We’ve just released version 1.1.8 of the Userplane SDK–our first release of 2012! 1.1.8 gets us off to an exciting start in the new year, and marks the jumping off point for the next big step for our platform.
But first, I want to highlight the improvements in our 1.1.8 release. Webmessenger was the primary focus for us in 1.1.8 based on customer feedback, so we devoted much of our focus to fixing small issues that, when added up, amounted to a negative impact on the user experience:
- We resolved 14 bugs related solely to IE8–we love Internet Explorer! (/sarcasm)
- General improvements to Webmessenger’s handling of multiple conversations and conversation-switching
- Improvements and bug fixes around initiating A/V sessions
- If you’d like to read the full list of improvements in our 1.1.8 release, please click here.
In 2011, we released a new build approximately once every three or four weeks. While we anticipate a similar schedule for 2012, we’re going to exempt ourselves until the end of February. Why? Well…
…Ever since we undertook the rebuilding of our platform and moved to XMPP for our messaging protocol (and away from Flashcom), we’ve wanted to remove Flash from the platform entirely (for text-only implementations). What does this mean for our publishers? It means faster load load time and rendering of the user interface, and it also lays the groundwork for Userplane compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers.
Now that we’re in a position to remove Flash, our engineers will be focusing for the next month and a half on this next step. It’s a very exciting milestone for us, and will certainly result in quieter-than-usual communication from us. However, our Director of Technology has been known to tweet his development progress. So if you’d like insight into how the process is going, I would recommend following @UserplaneMatt on Twitter.
Happy 2012, and be sure to keep your eyes on our blog for many exciting developments to come!
I like to tell people with whom I’m talking about Userplane that we are a white-label social discovery platform. And I assume that if I get a puzzled look, I’ll be explaining what I mean, exactly, by ‘social discovery.’ But it seems like puzzled looks of late have been wondering what, precisely, ‘white-label’ means. So I guess I’ll save social discovery for another post, and I’ll tackle white-label first.
Can you spot the white-label solution? Userplane lets you leverage your own brand, look and feel, rather than giving free advertising to someone else.
To the point: we think of white-label as YOUR label. When you choose Userplane, you choose to own your brand over someone else’s. Take Meebo, for example; add Meebo for free to allow your users to connect with Facebook friends while on your site, and in return you reward them with free advertising (their logo is all over their bar). Sure, they’ll give you a cut of the ad revenue as a consolation prize, but in doing so you hand over your identity–your BRAND–to someone else for a significant feature on your site.
Then there’s our competition for hosted chat. 123FlashChat, AVChat and Flashcoms (to name a few) offer skinning of their integrations. Most, if not all, of our competitors use a Flash interface which severely limits the ability to customize the UI/UX. You can change colors, fonts and labels, which I guess is sort of nice. AVChat goes so far as to say you can use CSS…only to say two sentences later that it’s not TRULY CSS.
On the flip side, there’s Userplane. Our new platform has an entirely Flash-free UI. In fact, it’s JavaScript and CSS-based. And I’m talking TRUE CSS. So yeah, you can change colors and apply a basic skin. Or, you can style your own CSS and completely override the default Userplane skin. You can even add custom icons to the interface in place of our own, or in place of data labels.
See, at our core, we believe that online communities were built to connect users with a common interest. It doesn’t matter whether that interest is to learn a new language, play games or fantasy sports, consume news and information or meet new people for friendship or love. The fact is, people join online communities because they believe in the purpose for which the community exists.
Offloading users to their Facebook social graph while on your site doesn’t accomplish anything to further deepen the pull users feel toward the community. And adding Flash-based features is like buying a car because the salesperson told you that you can customize anything by changing the paint color.
Your brand, and how your users interact with it, is a core pillar of a successful online business. And we believe in making available all the tools at your disposal to create an experience that your users truly identify with when they choose to engage in your community. This approach admittedly makes us different. But I think it also makes us the best.
SDK 1.1.6 has been released just in time for us Userplaners to kick back with some turkey, stuffing and wine for a long Thanksgiving weekend. Just like all our Thanksgiving turkeys, SDK 1.1.6 is a fairly stuffed release, with lots of features added, enhanced and fixed.
One of my personal favorites has been an API-side additions in sendOfflineMessages and sendArchive. Together, these APIs enable you to do lots of cool things with chat transcripts and messages sent to users when they’re not online. The most practical implementation of these APIs would be something akin to Facebook-messaging, where you can send a message to anyone and, if they’re offline, it will be delivered to an inbox.
Like sendOfflineMessages, sendArchive can be used to deliver entire chat transcripts to users at the close of their conversation, like GTalk does with GMail. Pretty great stuff, and a neat way to extend the functionality of your Userplane SDK integration.
Other features and enhancements of note in the SDK 1.1.6 release:
- Webchat Lite is now available as an embedded experience;
- Ensure your users don’t miss a notification with customized timeouts;
- Pending message indicators now persist when a user navigates or refreshes.
For our complete 1.1.6 release notes, just click here.
This article, written by TheMediaBriefing, is a great introduction into a narrow way many publishers think about monetizing their free sites through ads (with content like this, you should be following them on Twitter). And how to broaden your perspective to truly maximize the potential of your site.
For many online communities, whether start-up or mature, the size of their user base may be viewed as the end-all, be-all. It’s not uncommon for communities (especially dating sites) to purchase users from 3rd parties to build the site up and market a larger user base. Profit, then, is seen as “more users equals more visits equals higher CPMs and ad revenue.” Easy, right? Anyone can be a millionaire internet mogul!
Not so fast. This theory often depends not just on a large user base, but that the large user base cycles through the site often enough to drive up the visitor and page view numbers. Or, if you’re not cycling through your existing users, you’re going to have to find new ones. Lots of them.
So rather than narrowing your thinking to strictly page views and visitors, think too of the true star of the show: engagement. The site that wins in the long run doesn’t always start with the largest user base. Rather, the site that wins starts with a very engaged user base.
To understand levels of engagement, expand your focus past page views and visitors to session length and return frequency–indicators that your user base finds your site’s content worth returning to. These measurements lend themselves to helping you not only figure out how well you’re monetizing your site, but how well you’re monetizing each USER.
Think of your community’s value this way: you can make the same amount of money by getting 10 users to your site who view one page and then churn, or by getting 2 users to your site who view 5 pages before logging out. Which type of user is more valuable? If you focus on building your site out in a way the makes users want to spend more time on your site, and adding features that draw users in, your users become more valuable.
For free ad-based sites that want to add chat features to drive engagement, this has been a traditionally tricky decision. “Do I engage my users with a pop-out or embedded chat experience, at the cost of page views and ad revenue?” Luckily for you, Userplane has a new solution ideal for communities with this business model: Presencebar.
Unlike most hosted, white-label chat experiences, Presencebar is persistent, and is not a pop-out window or embedded element. As a persistent IM experience (with the capability to support group chat), your users can engage with others in their social graph, all while remaining focused on your site’s valuable content, rather than being drawn away from it.
We would love to show you what Presencebar can do for your community. If you’re interested in discussing how Userplane’s solutions can increase the value of your users by driving engagement, drop us a line.
SDK 1.1.5 was released today by our engineers. I’ll highlight a few fixes/improvements below, but I want to talk about one really cool feature implementation, in particular.
With the release of Presencebar, we’ve introduced the concept of a hover card. The hover card is essentially like a mini-profile that a user can view when mousing over a buddy in their buddy list. Typically, our publishers will populate these “mini-profiles” with A/S/L, or other basic, common data.
With the 1.1.5 release, though, we’ve added the ability to dynamically pass data into the hover card when using the simple single-sign-on method of integration. For example: say your community is online gamers. When a user hovers over another user in their roster, you can now display things like: last game played, number of points earned, number of badges earned, etc. The custom hover card expands the functionality of Userplane exponentially. And it means that you can take existing engagement tools you’ve already implemented, and tie them directly into the chat experience.
There’s a lot more in this release, as well. Here’s a quick summary of some of our other favorite additions with SDK 1.1.5:
- Updates to Presencebar CSS;
- Buddylist now groups users by their online/offline status, and alphabetically within those groups;
- Support for setBuddylist added with support to update Buddylist when friends are added
If you’d like to view the full release notes for SDK 1.1.5, please click here.