Author Archive for Andreas Stephan

Twitter directly from your Livestream, find your friends on six groups

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at August 25, 2008 in six groups, Features and Functions. 5 Comments

Yesterday’s release brings some new cool features and one major bugfix to sixgroups.com:

Twitter-Backchannel

You can now send a copy of your Livecommunity posts to Twitter:

erlenzeisig

When sending tweets from sixgroups.com you can choose between eight different icons to express your current mood. We also use these icons to identify posts from sixgroups.com to prevent them from showing up in the Livestream a second time.

mood

Global Twitter search

Up till today the Livestream would only show Tweets from sixgroups users.  Now you can also chose to display Tweets from the global Twitter search.

Find your friends on sixgroups.com

Finding people on sixgroups.com you already know by email has just become a lot easier. Import your contacts from your webmail adress book (eg. Gmail, MSN, Yahoo, etc) and we will tell you, who of your mail contacts already has a sixgroups.com account. Contacts who are not on sixgroups.com yet, can be invited to join.  Of course we do not store your email address or password for this service.

Safari overhaul

So far we have treated Safari as a second class citizen. With this release we have fixed some JavaScript issues and a login problem in the Livecommunities related to pretty strict third party cookie regulations in Safari. We are happy to announce that all known Safari bugs have been eliminated or worked around with the current release (tested on the Safari 3.1).

OpenID fixes for Yahoo OpenIDs

A bug with OpenID Login with Yahoo OpenIDs discovered by Bernd Schmitz on Saturday night , that made us precautiously disable OpenID logins in general for ~24h, has been fixed too. When people tried logging into sixgroups.com using only http://yahoo.com as OpenID URL, the system stored a wrong OpenID for those users. Instead of using the proper Yahoo OpenID URL, which the server returned after authenticating  (e.g. http://flickr.com/photos/username ), http://yahoo.com got saved as their OpenID in the database. When these users then tried logging in with http://yahoo.com as OpenID URL, they ended up being logged in as the first user that was found the DB with this URL (in this case the user art99). Luckily only two users were affected, the error has been fixed and OpenID Login is now fully functional again. We are really sorry for the caused inconvenience.

Livecommunity for Going Solo Leeds Conference

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at August 5, 2008 in goingsolo and Cooperation. 0 Comments

sixgroups.com will be a media sponsor of the next Going Solo Conference, an educational web conference which will be held in Leeds, UK on September 12th, 2008.
Our advisory board member Stowe Boyd introduced the Livecommunity to Going Solo organizer Stephanie Booth who integrated the Livecommunity on the conference website yesterday. She also posted a really nice explanation on how to participate on her blog. sixgroups.com also offers premium packages for conferences. Feel free to inquire about these if you are interested.

The Livecommunity on going-solo.net will aggregate everything happening on major web 2.0 media services (flickr, Technorati…) related to the Going Solo conference. Just join the community and tag you photos, videos ang blogposts with “goingsolo” and use the Twitter hastag #goingsolo to make your media appear on the Going Solo website. We hope to provide a service, that will add to the overall experience of the conference and foster communication and interaction among its visitors.

Privacy galore ;) - Private groups and forum for your community

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at July 21, 2008 in Features. 1 Comment

Last weekend we deployed a small bugfix release that adds to overall stability and performance of sixgroups.com. The only visible change we applied is fairly small but has been requested by several users for quite some time: you can now set your forum and groups to private, so only members of your ommunity can access them. You can change these settings by clicking “Features” under the “Admin” panel of your community.

six groups Livecommunity - new WordPress widget

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at July 8, 2008 in six groups, Cooperation and Features. 0 Comments

Matthias Pfefferle, blogger at http://notizblog.org/ and gifted programmer at Communipedia has just released a small wordpress plugin that makes integrating the Livecommunity into a WordPress blog even easier. All you need to do is copy the plugin to your WordPress blog installation, activate it and paste the Livecommunity code into the textarea. That’s it. No more template editing needed! Great work. Thanks a lot to Matthias for providing the plugin to the public! Download the plugin from his blog.

New design, smart features, blogging in English

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at July 4, 2008 in six groups and Features. 1 Comment

We have finally launched our new design across the whole platform. Six groups now looks much cleaner and  has a more consistent user interface:
Now you always find the most important user actions on the top right of every page. Most sections are foldeable and the tab navigation now always provides a link to your profile. Let us know what you think in the comments.

What else is new?

We are blogging in English now
Why are we writing in English? Well, a Livecommunity is for every website around the globe. We want to reach more people with news and background information about six groups.

Replies and media recognition for the Livestream
Now, you can reply to any item in the Livestream and refer to these discussions via permalink. This turns the Livestream into a lightweight forum. What do you think?

Any image-URL or YouTube-URL that you use in a Livestream post is replaced by the referred media automatically.

Post URLs to livestream

Enhanced profiles
We restructured the personal profile pages - all your information is accessible in one place from every community. To strengthen the global character of a six groups membership you see all user activity, friends and communities on each profile page.

Brush up your community - upload your own header image
As promised for quite some time you can now add a custom header image to your community to make your community look even nicer. Check out  for an example

Upload custom header image

Advertising
As nothing in life is for free we have integrated ads on sixgroups.com. We tried to keep them as subtle as possible and to make them integrate into the design as smoothly as possible. If you do not want ads to appear in your communities, we are going to offer a premium feature that allows you to turn ads off. If you need this feature earlier, let us know and we will work something out for you.

We hope you like the new release and we are looking forward to reading your feedback here.

Community Widgets, Du, Smileys

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at January 17, 2008 in Functions and Internals. 2 Comments

Eben haben wir wieder ein neues Release online gestellt. Hier die wichtigsten Änderungen im Überblick:

Widgets für Websitebetreiber und Blogger
Für Besitzer einer Webseite oder eines Blogs bieten wir jetzt zwei Widgets an, die man ohne großen Aufwand auf (fast) jeder Webseite einbinden kann.
Die Seiten, die ein Widget einbinden, werden auf der entsprechenden Community als Partnersites aufgeführt.
So entsteht ein Netzwerk von Webseiten, die mit der Community in thematischem Bezug stehen.
Top5 Partnerseiten einer Community Partnersites der Community

Widget1: Neueste Besucher dieser Website aus einer Community
Dieses Widget zeigt an, wenn ein Mitglied aus einer Community Deine Webseite besucht hat (auch rechts in der Sidebar eingebunden):
Letzte Besuche von Communitymitglieder auf der Website

Widget2: Neuste Mitglieder einer six groups Community
Das Widget sieht im Prinzip aus wie das Besucher Widget, zeigt aber immer die neusten Mitglieder einer six groups Community.

In der nächsten Zeit werden wir viele weitere Widgets vorstellen, die es ermöglichen eine Website zum Teil einer großen Community werden zu lassen.
Du!
Nachdem sich gezeigt hat, dass die meisten Communities aus dem Freizeitbereich stammen, haben wir uns entschieden, die Ansprache auf der Seite auf “Du” zu ändern.
Deshalb heißen “Kontakte” jetzt auch “Freunde”.

Neue Smileys
Auf vielfachen Wunsch haben wir neue lustige Smileys und einen erweiterten Richtext Editor eingeführt:

Rich Text Editor
neue Smileys

Kleine Verbesserungen und Bugfixes
Wie immer haben wir auch einige kleinere Fehler behoben und Dinge optimiert, die niemand sieht ;)

Your social Network….

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at December 29, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Eben auf Google Blogoscoped gefunden. ;)
your-social-network.gif

Frohe Weihnachten

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at December 25, 2007 in Internals. 0 Comments

Allen six groups Nutzern, Bloglesern, Freunden und Bekannten wünschen wir besinnliche Weihnachsttage und einen guten Start ins Jahr 2008. Vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse an six groups. Wir freuen uns auf ein spannendes nächstes Jahr mit vielen neuen Features und zahlreichen neuen six groups Communities.

Was bringt Social Networking?

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at November 23, 2007 in Internals. 0 Comments

Die Leute von der Commoncraft Show haben mal sehr gut erklärt, wozu man eigentlich Social Networking Sites/ Communities braucht bzw. wie die Nutzer davon profitieren.

Medium: www.youtube.com
Link: www.youtube.com

Das Besondere  an six groups ist, dass die beschriebenen Netzwerkeffekte nicht nur innerhalb einer Community auftreten,  sondern über alle six groups Netzwerke hinweg, was den Nutzen natürlich stark steigert.

Neue Funktionen: Datenfelder bearbeiten, Profildatenerweiterung

Published by
Andreas Stephan
at November 23, 2007 in Functions and Internals. 0 Comments

Gestern Nacht haben wir wieder eine neue Version onlie gestellt. Hier die wichtigsten Neuerungen im Einzelnen:

  • Profilfragen bearbeiten
    Den Editor zum Anlegen der Profilfragen einer Community haben wir komplett überarbeitet und benutzbarer gemacht. Neben den bisherigenAntworttypen “kurze Antwort” und “lange Antwort” haben wir die neuen Antworttypen “Webseite” und “Auswahlliste” eingebaut. Bei der Auswahlliste könenn Communitygründer eine feste Liste von Antwortmöglichkeiten festlegen. Außerdem können Communitygründer die Datenfelder ihrer Communities jetzt nachträglich bearbeiten, neue Fragen hinzufügen oder alte löschen.
  • Userprofile
    Auf vielfachen Wunsch haben wir das Feld “Homepage” mit in alle Profile aufgenommen. Außerdem gibt es ein Feld für den Twitter Usernamen. Darüber hinaus können Nutzer ihr Profil jettz von der Indizierung in Suchmaschinen ausnehmen.
  • Austreten
    Auch wenn wir natürlich nicht hoffen, dass diese Funktionen häufig genutzt werden, können Nutzer jetzt auch aus Communities austreten und ihr Userprofil komplett löschen.
  • Performance
    Unter der Haube hat sich ebenfalls einiges getan, was die Ladezeiten der Seite reduziert.
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