Blue Dot Launch Party Photos

A big thank you to everyone that was able to attend the launch party last night. A great time was had by all, as you can see from the photos. A big "thank you" goes out to ".Twist." who hosted this amazing event for us, preparing great food and drink all night. Those folks have an awesome venue and a great club. I've posted a bunch of photos from the evening. "Thanks" here to Matt Hallett, Asayo Urisu, and Kabir Shahani for taking all of the photos (I don't know which ones were Kabir's so they all say Matt and Asayo on them). Please feel free to peruse and comment as much you'd like. We look forward to parting with you all again soon. Blue Dot Launch Party Photos

Developers, start your engines! Blue Dot API now available.

For those of you who have been requesting a development API, this is just a note to let you know that we have posted ours with the corresponding documentation at our new "Developers" area (which you can always find linked from our footer). Here's a direct link. Let us know what you're building and what else you'd like added! http://bluedot.us/Developers.aspx

T Minus 1 Day

So a lot has been going on in Blue Dot land over the past several weeks. Obviously, if you are reading this it's likely you have seen the tremendous work that has gone on in improving the site and adding more ways to interact with your friends. Yeah, I too think it's pretty sweet. There has also been some work in other areas, which unfortunately most of which I cannot talk about on a blog (boo). One thing that can be discussed, however, is the awesome work Jigna, Sung, and Eric have been doing on the launch party. Holy crap is this going to be good - and it's just about one day away. If you are in Seattle, hopefully you recieved an invite and we'll be seeing you there (the rsvp list is long enough now that it seems like most of you will be - which is great ;)). If you are not in Seattle - I'd reccomend you figure out a way to get here by Tuesday at 7p - cause we're really going to party the night away! If you cannot make it here - that sucks, but we'll be sure to get some pics posted here so you can find a way to make it here next time we come up with an excuse to have a huge party :) - Kabir.

New Site Release: 20060815

Welcome, diggers! To digg this release, click here. Today, we are releasing some major improvements to the Blue Dot web site, www.bluedot.us. Personal Messaging - You can now send a message to any user on Blue Dot. Messages from your friends will be in one Inbox, while messages from other Blue Dot users will be in another. You can also attach a personal message to any friend request, which is a nice way to introduce yourself. Comments Tracking - We’ve made it much easier to find the comments your friends are adding to your dots. By clicking on the Comments link on your Blue Dot home page, you can now see all the new comments on your dots since you logged on as well as any follow-up comments on your friends' dots. No more digging through all of your Dots to see if people have responded! Activity Notification - When there are new comments or messages waiting for you, you'll see a "New" notification on your home page highlighting new messages, comments, and friend requests. Tag Improvements - We've implemented some major improvements in tag navigation. Click on any tag in the right hand column and you'll see the related tags displayed. You can add these tags to your previous query by clicking the "+" symbol or "pivot" on a new tag by clicking another tag. Play around with it. It's a fun and powerful way to explore your own or your friends' dots. You can now view and edit all of your own tags. I was amazed to find that I have used 2,500 unique tags. Can anybody compete with that? Dot Permissions - You can now see who each dot has been shared with directly in the Dot display. Look for the "Shared with" field under the title of each dot. Enhanced Feed Support - Our advanced blogging users have asked for expanded auto-Dotting so you can now configure Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds no matter where your blog is hosted. You can now ensure that all of your posts get created as Dots. We hope you like the new features as much as we do. Please send us your feedback on these or other new features you’d like to see in a future release.

Public Domain Dots

Here's a nifty variant on the Domain Dots favlet. If you're on a web site and want to know if anyone on Blue Dot has dotted a page from this site, you can use this favlet: Public Dots In IE, right click and select Add to Favorites... and then select the Links folder. If FireFox, just drag the link to your toolbar. Now whenever you're cruising the web, you can see what other people are saying about that site before you dot yourself.

File under "nifty": Domain Dots

Hey there. I just wanted to file a quick post and let you know about a couple interesting ways that may help you get more out of using Blue Dot. The two things I'm going to tell you about tonight are both variations on a theme - getting Dots for a particular domain (website). 1) Using Blue Dot search - you can narrow search results on Blue Dot to return Dots only from a specific domain. For instance, imagine that you want to see all of the Dots from Amazon.com that have the word music in them. You could type the following into the search box: site:www.amazon.com music I got 439 results for that one. Click this to try the search for yourself and see if your community has Dotted any music from Amazon. Pretty nifty, eh? There's only one thing you have to keep in mind on these searches - sometimes the domain you want to search is indexed with a "www" and sometimes it's not. If you're getting zero results where you expect to be seeing some, that could be the issue. 2) Bookmarklet fun - now this one is something a bunch of us have been using internally for a while and thought you might enjoy. If you add the following "Domain Dots" bookmarklet to your bookmarks, you can press it while you're on any website and it will show you all of your friends' Dots from that site. It's pretty fun to have your friends' knowledge a click away from wherever you are: Domain Dots In IE, just right-click the link above and save it to your bookmarks. In Firefox, you can either right-click and save -or- you can just drag the link to your bookmarks bar. Let me know what you think of these features and keep sending us your ideas. Cheers!