New feature on keiala: you can now create and attend events on keiala.com via twitter. Simply follow the @going_to account and send it a message like so:
@going_to my eventYou can also add the location of the event by adding to the message, prefixed with “L:”, e.g.
@going_to my event L:my houseAlso the date and or time:
@going_to my event L:my house 2008-05-02 13:45For more details see the help page.
Now you can mark a new event on keiala as “visible for friends only”. With this you can also add events not suitable for the general public, like private parties. Only the people that you follow on keiala will be able to see these events so you can safely enter private information in the description and comments.
We have also added another usability nicety: When on a user profile there now is a link at the bottom that adds the events for the next three days to the current page, so you don’t have to page through every single day anymore.
after improving the top navigation, todays task was to work on how users can navigate to a specific date. until now you could only jump one day forth or back - or change the date in the url line.
starting now, when you click on the box displaying the current date, you are presented a list of the next 30 days and can jump to any one of them with just a single click. this makes it much easier to navigate to some date in the near future, e.g. the next weekend or a special event like a conference.
usability is one of the core isues while working on keiala. with every update comes a list of improvements. the last one focused on the navigation which has been revamped completely. they key concern on an iphone display is of course screen real estate, so the major challenge was where to fit which button and link.
when showing keiala to new users it turned out that they didn’t get the difference between all/my/my friends events and din’t even know where to find which. so the major goal of this update was to improve on this. also, the user profiles were cluttered with just too many links at the top (events, followers, settings etc.)
what changed: the 3 event lists (all/mine/friends) now all have their own button in the top navigation. i also added a help button. the log out button - after thinking about it it’s really nothing important, i never use it - went down to the bottom. the user profiles are also much cleaner now. the links at the top (which actually were some kind of 3rd level navigation) bar have disappeared and added to more appropriate places, e.g. the ‘x followers’ hint next to the username now links to the followers page.
i hav ordered a graphics designer to take a look at keiala, so the graphics are something to be improved next.
As noted we just imported the conference schedule of the upcoming re:publica conference into keiala so that users can plan their sessions from their mobile phone and see who is attending which session.
I just tried it and it’s amazing. In 10 minutes I had my own personal conference schedule planned out. I simply joined all the sessions I want to attend. Now I can either look at only my own events to see my personal schedule, I can look at my friend’s events to see what they are up to and I can look at the public timeline to see all the sessions - just in case I want to change my mind. Great. And it all works from my iPhone.
By the way, the sessions are updated every hour - conference schedules change.
Other stuff that might be useful:
We just pushed out another keiala update, here’s the news
keiala.com just got iCalendar support, which means you can subscribe to keiala events using your favourite Calendar Application, for exampe Apple’s iCal.
There are two feeds available: the public feed lists all events on keiala for the next four weeks. You can find the link on the bottom of the page while on the all events page.
The second feed contains only the events of your friends. You can also find it at the bottom while on the my friend’s events page.
To subscribe to a feed right click on the link and copy the link to that file. In iCal simply select subscribe from the Calendar menu and paste the url.
With today’s update keiala now integrates even closer with twitter. After you have entered your twitter account details, keiala automatically shows your twitter photo and account description on your profile. It also matches the people you follow on twitter with the users on keiala and you automatically follow everyone who has a keiala ccount as well. Most of this even works without storing your twitter password - your login is enough.
Again we have also added lots of little improvements like those little yellow notes explaining stuff a larger help text on the twitter settings page.
Because of the way twitter is handling external applications like keiala right now we ask you to enter your twitter username and password into your keiala account. This is used for two things:
Some of our users said they did not want to enter their twitter password on keiala - fair enough. The good news is that you can still get the comment notifications from us. Simply enter your twitter username on your profile and leave the password blank. Then manually follow the keiala twitter user with your twitter account. From now on you will get those direct messages.
Today keiala got some more user interface polish. The events got their own entry in the main navigation, some convenience links were added and a minor tweak here and there.
The URLs also have become more beautiful - you can now see the name and location of an event by looking at its URL, e.g. http://keiala.com/events/webmontag-newthinking-store
There was also a small problem with the twitter integration. Normally when you enter your twitter details on your user profile you automatically follow the keiala twitter user. This is necessary so we can send you direct messages to notify you about new comments. Anyway, that should be working now.