WPCom From Dev

Flying Around With Hovercards

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:00 GMT

Because many of you use twitter.com to read and write tweets, we've been spending some time focusing on ways to improve your experience on the site. Today, we're introducing a feature called Hovercards that will be a handy way to interact with the folks behind each tweet.

On any timeline, as its namesake suggests, Hovercards are cards which appear when you hover over a username or avatar. The cards display additional information about the person and allow you to interact with them while staying within the context of your page.

One way we've found these cards to be useful is to find out more about retweeted people and follow them right there. You can also see more information with an expanded view of the card.

Sending direct messages to people you follow will also be possible with Hovercards so you can interact with tweeters without having to move off the page.

Hovercards will be rolled out in stages so not all of you will be seeing them right away.

Special Event: Digg Dialogg LIVE with Toyota's US President

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:00 GMT

Hi everyone -

Let's make some news!

In light of the recent controversy around the Toyota vehicle recall, Digg is hosting an exclusive Digg Dialogg LIVE event just days before the car maker testifies before Congress. We know there are a lot of open questions about how Toyota is dealing with this situation, and we're giving Toyota's top US executive, Jim Lentz, the opportunity to address them.

Author:

Mike Maser

Best of Digg: January Comments

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:51 GMT

We all know that Digg is a fantastic resource for discovering the most interesting content the Web has to offer. But just as entertaining as the submissions are the conversations the Digg community builds around the news stories, funny images and quirky videos that hit the homepage.

Author:

T.J. DeGroat

Filter and browse

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:03 GMT

Now that we've gotten some housework out of the way, we've been able to spend the first few weeks of 2010 finishing off some new features and correcting some long term annoyances. We think you'll enjoy these, a lot!

Bookmark Display options

The Delicious bookmark display options were spread all over the page and subsequently there was more than one place to control how you view your content. So we combined them all and placed them to the right of the Tagbar, just beneath the bookmark count.

Privacy filter: This has been requested so many times and unfortunately put on the back burner in place of other features. We figured it was time for it to finally hit the streets. You can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public.

Send recipients: (display of for:, @twitter & email addresses): The community is clearly divided on whether or not they want this information displayed or not, so we decided to give you the ability to 'show' or ‘hide' that information. If you don't want to see the history of who you've sent bookmarks to, you can hide them.

Open bookmarks in: Something else that both you and the Delicious team have been divided on. Should bookmarks open in the same window or a new tab? Well, we thought we'd let you decide want you want to do.

Tag options

Somewhat related to Bookmark Options, we also moved the ‘Tag Options' out of the blue action box and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed. Here you get the same functionality as before, it's just closer to the tags.

Browse these bookmarks

We've created a new feature that saves you the trouble of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row.

Click the new link in the action in the upper right hand corner of a users page to see it in action

The feature opens the first bookmark and displays a small frame at the top of the page. From here you can paginate forwards through the bookmarks.

We're still working on the feature and more functionality will be added over the coming months, but based on how useful we've found it, we wanted to give you a chance to start using it sooner rather than later. We'd love to get your feedback on this feature and suggestions for other features. We know what we want to add to it, but your responses will help us gauge what we should work on adding next.

Beyond these features we've improved the tag management functionality on our mobile site and while you might not notice the changes, we also fixed 50+ other minor bugs here and there.

What next?

There are a few long outstanding pet peeves that we want to get addressed before we tackle some of the larger projects planned for 2010. There will also be some more tweaks to current functionality that give better access to the great content we all help generate everyday, not to mention the ability to look up and connect to other friends that use Delicious. All of this we hope to give you before the end of March, plus a few other benefits we know you'll love, but can't spill the beans on just yet.

Keep bookmarking!

Simon

Offical Twitter Developer Conference, Chirp!

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:01 GMT

There are more than fifty thousand registered applications on the Twitter platform. These applications represent the creativity, ingenuity, and talent of a growing number of developers and companies building innovative new ways to interact with the Twitter information network. There are thousands of individuals who work on Twitter—over one hundred of these individuals actually work at 795 Folsom Street in San Francisco but many platform developers work in offices, coffee shops, apartments, and even friend's couches around the world.

We want to get together with some of you and celebrate the chutzpah that goes into so many of the apps built on the Twitter platform with our first ever official Twitter conference especially for developers called Chirp. The word Tweet is a noun defined as the chirp of a small or young bird. The Twitter ecosystem is still very young so naming this conference Chirp felt right. For all the details and information about the event please visit Chirp, The Official Twitter Developer Conference web site. Carsonified are helping us so it's going to be awesome. See you there!

Now Trending: Local Trends

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:20 GMT

Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations. It's interesting to know that one topic can now spread across the world in real-time, and Trends help us discover which of those topics are paramount on a global scale.

As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we've fully launched so everyone can use it.

The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation, but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those São Paulo, Brazil?

Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you. We’ll be improving this feature over time to provide more locations, languages, and data through our API.

Testing at Digg

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:55 GMT

The Quality Assurance team at Digg is always looking for new ways to break things. We use a combination of unit and automated functional tests to make sure our code is working properly.

Author:

Jeremy McCarthy

Hope for Haiti

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:22 GMT

Photo courtesy Agência Brasil.

Since President René Préval and others issued appeals for humanitarian aid, there has been a massively coordinated global response to begin rebuilding Haiti. In addition to governments and organizations doing their part, technology has played a meaningful role. Donations accepted via SMS, Facebook attracting and educating thousands of concerned individuals, Google providing satellite imagery tools to relief workers, iTunes and Download to Donate converting everyday purchases into emergency funding—software augments humanity in a meaningful way and the arts unite us.

We're thrilled to have been invited to join a stunning assemblage of industries and individuals who are combining forces to raise proceeds for Haiti and make certain that the life cycle of this particular humanitarian mission extends long after the initial burst of compassion. Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief will be the most widely distributed telethon in history both internationally and across all media platforms. This broadcast marks the first US based telethon to air in China as well. On the evening of Friday, January 22, 2010 global citizens will come together in support of those in need.

The lineup for this program includes more than one hundred of the biggest names in film, television, and music. Proceeds from the telethon will go to The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, United Nations World Food Programme, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and Yele Haiti Foundation. This effort can be a testament to the positive global impact we're capable of achieving when we focus on a common goal. Tune in however you like and contribute if you can. We've curated additional resources and suggestions at Hope140.org.

WordPress Foundation

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:38 GMT

It is with extremely great pleasure that I point you to the first post at the new WordPress Foundation site. Not only am I excited about the things that will happen under the auspices of the Foundation, I'm excited to see a site running the 3.0 development version and the nascent theme called 2010. Go check it out for yourself.

The Power of Suggestions

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:56 GMT

Hi, I'm Josh and I work in the product team at Twitter. One of the areas I'm working on is helping new users get started so they know how to find and discover what interests them. Today we're making the first of many changes here to help people ease into the twitterverse by finding and following accounts that interest them.

Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow that appeal to their interests, and finding their friends and colleagues who tweet. Over time, we've learned that by making suggestions of who to follow, we can help users get going more easily on Twitter. In our new design, we're taking some steps to continue to improve this process. Once a user signs up and selects what they're interested in, we show them some accounts that relate to that interest. Next, we help them find their friends and colleagues by checking their address books, and third we give them a chance to search for anyone we or they missed in this process.

We've found that the power of suggestion can be a great thing to help people get started, but it's important that we suggest things relevant to them. We've created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists. These lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed. We also have a set of "Staff Picks" that are manually selected by Twitter employees as some of our favorites. Given the recent tragedy in Haiti, we've also created a special "Staff Picks for Haiti" to get updated news and content on what's happening there.

We're really excited about this change, and look forward to continually improving the experience for all users to discover the best content and get the most out of Twitter.