One of the things I’m getting asked a lot at the moment is “why can I add tags and not filter contacts by them?”. Well actually you can, we’ve just hidden it away a bit for now…
If you type in a tag into the “quicksearch” box you will be able to click it and see the contact list filtered to this tag.
This makes exploring hot prospects or Twitter people a breeze. You can then clear this by clicking the “people” link above the contacts directory. You can expect this to improve in the near future.
We’ve just put live a few sweet little updates to Rusic.com.
We’ve improved the “discuss” button from the previous orange link. It’s only a little change but the improvement is big. It’s much more obvious now what is expected of the user.
We also improved the footer and more importantly improved stability. You also no longer need to log out to view the buckets on the home page. Expect a big update in this area soon…
Check out the lovely new moderation area for the yet to be publicly released PRO version. It enables quick moderation of comments and ideas within a bucket. Nothing is deleted it’s just deactivated.
There’s also a new webhook system for firing events to external services, meaning integration with mailing providers is pretty straight forward amongst many other cool things.
Also GoApe is the latest PRO user for their summer campaign as you can see Rusic is fully skinnable… We’ll save that for another post.
Interesting posts, advice and tips! Here’s another batch of the links we’ve been looking at this last week.
Enjoy.
Should you add contests to your marketing strategy? Here’s 4 reasons why you should!
How do you define what quality is? Seth Godin explains.
If you’re looking for a way to setup a multilingual site in WordPress try the qTranslate plugin.
Super easy to use!
An awesome way to interact with Rack applications from your browser. Perfect for local development and staging environments.
Learn and improve agile development through Tetris. A cool presentation by Mark Daggett
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Join their global community!
Mentors in new government network “prevented from giving bespoke business advice”. Find out why.
When we’re working on projects for clients there’s always new ideas being thought up throughout the project. Ideas are great as an indication of a positive development.
The other side to this positivity coin though is the impending doom of “feature creep”. Sometimes its inevitable. It’s just the way it is. Get used to it! Over the years we’ve created a system that has evolved into something that seems to work for the client and for us. It’s even spurred us to build an application to manage the process.
We call this process the “bucket of love”. It’s a virtual bucket that all ideas go into. The term is fluffy and golden enough to take the edge off of a client feeling like they’re being ignored. They’re not of course, it’s just a sound way to remove feature creep until the end of a sprint. When we reach the end of the sprint, if it’s still a good idea we can discuss implementing it. Voila, everybody is happy.
This brought us to actually creating a system to do this and thus Rusic.com was born. A user logs in with their social account (Twitter or Facebook) and they then create “idea buckets”. Each idea bucket holds the basic premise of a question, “how can we improve sprint X?”. Everybody can contribute their ideas, “like” and comment on other peoples ideas. It’s a great way to see what is interesting (and what isn’t).
Interest doesn’t necessarily mean “like” either. I can make a negative comment but it still shows that I’m interested in an idea, just like in a real conversation.
There’s also a lot of social goodness going so that each idea bucket gains some momentum. Momentum is necessary for the generation of ideas. Ideas breed ideas…
We’ve pushed a new product live this week. Rusic.com - It’s for generating ideas based around a topic or question.
It’s early days yet so we’ve got loads that we want to do, we just didn’t want to go down the “beta” route with this. It’s either useful or not?
We describe it as social ideas; in that it only works via Twitter or Facebook and it’s very simple to use and appears to self promote. The basic premise is to generate ideas or responses to questions.
For example:
“How can we improve our local playground?”
“What can we do to improve our website?”
“What shall I wear to the wedding on Tuesday?”
You can even use it to have Twitter conversations that need more than 140 chars.
A great feature that’s coming soon in a paid tier is custom skinning and domains. This opens up all kinds of possibilities as Fat Face our first paid customer demonstrates. The skinning engine is liquid as used by Shopify so it’s already easy to do.
We’ve setup an “idea bucket” for how we can improve Rusic so please let us know how we can improve. We’re not doing the beta thing, we’ve just put it out there and we’ll see how it goes.
We really do want your ideas for feedback so please let us know.
