriver Alpha Launch Information Pack

November 11th, 2011 Posted by Chris 4 Comments

It’s 11/11/2011, almost 11:11 GMT. Time for something special to happen.

You might have seen a mysterious teaser that was circling around the web in the last few days. A teaser that gathered over 100.000 views, and received coverage from major publication all around the world, including Mashable. It was our trailer, heralding an event that happens today, this very minute.

A launch of our aticipated StormDriver Alpha test!

Yes, it took us some time – actually a lot more than we have expected. The system we’re working on is quite unique, so it offered us challenges we never faced before. All the time we were treading on pioneering grounds. Some bits of our technology are patent pending as of this week, so let me assure you – it was not easy to roll out first public version.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Internet Trends, Privacy, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

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