yabb blog

You’re browsing yabb and you see someone whose interests you share. If you think you’d both enjoy discussing a particular subject, simply visit their profile page and click ‘Suggest Topic’. This is a new feature for yabb - previously you were limited to sending a call request to someone you knew, or who was already a member of the selected topic. We hope this encourages more people to take the yabb plunge.

Enjoy.

Today we’re happy to announce the release of our yabb widget. Just like your Flickr photostream, you place the yabb widget on your blog so you can tell your readers more about yourself - the topics that interest you. You can see an example on the right - they’re the topics I’m talking about right now.

Adding the yabb widget to blogger is just a single click away. For wordpress, it’s only a little more work. If you host your own blog, you’ll simply need to copy n’ paste one line of Javascript.

For more details log into yabb and visit your profile page.

Beta invites are no more - yabb is now fully open. We’ve listened to your feedback and we’ve made changes. Tell your friends and join the conversation!

For this release we’ve also added a feature that lets you import your Skype contacts. For those of you who might not yet be comfortable calling people you haven’t met before - suggesting topics to your existing contacts and having conversations with them offers a more gentle introduction to yabb.

One of the stated aims of yabb is to help you ‘talk more and type less’. We followed that advice last week, but this week went straight back to our keyboards to get an update out for you today.

We have redesigned the topics page. It now gives you a much better overview of which topics have activity going on around them. Knock yourselves out!

The launch proved ‘interesting’. We got a slightly misleading write up on Techcrunch.co.uk followed by a blazingly wrong one on Techcrunch.com . It was a bit surprising given that Techcrunch is the leading blog in this area. We understand people want to be first (they were not anyway thanks to Paul Walsh’s post ) but this is bad when it kills the accuracy.

Certainly if we had our chance again we would write a press release style document for bloggers/journalists to prevent any significant confusion. We would also consider inviting in the Techcrunch folk a bit earlier so they have a bit of time to play with the service.

So what is yabb? We are a voice centric social network based on people having 1 to 1 voice Skype conversations on topics of mutual interest. I think that pretty much says it all in one sentence.

Just off in a few minutes time to announce yabb to the big wide world (well, a room of 80 people actually). Intrigued to see how our baby grows. We've named it - but other people will need to adopt it :).

We pushed out our last pre-launch release today. I will spare you any proud-parent metaphors, but rest assured we are all pleased to have reached this stage. Into this release went a lot of last-minute nips-and-tucks, interface enhancements a-plenty and a redesigned home page.

We will be announcing yabb officially at the Pizza-on-Rails event tomorrow, with attendees able to sign-up and join the (still-limited) beta. Hope to see you there!

OK, so we had a quick breather for the festivities, but now we’re back, tweaking, tuning and generally getting yabb ready for it’s imminent unveiling to the wider web world.

Yesterday’s update includes a radical simplification how we work with Skype. This change makes yabb feel much more responsive and gets rid of a whole load of weird issues some of you experienced.

Thanks for your continued interest and here’s to a yabby 2008!

the yabb team gave to you… our biggest update so far:

• recommend topics to your Skype contacts
• a really simple way to give us your feedback
• more spell-checking if you are using Firefox
• view topics your Skype contacts have joined

and loads of nips and tucks designed to streamline your experience.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Here’s what we squeezed into this one:

• Made viewing and managing different requests much easier
• You can help people write descriptions of themselves. Click “Write something about …” on someone’s page and propose a first draft to them.
• More aesthetically pleasing tag-clouds
• Plenty of small improvements to the interface
• Faster page load times

Enjoy!

Wow, it’s already been 2 weeks since we pushed yabb into private beta. Since then we’ve incorporated your feedback and have been polishing yabb and making it more usable.

The main improvements are:

• you can now skype people directly from the site
• tag-clouds on your profile page
• much easier tag editing
• filter topics + people by country
• better search

We hope you enjoy the new yabb!

After many months of work we are at a place where it is sensible to move yabb to a private beta. For about the last 10 weeks we have been in what I have termed ‘Office Beta’; Basically inviting a few friends in to use the service for 30 minutes while we shoulder surf. We learned massively from this. The first 2 weeks were not good - the low point was someone using yabb for 15 minutes and then saying ‘I just don’t get it’. Naturally we made plenty of changes to fix this and now everyone gets the core idea in a couple of minutes. Many thanks again to everyone who took the time to participate.

But that’s all history! We now very much look forward to receiving your feedback about the yabb Private Beta.