Friday, October 31, 2008

Last week news feeds now enhanced notifications!

We just went live with a very compelling feature that will notify friends that you added an item to your own personal top3Clicks list.

What does the feature do? If you add 'Phillies' to your personal watch list all of your friends that ALSO use top3Clicks will receive a notification that you added an item.

We added this feature so you can leverage the expertise of your friends. If Brett is a Phillies fan and is looking for Phillies jerseys then you may be interested as well.

Please let us know what you think!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Clash - Live At Shea Stadium

If you are like me and a fan of The Only Band That Matters (The Clash), you might know that the surviving members just released a stellar live show that was recorded weeks before their demise.



Live At Shea Stadium was recorded on the Combat Rock tour when The Clash was opening for The Who. Overall, the band, sound quality and song selection is top notch.

I also picked up the latest DVD, Live Revolution Rock,

which features the band over several years in a number of venues -- *and* I also ordered the forthcoming book, "The Clash", written by the band.

I wasn't aware that Live At Shea Stadium was forthcoming, I actually learned about it via Top3Clicks, watching The Clash, which was really motivating. The latest feature (news feed integration) was written listening to the Shea Stadium gig and the DVD.

Fiddling with new Facebook UX features when old features fail

When we launched top3Clicks, as third party developers, we focused about a third of our attention around the users Facebook 'profile' user experience. This was the major way to keep your friends in tune with what you are watching, etc.

With the new Facebook user design, we have found the profile section (now the boxes tab) to be absolutely useless (or to be nice - 'less useful').

We took a hard look at where we could make changes to get friends thinking about friends again and it became crystal clear that the 'news feed' is the only road for seeing what your friends are up to. Sooo, we just released a new update, tweaking our use of 'news feeds' focusing on tipping off your friends when you add items that you are watching in top3Clicks.

For example, if you are interested in watching 'Phillies' items. You can add the item to top3Clicks, example below.




Now notice below that once the item is added, it will appear in your news feed as something you recently added. Your friends will see this item and can either add the item to their top3Clicks page or they can click on an item that is available at Amazon (like the Phillies jersey). This gives your friends a chance to impulse purchase the item.




As the top3Clicks community adds more items this feature is going to really be cool.

Feedback (good & not so good) always welcome.

-The BaconMarathon


Note that the BaconMarathon is supporting the Phillies this year to win the world series over the Rays. The first time since 1980 when Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton ran the show. Go Phils!