Livecommunity

25.08.2008

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:

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.

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.

14.08.2008

We are very happy that our technology has real impact on peoples lives. In this case the Livestream of the “Zuckerhunde”-Community was helpful twice to dog owners who’s dogs are diabetic.
Birte Oldenburg, the founder of the community, explaines in an article on pr-blogger.de (in German) why it is so useful that every visitor of her website has direct access to the chat in the Livecommunity. This enables the visitors to see who is online and gives the possibility to communicate instantly with each other.
And in the case of the two dogs this was the right advice to the right time.

13.08.2008

Joscha, Christian and Stefan from Salon91 just launched the latest edition of their football* pool game (in German “Tippspiel“).
It is configured  for the upcoming season of the German Bundesliga. Everyone can run an instance of the game on a subdomain, e.g. - http://salon91.tipptotal.de - or on their own domain.
What role do we play in this?
Six groups enables several websites to be part of one big community. In this case Salon91’s customers who get their own installation can connect it with the six groups  Tipptotal community, and enable their visitors to communicate with its crazy betting pool crowd.
Salon91 is planning to change the tags of the Livestream to popular topics like “DFB Pokal”, “Herbstmeister”, “Ribery” , etc. from time to time. The Livestream will always gather relevant content from the web for the participating websites.
This is great for all participants because users get to know each other, discover other websites and topic related content.
Check it out:
http://tipptotal.sixgroups.com/
We invite everyone who loves football to challenge us in our football pool game here:
http://salon91.tipptotal.de !
*we mean soccer football not football football

05.08.2008

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.

04.08.2008

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!