Archive for the ‘Internet Trends’ 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 |

StormDriver is now Ping.it!

August 1st, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

Ping.it - the new StormDriver

Can you see the image on the right? That’s our new logo. By the time you read this, this logo is already on the live version of our system – as well as our homepage, newsletter, whiteboard in our office and even our t-shirts and underpants.

From now on, StormDriver becomes Ping.it, and officially goes into a beta stage.

Sure, StormDriver was the best name ever. It made us think of rolling thunder, screeching guitar solos and sharks with lasers on their heads. It also had a meaning, although it was probably not too obvious to anyone outside of the development team.

We will all remember you fondly, StormDriver. Alas, it is time to let you go.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Internet Trends, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

Alpha Test Update: 200 Feedbacks and Counting!

April 22nd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

It’s been a long while since our last Alpha Test update. In the meantime, invites started to pour out generously, we got more testers, more feedback – and more things to do. Our task board now looks like a hedgehog after a stroll through the “post-it” factory. That’s why, even if you haven’t heard from us in a while, don’t worry! We’re still here, hard at work, pumped up and excited. We just didn’t have time to bring things up to speed, hence – the article you’re reading now.

First of all, thanks for all the great work you’ve done testing the alpha version. So far we received over 200 feedback messages from our alpha users. And while some of you wrote just to say you like the system (thanks!), and some wrote just to say “adsfasdf”, the vast majority of e-mails contained valuable ideas and bug reports.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Internet Trends, Releases, 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 |

StormDriver at the London Web Summit

March 22nd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

This Monday a part of our team went over to the UK to attend the London Web Summit. Our mission? Pitch the hell out of StormDriver in front of investors, industry insiders and other startups. And pitch we did, until we could barely speak.

It’s been the first time we have shown our system to the public, with a full hands-on demo. The result was very encouraging. It was great to see how people react to StormDriver, and how many of them thought it’s something new and interesting. Before the end of the show, our pockets were already filled with business cards.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Internet Trends |

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 |

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