Blogging Present.ly

Since we launched, we’ve been hoping to find a better way to handle support requests and documentation. We think we’ve finally found a better solution and are pleased to unveil the brand-new Present.ly support site: http://support.presentlyapp.com/.

The new site allows for public discussion threads as well as a searchable knowledge base that we will be adding to rapidly to help newcomers and old pros alike in being able to better use Present.ly.

We look forward to hearing your suggestions and being able to communicate with you more directly. Thanks!

Today marks the availability of a large number of new features that we’ve been working on for the past weeks to improve your user experience with Present.ly. We hope you find the improvements useful.

New Signup Options

We wanted to give people more flexibility with how users can sign up for accounts. With that in mind, there are now four “signup methods” that you can choose for your accounts:

• Closed: This is the same as the old method; the only way to create a new user is by direct invitation of an administrator. This is also the default option, so no existing accounts will change.
• Access Code: For events and other more open environments, you can use this method to provide an access code that people may use to sign up for the account. Anyone with the code can directly create an account by visiting your account’s subdomain.
• Domain: This allows you to specify an e-mail domain to always allow signups through, even without an invitation. This makes it easy to spread Present.ly within a company. Of course, administrators can still add people to the account that do not have the specified e-mail domain.
• Open: The final option is completely open sign up. Anyone who visits your account subdomain will be able to sign up for an account.

We think that these options will help Present.ly fit the flow of more businesses as well as make it easier for events and other more organic groups to form accounts.

New Customization Options

We want Present.ly to fit with your company perfectly. To that end, we’ve added some new features that make it easier to customize your account to fit your company.

Company Logo: You can now upload your company logo to your account. It will display in the header of your account when logged in and also above the login fields when logged out.

New Theme: We’ve added a new theme to give you greater choice in how your account looks. Just choose ‘Gloss’ from the Account Settings page and you can use it!

Custom Styles: You can also now add custom CSS to your account by selecting the ‘Custom’ theme and adding any CSS you would like. It will be added after all of Present.ly’s default styles.

But Wait, There’s More!

Suggest: If you start typing a user or group name (with an @) or a tag name (with a #) a dialog will come up as you type to help you select what you’re looking for.

Quick Login: You can now jump to the login page for your account from the Present.ly home page. If your e-mail address is on multiple accounts, it will let you choose which one you want to access.

Contextual Privacy Help: We know that getting used to @-replies, direct messages, and the other shortforms used by Present.ly can be a bit overwhelming. To help you out, we’ve added some contextual help that will let you know who your update will be seen by once you post it.

Group Discussion Sidebar: If you’re on a group profile page, you can now send messages to members of the group simply by typing updates in the sidebar. This gives you an easy way to focus on a specific group within the application.

More Informative IMs: Instant messaging notifications will now indicate when a message is a direct message to you as well as some other useful information.

Performance Improvements: We have also released a number of performance improvements designed to make the site run faster. We will be continuing to improve performance in the coming weeks.

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy all of the great new features Present.ly has to offer, and stay tuned for even more in the coming weeks.

This is something that’s been cooking for a while and it’s finally live! If you’re a user of GitHub, the fantastic Git repository hosting service (and open-source megasite), you can now integrate your GitHub commits with Present.ly! Take a look:

Integration is super-easy and can be used in a number of ways. To integrate, just go to the “Admin” section of your GitHub repository and then click on “Services”

From here, you can scroll down to find “Presently” as one of the service integration options. Simply fill out the information, check “Active” and save. You’re ready to go!

The best thing is how it can integrate with Present.ly’s groups functionality. There are three things you can do with the Group Name option:

• Leave it blank. When commits are pushed to the repository, an update will be posted from your account with the information.
• Use a Group Name. If you are the manager of a group, you can put the short name of the group in this field and commits will be broadcast by the group as in the screenshot above.
• System Broadcast. If you are the administrator of a Present.ly account, you can type “system” in the Group Name field and a system broadcast will be generated upon commits being pushed to the repository.

We think this is a fantastic way to keep teams up to date on what’s happening with a project, and we’re happy to be able to share it with you!

Present.ly is proud to sponsor the 2008 Rails Rumble set to kick off in a few short hours. The Rails Rumble is a 48-hour coding marathon in which teams compete to build awesome web applications in a short time. In addition to providing prizes for the winning teams, we also set up an account for the contestants to use during the competition:

The signups are driving along and the conversation is starting; we can’t wait to see how people use it throughout the competition.

Bulk E-Mail Invitations

To coincide with the Rumble we’ve released a few new features. First, you can now bulk invite users by entering comma-separated e-mails in the Administration panel. You can also enter a custom message:

Post to Twitter!

We’ve seen a lot of people wishing that they could dual post to Twitter and Present.ly simultaneously. That’s now possible! Just click on “Settings” and then “Services” to set up your credentials. Sending messages from Twitter is then as simple as typing t! at the start of your message!

We’re really excited about the Rumble and the new features, we hope you enjoy them!

UPDATE: Craig Hockenberry, the author of Twitterrific, has informed me that theway mentioned in this post will not persist if you download a new version. Check out his method in the comments section below!

Twitterrific is a fantastic Twitter client for Mac OS X that I’ve been using for a long time. Thanks to Present.ly’s Twitter-Compatible API, it’s possible to connect to Present.ly using Twitterrific with just a few short modifications! I’ve created a screencast of the process that is embedded below (though I suggest you view the HD Version on Vimeo but here’s the steps for those who don’t want to watch a video:

• Browse to the Twitterrific application in your Applications folder and Ctrl+Click it, selecting “Show Package Contents”
• Open the Contents and Resources directories, then open up the defaults.plist file.
• Modify the baseUrl property to be yoursubdomain.presentlyapp.com/api/twitter
• Modify the protocol property to be https:// instead of http://
• Save the file and launch Twitterrific
• Login using your Present.ly credentials
• Voila!

The integration isn’t perfect (we’d love for the Twitterrific folks to create a more robust implementation!) but you can read your update stream as well as post updates easily using the familiar system. Enjoy!

Since our launch there has been a small group users who have a keen dislike for the 140 character limit imposed by Present.ly. Why create such an arbitrary restriction? Because it keeps the noise down. Micro-update platforms quickly lose their usefulness if they are used the same way that e-mail or instant messages are. It’s for frequent, short updates to make sure that the information stream never becomes overwhelming.

But sometimes there’s really more to say than 140 characters can express. What if you want to share a paragraph of a blog post in which your company was mentioned? What if you’re a programmer looking for some help on some buggy code? It still doesn’t help to pollute the stream with this information, and that’s why we’ve developed a new feature called Text Attachments.

All The Info, None of the Noise

A Text Attachment is any long-form text that is associated with a particular update. It is visible simply by clicking on the “More” link that will appear after the update text on any update that has such an attachment. In addition to allowing you the space to convey more information, you can also format it using a number of different options (including syntax highlighting for most popular programming languages).

We think this is a really exciting feature because it solves a problem that micro-updates have always had without resorting to destroying the underlying principles of the communications method. Just a few uses for this that came up in some of our discussions:

• Sharing pieces of blog posts or articles with a link in the update
• Quickly sharing code amongst developers
• Summarize the answer to a question in the update, then write out a detailed explanation in the attachment
• Give some options for an informal poll
• Share notes from a phone call
• Write a quick list of your tasks for the day

But the real value of this feature will be in the innovative ways you find to work this into your company’s communications flow. We’re excited to hear back about your ideas, so please feel free to post them in the comments!

One More Thing

Since our launch you could post an update to Present.ly via the special e-mail address in the “Device Settings” page. Now with Text Attachments you can write a message with a subject and a body to the same address. The subject will become the update text, the body will become the attachment. So if there’s an e-mail that is pertinent to a group, you could simply forward it to your Present.ly post address and put “@groupname” at the beginning of the subject line.

This integration will make it extremely easy to start conversations about an important e-mail without resorting to endless chains of Reply-Alls.

Seeing is Believing

We’ve put together a short screencast (HD version available here) to show how this new feature works, so please enjoy and ask any questions in the comments on this post!

Some people have been asking if we’re going to be releasing a mobile browser version of Present.ly. Well, we already did! Present.ly launched with a fully functioning mobile version that has been tested on the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile platforms (and should work on any mobile device with a browser).

All you have to do is point the browser at your account (i.e. http://youraccount.presentlyapp.com/) and it should automatically detect that you’re using a mobile device. So if you can’t live for 20 minutes without getting your Present.ly fix (I know I can’t), you should bookmark the mobile version of your account today!

Since our launch we’ve been lucky to see a number of blog and news posts about the product. I just wanted to share a few of them (in no particular order):

• Web 2.0 Expo: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (Wired Epicenter Blog)
• Business microblog tool Present.ly is smarter than Yammer (cnet’s WebWare)
• Present.ly: Twitter For Companies, This Time Done Right (Profy)
• And in this corner…Present.ly packs a solid punch against Yammer (ZDNet)
• Business Review: Present.ly (StartupCFO)
• Enterprise Twitter Heats Up With Present.ly (NevilleHobson.com)

It’s been great to hear all of the feedback (positive and negative); it helps us to build a better product. While it’d be nice to just sit back and read the blog posts as they come in, we’ve been hard at work fine-tuning Present.ly and preparing new features for release (we’ve deployed 14 user-requested changes since our launch on Tuesday). Stay tuned to this blog to always hear the latest about what’s on the horizon for Present.ly!

We’re using CrowdSound to gather and respond to requests and issues that have come up since our launch. You can see and use the widget by clicking “Feedback” at the top of your account, by going to the Feedback Page, or by visiting the hosted feedback page. You’ll see suggestions tagged with a variety of statuses, I just wanted to run through each so that you can understand where your request is in its lifecycle:

• New: We haven’t had a chance to look at this in-depth yet. Stay tuned!
• Under Review: We are discussing our plans and timelines for this feature.
• Planned: This is a feature we plan on implementing in the future.
• In Progress: We are currently working on implementing this suggestion, expect it in the near future.
• Forthcoming: This feature will be coming in the next deployment (usually every 24 to 48 hours).
• Completed: It’s been implemented!
• Not Planned: This is not a feature we plan on implementing at this time. Will always come with a comment as to why.
• Invalid: Usually used for duplicate suggestions or suggestions for things we already have. Will always come with a comment.

We want to be very open about improving Present.ly, and we think that CrowdSound is a great way to help us do that. If you have an account-specific problem, we would encourage you to e-mail support to get the fastest resolution possible. Thanks for the feedback so far, it’s been really useful to help the continued improvement of Present.ly!

If you use Mac OS X, there is a great tool for creating Site-Specific Browsers called Fluid. This great application gives websites the ability to integrate with Growl (a system-wide notification system) and add dock badges. Present.ly takes advantages of these features as you can see:

We have also created a high-resolution icon to use for the Fluid application. Just create a new Fluid browser pointing to your Present.ly subdomain and you’ll be good to go!