So, what’s the news? Well, today we’re ready to open Ping.it in public beta, but what we really want to tell you about is one feature that we think is a game changer.

We’ve experimented a lot up to this point; at each stage building a little more of the feature we’re about to showcase today. We now think we’ve created something genuinely useful that can help content discovery in the social world.

The new feature is called “Probes”. These are small apps which go out and retrieve information from across the Web on behalf of the user. They can be created, edited, shared and subscribed to – all by Ping.it users.

For the first time, you’ll be able to personalize content subscriptions to suit your unique interests, rather than being limited to simple RSS feeds as most readers are.

Say you wish to receive updates on “YouTube Videos on Reddit with more than 1 million views”, for example. You can easily create a Probe that uses the APIs of both YouTube and Reddit to draw the information directly to your feed, which can then be shared across the Ping.it platform. It’s a whole new world of content discovery.

What really makes this feature stand out is that in contrast to the passive methods of typical ‘single-feed subscriptions’, our users are able to decide what they deem interesting or useful to “probe” for, and that’s what they’ll see. You – our users – decide, not us.

We’ve pivoted a few times since we started (twists and turns that are inevitable in the path of a startup) but now there is a recognized need for a truly social reader: free from clunk, confusion and irrelevant content. Ping.it has been in the game long before the announced retirement of Google Reader, but now that has happened, our path is clearer than ever before.

Try out the Probes and let us know what you think – we’d love your thoughts, comments and criticisms. You can get in touch via team@ping.it and keep up-to-date by following us on Facebook, Twitter and the blog.

Quite simply, Probes are small, content-retrieving apps that are released into the internet to collect specific information. They enable the users to make personalized collections of information on topics of their choice.

For example, if a user wishes to receive updates for “YouTube Videos on Reddit with more than 1 million views”, they can create a Probe that uses the APIs of both YouTube and Reddit to draw the information directly to their feed.

Probes can be copied, adjusted, and shared across the network, making Ping.it a social network for content discovery.

To subscribe to Probes, simply select any existing Probes created by other Ping.it members on the home screen. Your feed will be automatically updated with information from this Probe as soon as it generates some new updates.

Probes can also be copied and adjusted. Clicking ‘Copy’ at the top of any Probe feed, allows you to adjust the parameters of the probe. For example, instead of ‘articles on CNN with more than 1,000 likes’ you may wish to search for TechCrunch articles with the same popularity. Once edited, the Probe can be renamed and saved as your own.

To create and entirely new Probe, you can easily do so by filling out the fields on the ‘Create a Probe’ popup box on the ‘Probes’ tab of the Ping.it home screen. Similarly to copying existing Probes, simply set the requirements of the content you wish to see and name to probe to save it to your feed.

Contact Group: This is only a group of your own contacts allowing you to ping many people at the same time without them knowing about each other. Instead of adding your contacts one by one you can send to all at the same time.

Private Group: If you want a group of people to communicate privately with each other this is the group you should create. No outside users will see pings to this group.

Public Group: If you want others in the community to join your group then a public group is what you need. When you ping something to this group it will be accessible on “Public groups” under the “Explore” section on home for all users.

Creating a group:

From the Ping.it popup:

1. Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.
2. There is a link just below the recipient’s box named “Create group”. Click on it to get the “Create group” popup.
3. In the popup you can fill out name, description and choose the type of a group.
4. In the same popup at the bottom you can easily add existing contacts to the group.
5. If you want to add new contacts to the group click on the small “Add contacts” link.
6. When you’re done, click “Create” at top right.

From the “Groups” tab on your Profile page:

1. Click “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.
2. Click “Create group” on top to the right of your name.
3. Follow points 3 to 6 from the description above.

Editing a group:

From the Ping.it popup:

1. Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.
2. Start writing the name of your group in the recipient’s box (where it says ‘Start typing to add recipients’). Select the group in the search results either by clicking on it or using up and down arrows and hitting ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.
3. When you see the group in the recipient’s box, you can simply click on the name to open the edit box. See points 3 to 6 in “Creating a group” on how to edit data.

From the “Groups” tab on your Profile page:

1. Click “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.
2. Find your group in the list and click “Edit”.
3. See points 3 to 6 in “Creating a group” on how to edit data.

Sending to a group

From the Ping.it popup:

1. Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.
2. Start writing the name of your group in the recipient’s box (where it says ‘Start typing to add recipients’). Select the group in the search results either by clicking on it or using up and down arrows and hitting ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.
3. Click “Ping it” and it is sent to the group.

From the “Groups” tab on your profile page:

1. Click on “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.
2. Find your group in the list and click “Edit”.
3. Paste the link you want to ping to this group in “URL to ping” text field.
4. Change subject and message as you like and “ping it”.

More important info

• Pinging to multiple groups does not send multiple pings to members of more than one of the groups. They’ll only receive one ping in their inbox.
• As a sender be relevant. Ping only what is expected to be pinged to the group based on its name and description.
• Spamming is absolutely not allowed so only add your own contacts into your group when you know it is something they would like to receive.

Ping.it Quick Tour

What does the media launch mean for you? Most importantly, there should be many new users coming to Ping.it over the next few days, so we encourage you to head to Ping.it and meet them. Also, all invitations are now sent instantly, so if some of your friends were waiting to join Ping.it, now is the time! They just have to use the “Request Invite” button on our homepage, and they will receive an activation link straight away!

And here are some other things that you might check out in the meantime.

Our tongue-in-cheek flowchart on how to share things, and not make people hate you: http://ping.it/sharingflow

A great infographic that presents a world of content sharing today: http://ping.it/infographic

Our media launch press release with some fine details, if you’re interested in this sort of things: https://ping.it/press

Have fun and see you on Ping.it!

Surprised? Check our infographic to learn more surprising facts and learn how Ping.it solves information overload and cleans up the cluttered social streams.

]]> http://ping.it/blog/learn-who-is-winning-the-online-sharing-battle-with-our-infographic/feed/ 0 http://ping.it/blog/new-ping-it-release-taps-into-dark-social/ http://ping.it/blog/new-ping-it-release-taps-into-dark-social/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:14:51 +0000 Chris http://ping.it/blog/?p=2700 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?

It is fueled by direct e-mails, instant messengers, closed forum posts, mailing groups, and much more. If you have ever pasted a link on Skype to some of your friends, you contributed to the Dark Social sharing. If your aunt sent you some links to favorite recipes in the e-mail, she’d be  a part of Dark Social too. Told a guy on chat about a good Web app, and he punched the URL into his browser? Dark Social. Showed a URL during your presentation, and people went on to visit it? Dark Social as well.

Naturally, in this context “dark” is not supposed to mean anything sinister. This kind of sharing is simply invisible and untraceable to popular Web analytics suites. It happens in private two-way communication or in closed social clusters. If there’s anything bad about the Dark Social, it’s only the number of webmasters who went bald scratching their heads at the mysterious spikes of “direct” visits to their site, with no trace in the visible backlinks.

And trust me, there’s a lot of this direct sharing traffic.  Over half of adult Americans use Facebook, but still almost all of them supplement it with e-mail direct sharing. That leaves us with the other half that’s not on Facebook – a group that entirely relies on smaller platforms and the Dark Social.

No wonder the first estimate in The Atlantic states that nearly 60% of sharing happens in Dark Social, out of reach of the marketers, analysts, and third party observers.

Of course, this piece by Alexis Madrigal provoked a slew of rebuttal articles. Some of them tried to do the actual science, like this one, by an author who checked what really makes the traffic “dark” or “bright”, and went into some details to explain that “dark” traffic comes from many other places (like bookmarking), and sometimes it is even just a miss-categorized traffic from social networks.

But everyone agrees that traffic from direct, untraceable sharing plays a very major role in our Web life.

Why? Because regardless of the social changes, people still won’t share everything publically. They still have closed circles of friends and family that are impenetrable to the outside  networks. They realize that some of the things won’t interest ALL of their Facebook friends, while they might be of use to several individuals. This calls for direct sharing.

But why am I talking about it?

It seems that the new version of Ping.it ventures far into the realm of direct, personal content recommendations. Straight into the Dark Social.

Ping.it is now a simple Web app that makes sending and receiving personal content recommendations faster and easier than before. The main ingredient comes in the form of a nice bookmarklet that lets you recommend a page you’re viewing straight from any browser, with one click, to any combination of your existing contacts across different platforms.

There’s no need to launch any applications, log in to e-mail accounts, write subject lines and messages… What’s probably most important, the recipients don’t have to register to Ping.it in order to receive messages. They are sent, depending on the contact type, either as a direct Facebook message, or as an e-mail. We’ll be working on adding more social integrations, too.

Registering gives you an ability to ping, join and manage groups, and to receive your pings to a nice Web Pingbox, instead of an e-mail.

This solution should appeal to all the Dark Social sharers. It lets them do what they do now, but in a faster and more convenient way. And if that doesn’t sound exciting enough for you, just bear with me. We realize Ping.it (and StormDriver before) has always had a strong content discovery element and that this specific element attracted many of the 17 000 people who registered for tests.

It is still present in our new version.

Apart of private groups, any Ping.it user can also create open groups, that work a bit like topics did, but they are – well – open. Anyone can join, and receive pages pinged by other group members. You can browse them or search them to join something right for you.

Oh, and you can still keep digging through profiles of random strangers to discover what open groups they have and what pings they sent to them. Naturally, private groups and pings to individual contacts remain invisible and 100% personal.

We have really high hopes for this version. The public release is currently scheduled for November 26 (as usual, it might change), but we have already invited our testers back to give our system a proper shake-down, before we show it to the press. We hope you’ll help us too!

Let me finish this with an anecdote. We’ve knownthe power of the Dark Social for a long time now, because at our team we send links to articles and inspiring videos in several various projects every day via personal e-mails, work e-mails and two different instant messengers. We’ve already found out that using Ping.it allows us to separate content recommendations from conversation, and it allows us to store all of the pages we exchange on neat group pages and in personal Pingboxes.

We liked it a lot, and we hope you will to.

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!

That’s why up until now staggering 66% of content was still shared using regular e-mail. Yes, even with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, social networks are still not the most popular way to spread content, and Instant Messaging is just a distant third.

Now let’s see how sharing works in Ping.it now. You’re still on a site with a movie review. You click the Ping.it bookmarklet button in your browser, select “John”, “Annie” and “Movie geeks group” from a list of contacts, then you click Ping.it. In seconds they receive an e-mail or a Ping.it message with a link.

That’s it. Really. It’s that simple, and it’s all Ping.it is about now – quickly pinging people about pages you think they might enjoy. In fact, it’s the fastest, simplest link sharing platform out there.

And you can make it even faster by dragging any person or a group to your bookmarks bar as a separate bookmarklet. For example: if you put “My office friends” group on your bar, then one click on the group name will ping them any site you’re viewing now, instantly and directly.

Now you can see why we’re one of the 55 startups chosen to present on START opening gala and the main competition at Dublin Web Summit. This new version of Ping.it shows that even something as mundane as sending links can still be improved. That sometimes, instead of making a big system with huge ambitions, it’s good to simply think about small annoyances each and every one of us faces on the Web – and solve them!

But what about content discovery? About actually FINDING great links? Don’t worry! We know many of you liked this side of Ping.it, so we did our best to keep it intact. The system supports creation of open groups on any topic, which can be visited and subscribed to by anyone. So if you join a group called “technology”, you can receive fresh pings straight to your Pingbox or e-mail, from people interested in tech. From people just like you.

You can still click on random strangers, and see things they ping to open groups they joined, or see who’s in those groups and what other groups he or she likes. You can still dive head-first into this sprawling content sharing community, and browse it until you discover something for yourself.

There’s still much we could discuss – other types of groups, new layouts, your personal Pingbox, but we feel the system is so simple, you should just check it out for yourself! On October 17, in less than a week, we’re going to re-open the gates, and we hope to see you in Ping.it then!

In the meantime, we’re packing our bags and stuff them with freebies and goodies to give away on Dublin Web Summit (stop by our booth to get some). Soon, we’re going to present a re-vamped version of Ping.it on a big stage, in front of many important people from all over the tech realm.

Please wish us luck!

We are proud to announce that Ping.it is going to join an exclusive group of world’s 100 most promising early-stage startups that have been chosen to present themselves during START – a hot starting point for this year’s Dublin Web Summit.

What’s Dublin Web Summit?

Dublin Web Summit  is a fast-growing annual high-tech scene gathering aiming at bringing the most creative professionals together in order for them to exchange ideas, present and review fresh Web stuff. It connects entrepreneurs to investors and to influential commentators. Some of the previous speakers include such famous figures as the founders of Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Skype and Rovio. This year’s summit is third in the row and it will be attended by over 3,000 people coming from more than 40 countries. The event will take place in the Royal Dublin Society, October 16th – 18th. As its founder, Paddy Cosgrave said, it’s going to be “the biggest yet” with “a real international focus as we work to show international start-ups why Dublin is a great place for tech companies.”

STARTing point

START is a brand new invite-only opening event, organized by F.ounders – a yearly meetup of 150 most influential and successful tech company founders in the world. The professionals choose the projects based on innovative features, attractive concept, and clear ideology that are going to revolutionize the market, stimulating new needs. START is a unique opportunity to exhibit a product, develop key pitches and create a network of potential investors, media contacts and an early client base.

What to START with?

What exactly we are going to present at START is supposed to remain a surprise, but we can unveil the mystery a little bit. Basically, we are going to convince the audience that Ping.it will transform the way people share links, offering an unprecedentedly smooth way to manage them all from one place.  Thanks to our bookmarklets and easy grouping system, the users will be able to ping links to their contacts across different networks, with just one click.

We are looking forward to START and can’t wait to see what’s sizzling on the Web startups’ pan, as well as to present ourselves to the public. Stay tuned and check out our impressions afterwards!

Can’t wait to learn more about the system? The new version is about to launch! Subscribe to be the first to get the news!

Quotation source: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0419/1224314923505.html

Rumor has it the new Digg owners blew it big time. Tens of millions of dead URLs all over the Web are screaming for vengeance. Content owners are concerned their SEO standing may be affected now that these 14 million pages Google has indexed from Digg are kaput. Most importantly, however, millions of former Digg users are now on the lookout for a better way to discover content. And hey, some of those lost souls ended up in our backyard! Check out this comment from one of the Ping.it beta testers:

Message: Nice….encourage some former Loyal Digg users to come over and you folks will have quite a quick following. LOVING what I see so far.

Signed: Formerly Loyal Digg User for 6 years

Comments such as this one make us very happy, but they do not come as much of a surprise. We’ve shown Ping.it to many pairs eyeballs from all around the globe, and a lot of the times people reacted by saying something along the lines of “yeah, I see, so this is kind of a Digg 2.0?”. Well, yes and no.

Yes, because people who liked the old Digg are likely to dig what they see on Ping.it. Many of the things Digg v1 users weep after are available in our system. We have topic groups and follower lists, and we do not force you to use Facebook login. We also do not plan to ever intentionally incinerate all your digital possessions, unless all that money and power turns us to the dark side.

That said, the answer must also be “no”, since Ping.it is based on an entirely different concept than Digg and other news aggregators. On Ping.it you discover content by checking out where others are online right now. Basically, you can see where people you follow are and you can join them on any page. When they’re pinging you it’s like they’re saying “hey, get over here, I found something cool”. Instead of waiting for people to tell you what they’re doing, you can see them doing it.

If you find this too good to be true and you’re not swayed by our cherry-picked feedback from a former Digg enthusiast, you definitely need to check out Ping.it yourself. It’s in a closed beta right now, but if you request an invite here you may just get it pretty soon(ish).

Now, lets see how well this article fares on Digg…

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.

But why?

Mostly because that’s what was supposed to happen all along. You see, StormDriver was the first codename, when we started our work on the system many moons ago. It was never supposed to stick as long as it did. But it did stick, all the way through the alpha version, probably because of the cool factor I just mentioned.

In the meantime, the system went through a long and winding development process, and – frankly – outgrew its name. The StormDriver tag was attached to several different prototypes, including – but not limited to – the one you’ve tested in our recent alpha tests. Functionalities came and went, our targets shifted, but the name was still there. We did a press preview and an alpha launch, and it went OK. But in the end, it was all quite different from the system we’re going to launch now.

Today, after long development, we’re finally there, and we asked ourselves a simple question: why are we still using our codename? Couldn’t we find something better, something that describes the system? Something shorter and with more traction?

After careful consideration, many riotous brainstorms and speaking to some knowledgeable experts, we decided to go with Ping.it. The ping button is now the heart of our system, and the system’s philosophy focuses on sending (and receiving) pings. We really wanted to emphasize this with the name. Yes, Ping.it doesn’t have the same thundery connotations as StormDriver. But it does something much more important – it instantly says new users what we are all about, as you can see for yourself in our launch video below:

Ping.it Beta Release Teaser

We contacted some talented designers, decided on a final logo, and in the process – we also gave our system a final layout overhaul! New looks are sleek, cleaner, and the interface is now much easier to use. Just take a look at our new version to see how much the look and feel have improved.

We hope you like our new logo, name, layouts, our pings and topics. We’d love to hear your opinion. Just leave a comment here or have your say on our new Facebook fanpage. We will listen to everyone, but for the time being, let’s leave StormDriver Alpha Test behind, and move on to Ping.it Beta Test!

On a side note – some of you might still have StormDriver folders and pendrives we gave out on LWS 2012 conference and other occasions. I’d hold on to them if I were you. When we launch a gazillion dollar IPO, we expect those early StormDriver collectibles to be more valuable than Elvis’s pants.

Some technical stuff

And just to answer some questions that might pop-out, here’s a short guide to the name change (and what it means for you).

• This is only a rebrand and a layout overhaul. Our database remains unaffected. You won’t lose your account, user history, pings, cred or pretty much anything – they all carry through to Ping.it!
• Beta was a good moment for us to introduce some changes we have planned for a long time. The system is now based around sending and receiving pings – instant signals, that you can send with a single click whenever you find a nice piece of content.
• Pings are grouped in topics, so apart of following interesting people, you can just follow pings to a topic you like, or create your own topics and invite some contributors.
• We replaced Mingle and Surf with a single Discover page. We might bring back adaptive people / content recommendations at some point, but for the time being, we have decided to go forward with only most polished functionalities.
• Because of all the changes, we’d like to invite you to go through the tutorial again. It is now shorter, more to the point, and it will quickly bring you up to speed on how to use the system.
• The beta version is closed, which means the only way to get in, is to get an exclusive invitation from any member of our community. Of course alpha testers and people who signed up to StormDriver all have working accounts – just check your e-mail for an activation link, if you haven’t set it up yet. If you like the system, be sure to spread the invitations around! We will go open at some point, after we decide we are ready to handle it.
• Unfortunately we were unable to change the name of our Facebook fan page, due to Facebook’s policy and lack of user support. That’s why we’d love if you could join our new Ping.it fanpage!
• Our old Twitter account (OpenWebLayer) was renamed Ping.it and is still functional. If you want to keep on top of the latest Ping.it news, please follow us!
• As of now, www.stormdriver.com redirects to ping.it.
• If you notice StormDriver name in any e-mails, system notifications or messages, please let us know via the feedback form. We could have missed something.

That’s it. Have fun and see you in… Ping.it. We need your help to make it the best upcoming social platform out there!