official blog of welshare.com


LinkedIn Integration

Sep17
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

LinkedIn integration was introduced to welshare. It’s currently at an experimental stage. Note that some features are unfortunately missing – you can’t see your LinkedIn notifications (you can’t see them on LinkedIn anyway), there is no statistics or missed important messages yet. But as LinkedIn is one of the biggest networks it’s worth integrating and these features are coming soon.

Sharing and resharing to LinkedIn is disabled by default – you have to switch it on for each post. This is so because it is rarely appropriate to post cat pictures and fail videos to your professional and business contants.

Posted in Announcements

Welshare Gets a Facelift

Sep06
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I am proud to announce that welshare has a new design. It got a summer facelift and now looks more fancy and web 2.0. The simplicity of the user interface is preserved and the idea is to make it even more comfortable to use.

Posted in Announcements

Don’t Miss a Thing

May29
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Last week Welshare introduced a feature that allows users to see what important messages they have missed while being offline.

When you login you can click on the icon in the top-right (next to notifications) and see which messages had more than a given number of likes or retweets (the number of configurable). In addition to that it shows links that were shared more than the configured number of times.

The aim is to make it easier for users to see what they missed, and not to force them to scroll down through tens of not-so-important messages in their stream in order to get the “hot stuff”.

Posted in Announcements

A Month of Welsharing

May13
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

A month has passed since welshare went into “field trial”. What happened is:

  • lots of issues were discovered and fixed. Many thanks to the users that dug into most of the features and discovered problematic behaviour
  • new features were introduced, like the viral graph, embedding videos, and more.
  • around 150 users singed up (which is not much, but is a good start)
  • around 90 visits per day and around 40 unique visitors per day (data from google analytics)

The product is much more stable and usable now and the next step is to submit to to several startup programs like “spark of genius”, KillerStartups, etc.

 

Posted in Announcements

Introducing the Viral Graph Into URL Shortening

May09
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Links, including shortened ones, can become viral – if their content is interesting to many people, they spread them through their social and interest graphs. This forms the viral graph, which shows how the viral link spreads:

That said, URL shortening has been “flat” so far – that is, users shorten links, distribute them and only they can see the results – how many times the link was opened and by who.

Welshare introduces the viral graph into shortened links. When a user shortens a link, he has the option to shorten it “virally”. In that case when the link is opened by other people, they get a new URL each, and they can redistribute that URL. All that is tracked in a graph so a user that has participated in spreading the viral can see:

  • viral points – how many other people opened the link because of him. And that’s not only the people he sent the link to – it’s all the people that got the link from the people he sent it to, and so on.
  • viral percentage – what’s the percentage of the user’s contribution to the link popularity. That is, what’s the percentage of his viral points from all viral points for the link
  • nodes from beginning – this is the distance from the initial source of the link. If user A sends the link to B and then he sends it to C, C will be 2 nodes away from the beginning of the viral graph
  • average depth of subgraph – on average, how deeply was the link spread after the user shared it.

And the good thing is that users don’t have to be registered on welshare. Only the initial source of the link has. But still, everyone is able to track their contribution (they just have to write down a key, or URL)

This is all implemented by having a tiny top bar above the link (like stumbleupon, for example). It may happen that a user decides to close the bar and thus end the tracked graph (while still redistributing the link), but according to hootsuite the top bar is preferred by more than 90% of users, so it should not be that much of an issue.

The feature is now live (but still in beta, as is welshare), and you can experiment with it. Any feedback will be valuable.

Posted in Announcements

Welshare Goes Into “Field Trial”

Apr12
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Today the field trial of welshare, a sharing platform, was launched. You are welcome to register and try it out. Welshare is similar to other services like hootsuite, friendfeed, postling, favit, tweetdeck, etc. But as 37signals write “build software for yourself”. And none of these services offered me exactly what I wanted, so I had to roll out my own. Here are some of the features:

  • Aggregating your twitter and facebook streams in addition to the internal stream – that’s an incentive to actually start using it – you will be seeing all your streams from a single place;
  • Unified like button – “like” means “I like this, and I want my friends to know about that”;
  • Search – search the whole site, your stream or your own messages;
  • Social reputation – simple, mechanical formula for measuring social reputation. Providing rankings based on city and country;
  • friends and followers – if you are a friend with someone, add them as friend. If you are just interested in their “stuff” – follow them;
  • notifications – you get notified on events from welshare, facebook and twitter, with a unified interface.

Of course that is not everything, and there are more features under development, but you get the picture.

If you are interested in technical details, see here.

Enjoy!

Posted in Announcements
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