Blogging Present.ly

Present.ly has been nominated as a finalist in the WebWare 100 Communication Category. We’re honored to be chosen from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to be one of the 300 finalists to compete for the title.

The WebWare 100 is a yearly contest held by CNET that allows the public to pick what the 100 best web applications of the year are. Past winners included such products as GMail and Amazon MP3, so we’re very excited to be included as a finalist for this year’s selection.

Voting is open right now, so please vote for us! We think that business micro-communication is an important next step in the future of communication, and your votes will help validate that and move it even further into the mainstream. Thanks for your support.

Along with the launch of Presently.com, we quietly revamped the backend architecture of Present.ly to better use the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as the standard message delivery system. You may have noticed near-instant updates on the new web interface — this is primarily due to the super-fast messaging features of eJabberd, the XMPP server that Present.ly runs on.

We believe that XMPP will play a bigger role powering dynamic, real-time web applications in the coming years and have previously blogged as such. While most people in the industry know of XMPP only in its instant messaging role, the fact that there are fully fleshed out specifications for most common enterprise messaging problems as subsets of the XMPP specification is often sadly overlooked.

So what does this mean for Present.ly? In the short term, as you may have already noticed, you will see a major speed improvement posting and receiving updates. In the long term, we are planning on making our user interface a lot more dynamic — details are top-secret at the moment. We are also working on moving over our notification systems completely to XMPP, which will result in you receiving update notifications more rapidly over all your devices. As we grow, we’ll be leveraging eJabberd’s high scalability (due to it being written in Erlang) to provide a seamless, quick user experience.

We are also actively contributing back to the open-source XMPP community. Read about ruby_bosh, the first Ruby library to handle BOSH sessioning in your Ruby applications. We have also made various stability and speed fixes to the stropheruby library, which is based on the libstrophe C library (announcement soon). Both are available on Github for general use. Intridea’s proud to be a part of the XMPP community, and will be heavily using and promoting the technology with both our products and services.

One of the features that I’ve found most useful in the new version is the Links page. This page allows you to see the links that other users have shared on a Present.ly network (those that aren’t privately sent to other users or groups) including the title of the linked page.

This is a great way to look back to try to find that interesting link that your co-worker posted yesterday but you can’t seem to find the update itself. It’s also a great way to discover interesting things posted by members of your network that you might not be following. Each link has the poster and what they said displayed along with it, providing you the context for the link as well as the link itself.

We also reorganized the Tags landing page to list all of the tags alphabetically along with the number of posts to each tag. As discussed earlier this week you can now “Track” tags with a Custom Feed, giving you even greater access to the information on your network.

We hope that you enjoy all of the new features introduced with the latest version. We will continue to innovate and build functionality to help you organize, utilize, and follow the collective knowledge of your organization.

Last week Present.ly launched a great feature for keeping information organized: Custom Feeds. Custom feeds are feeds that you can create by entering search terms or tags; these feeds will then automatically update each time those search terms are entered.

To create a custom feed, you first go to the “My Feeds” menu and then “My Custom Feeds.” From here you can click to create a custom feed. Here I’m creating a new custom feed to track posts about SXSW on Presently.com.

Now if I go to my “My Feeds” menu I will see “SXSW” underneath custom feeds. I can simply click that link at any time to see the latest updates about SXSW!

Note that you can also create custom feeds for tags from the Tags tab on the menu, just click the “Track” button next to a tag and it will take you to the Custom Feed creation screen for that tag.

We think that this is a really useful and powerful feature for keeping organized, and just one more way we’re trying to help improve the signal to noise ratio. Stay tuned tomorrow for another post from Feature Week!

This is the first post of what we’re dubbing “feature week.” Last week we released a huge number of bug fixes, feature additions, and updates to the Present.ly platform and this week we’re sharing what we’ve done in a series of blog posts. First up is the New Present.ly UI.

The Big Update Box

Front and center in the new UI is what we call the “Big Update Box.” We’ve made it easier than ever to use and understand the advanced features available with Present.ly by making their use as straightforward as possible.

The Big Update box allows you to choose commands from a drop down menu, selecting a person or group to share your update with, broadcasting as a group of which you are a manager, as well as cross-posting to Twitter.

Along with the Big Update Box comes the ability to attach multiple files to a single update. This will seem very familiar to those who have been using the new GMail uploading system: you can simply select multiple files from the menu that pops up and they will all be attached to the update with individual upload progress bars.

You can still use the same commands as previous versions of Present.ly but they have been enhanced by integrating directly with the Big Update Box. For more information about how to use this great new feature, view the knowledge base article about it.

Revamped Menus

We have re-organized the navigation system for Present.ly to make it easier to find what you’re looking for in a single click.

Most options have been added to drop-down menus allowing you to quickly and easily access different parts of the application. Additional navigation will appear in the sidebar as necessary.

Better User/Group Listings

The user and group listings have been optimized to make it easy to find who or what you’re looking for and get information quickly.

In addition to being able to browse by letter, the information has been reorganized in a simple tabular form.

Dead Simple Invitations

The invitation system has been made easier than ever. When you click on the “Invite” link to invite more people to join your network, a sidebar will slide over allowing you to invite more users without interrupting your workflow in the slightest.

Improvements All Around

While this post lists some of the biggest changes to the user interface, there are many more throughout the application. We tried hard to analyze the pain points of usability and make them better where and whenever we could.

We hope you enjoy the additions. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next post in our Feature Week series!

This past weekend at SXSW 2009 we announced the brand-new launch of Presently.com. Presently.com is a public microblogging network for professionals powered by the Present.ly platform. We believe that microblogging has an amazing amount of potential inside the workplace, but we also want to provide a public forum for professional conversation. Presently.com is our way to achieve that goal.

We encourage anyone who uses or enjoys Present.ly to sign up for Presently.com as well. It has all of the same features as the internal application but you will be able to connect to other professionals around the world. In addition, we will be working on ways to tie the two services more closely together, so stay tuned for that!

When we say that Presently.com is running the Present.ly platform, we don’t mean that it’s running a souped-up or heavily modified version of the application. Presently.com uses the exact same technology as every single instance of Present.ly and we think that the cross-pollination of Presently.com will bring great new ideas and innovations into Present.ly now and in the future.

We look forward to seeing you all on Presently.com!

Present.ly is the microblogging tool of SXSW 2009 and we’re also at the show. Come by booth #607 and say hi to Yoshi and Joel from Intridea or Richard Johnson, the founder of HotJobs.com.

If you’re a user of Present.ly you may have noticed lots of big changes this week. We’ll be rolling out a series of blog posts describing the changes and showing you some of the things we’ve been working on starting on Monday, but until then enjoy the weekend and we hope to see some of you at SXSW!