11 days ago I posted the launch notice for Triply. The only other place where I publicized it was on the Foursquare Apps list here. It was very surprising for me that given no “advertisement”, no web design and very little features it managed for 11 days to score:

• 103 user accounts – 83 Foursquare and 22 Facebook
• 2226 actions performed around the site
• 651 visits
• 432 visitors
• 10 Twitter followers
• 14 Facebook page fans
• 2 Feature requests in UserVoice (completed)

I used real time analytics (Woopra) to monitor the users navigation flow (not that there are many pages to navigate around) and that helped me to optimize the experience, especially in terms of login flow. For example instead of asking the user to sign in with Foursquare or Facebook to share a trip I redesigned it to show the actual page and only prompt for login when the user needs to import Checkins. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the actual thing is priceless.

Other new features since launch are:

• Facebook Places Checkins support
• Browse trips interface where a user can browser trips, days out and experiences by City, Country and latest
• Allow trips to be downloaded as a .GPX file which users can open with Google Earth and Garmin sat navs. Adding support for other geo formats for other satnavs won’t be hard either.
• A lot of polish and fixes in the backend. Thanks god for ELMAH, which helped me log all problems around the site.

What’s next?

I am on a cross road at the moment as I need:

1. A web design (well overdue)
2. Someone to bounce ideas off and vice-versa (co-founder?) in which direction to take Triply as I think there are many directions Triply can go. For example I can make it the bit.ly for sharing trips/days out, etc or I can make it a trip diary type of thing by pulling and displaying photos of the trip from Flickr (using EXIF location data and search), etc. All fun ideas.

But how do both of those fit together? Doesn’t the design depend on the future features and vice-versa?

I have released version 0.5 of PicasaUploader - the simple PicasaWeb uploader tool. Changes:

• Add support for uploading videos.
  • Supported files are: .avi, .mpeg, .mpg, .wmv, .3gp, .asf, .mp4, .mov. However PicasaWeb can still reject any of those if it doesn’t like it. Note also that videos won’t be playable in the album immediately because they have to be postprocessed by PicasaWeb.
• File size limits: 20MB for photo files and 100MB for video files.

Get it here.

Video Upload

Just noticed that I can toggle a stereoscopic view in Google Maps Street View. Funky. However I truly dislike stereoscopic “3D”, so I doubt I will ever be using this feature.

I started at IBM UK (Hursley Labs) on Monday but it is only today that I got my permanent badge with all the security clearance added for the ultra confidential work I will be doing. One of the goodies when working in the restricted area is that only the chosen ones get access to the proper coffee machine which makes excellent espresso coffee only 10p each.

IBM

Yesterday evening I noticed that one can now track the progress of his Domino’s Pizza order live:

Domino's Pizza Tracker

The security warnings when deploying unsigned applications from Visual Studio to a real Windows Mobile device can get very annoying. Thankfully they can be disabled with a hack and here is how.

Using the Remote Registry Editor supplied with Visual Studio and with the Windows Mobile SDK installed change the following key value from 0 to 1 (and vise-versa to reset the change)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policies\Policies\0000101a = 1

That’s it.

I just saw for the first time an advert in a YouTube video. Notice the “Ads by Google“. The video in question is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sekLEG8xsOs .

Just stumbled upon this awesome Twitter Gadget for Gmail. It not only adds a status update widget on the side but also a full interface to twitter as part of Gmail. Really cool and the interface is much nicer than the Twitter web page IMHO. Screenshot below. The Gadget can be found at http://twittergadget.appspot.com

To install:

1.   In Settings –> Labs enable “Add any gadget by URL” from the list.

2.   In Settings –> Gadgets –> Add https://twittergadget.appspot.com/gadget-gmail.xml .

You could also enable “Navbar drag and drop” so you can move the gadget up and down if you want.

Twitter Gmail Widget

The story of the Google Chrome Logo

Source: http://www.onecomics.it/12/09/2008/google-sfida-microsoft-con-chrome/