Last week we rolled out a new release. The most obvious changing covers the height of the Livecommunity (have a look at the top of this blog). Several webmasters and users mentioned that the Livecommunity lacks of visibility. That was a positive surprise as we thought that the Livecommunity should be as discreet as possible. So we added some pixels 
. Enhancing the visibility of the Livecommunity is one of our main goals for the next weeks.
Another apparent add-on is the search field on the upper right side. The Livecommunity’s search feature includes 3 searches in 1:
- Site search,
- results of the community’s Livestream,
- results from all of the other six groups Livecommunities.
The search feature is optional. There is a special parameter in the Livecommunity’s JavaScript code to turn this feature on or off.
“Inside” the Livecommunity you’ll find the latest visitors and the partnersites of a Livecommunity. In this context we introduced an administration area where founders can manage their partnersites.
The response feature for Livestream shouts is not new, however we have optimized it’s visibility:
You also have extended privacy options. Just set if your Livestream postings (including external resources such as Tweets) should be indexed by search engines and if you want to be displayed in six groups widgets.
If you’d like something to say drop us an email or twitter us here. Your feedback is always highly appreciated!
The Online Marketing Düsseldorf (OMD) takes place in Dusseldorf on September 17th and 18th, 2008. With its wide-ranging exhibition offering for the digital marketing economy, including congress, workshops and specials, the fair has emerged as one of the most important platforms in the online marketing industry. In 2007 there were more than 250 exhibitors and more than 11.000 visitors.
Djure Meinen of 50hz who is in charge of the social media activities of the Online Marketing Düsseldorf installed the Livecommunity on their official blog theME08 to connect visitors and exhibitors of the fair. Furthermore the Livestream aggregates all media related to the fair which is posted to flickr, sevenload and blogs (Technorati).
Twitterers please use #OMD or #theme08 as hashtags, media and blogpostst should be tagged theme08.
Sites integrating the theme08 Livecommunity so far:
Join the community now.
We are very happy to announce that one of the most profiled web personalities, Stowe Boyd, joins the advisory team of the INSTANT Communities GmbH, the company behind sixgroups.com.
This exemplifies our approach to an international strategy in which we align six groups not only for the German and European market but for the international web crowd. Stowe will take an important role in our future business development strategy and will be the driving force for penetrating the market for conferences with our Livecommunity.
We first met in Hamburg on the next08 conference where we presented the Livecommunity to the public. On the same day Stowe started his first community and immediately pictured the various opportunities for conferences. What we did not know back in May was, that Stowe had put some work into a prototype back channel system for conferences named “FrontChannel”.
About Stowe Boyd
Stowe Boyd is probably best known for his countless appearances and inspiring talks on conferences all over the world. Apart from this he also publishes insightful articles in his blog /message - have a look. Add it to your RSS readers. It’s definetely worth a read!
About six groups
six groups has been offering community solutions for the rest of us since October 2007. Today six groups provides the Livecommunity, a community application for websites.
It shows the visitors community of a website and enables communication and social networking features among them. Apart from standard community features, like friend request or personal messages, the Livecommunity includes a revolutionary communication tool - the Livestream. The Livestream aggregates all activities in real time: spontaneous conversations and discussions as well as topic-related content from web 2.0 services such as Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr.
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.
That was fast… it took the developers from construktiv (the company behind mister-wong.de and lifestream.fm) only one day to fully integrate the six groups activity feeds into lifestream.fm.
Lifestream.fm is a social media aggregator, which puts all of your online activities in one place. This way your friends can instantly keep up-to-date whenever you write a new blog entry, post pictures on flickr, post videos on YouTube, write on twitter, are active on facebook, and bookmark on Mister Wong… and now also when you are active on six groups.
The service is currently in closed beta. But nevertheless: we have a bunch of invite-codes. Just leave a comment here and we will send you an invite-code.
If you are already a lifestream.fm user all you have to do is to enter your six groups username and all your six groups activities will appear on lifestream.fm.
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.
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.
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
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.
Heute morgen hat es uns erwischt. Einer unserer Server ist ausgefallen und sorgt dafür, dass six groups nur seeeehr langsam zu erreichen ist. Wir möchten uns bei euch für die Unannehmlichkeiten entschuldigen und geben hier ein Update, wenn das Problem behoben ist.
Update: Die Server laufen. six groups ist wieder erreichbar. Sorry für die Umstände.
