To increase the value and impact of Tweets on Arktan we have started to display meta information along with the Tweets. Below are the various cases and sites for which Arktan now supports the display of Twitter meta information. We have started with some of the major use cases and plan to enhance this support over time. We would like to hear from you some of the other cases for which you would like us to show Twitter meta information.
Somewhere within us we all have an urge to narrate a story. This could be a narrative of a rock concert we went to or a narration of our recent vacation to Italy. Or it could just be a sampling of tidbits pieced together to form a common thread. The imagination of an artist or the blog post of a technology whiz.
To take digital story telling to the next level we need to evolve to a “curation system” that allows you to put together a sampling of digital activity, your own or that of others, in a story.
Robert Scoble describes his vision of a curation system quite comprehensively in the following blog post:
http://scobleizer.posterous.com/the-new-billion-dollar-opportunity-real-time
To us his vision is about the next evolution of digital story telling and really resonates with us. When we launched Topic Channels we were taking a step towards such a curation system. Such a system is about selecting some tweets, photos, videos, bookmarks etc., potentially from different sites and publishing them to tell a story. That is what Topic Channels facilitate for tweets, blog posts from BlogSpot and Flickr photos. Though there is a lot more to be done to get to a user friendly and powerful curation system. Such a system should also be able to run on an open platform such as Wordpress.
We believe that Arktan has the major pieces required to evolve into such a curation system and are beginning to think about how we can get there.
What are your thoughts? What would you like to see in such a system? How can Arktan facilitate this?
We would like to thank ‘The Real i’ for featuring Arktan as the “gratiz business tool of the week” in their latest video! You can find the latest video on TheReali’s website. You can also see the video on Arktan:
‘The Real i video featuring Arktan’
The Real i,’ is a national weekly web show that highlights unique and exciting news relating to the
internet world.
We have supported the ability to add your blog that is hosted on Wordpress i.e. www.wordpress.com to Arktan using the RSS of your blog. However we haven’t supported Wordpress as one of the sites that we have custom support for. We have now launched custom support for Wordpress. All you need to do is to specify your Wordress blog name and we will do the rest.
You can add your Wordpress blog to Arktan in the following way:
* 1. Click on “Post New Content” button in your profile box on the top right.
* 2. Click on the second tab - Auto-import Website/RSS.
* 3. Select a Channel. If you don’t select one we will automatically create a channel called
“Blog”
* 4. Select Wordpress from the list of websites
* 5. You will be taken to the page where you can specify your Worpress blog name and
add it. For example if your Wordpress blog URL happens to be
http://catherinesherman.wordpress.com, your blog name would be catherinesherman.
Killerstartups published an informative review of Arktan. We wish to extend a big thanks to Killerstartups for writing about Arktan! Here is the link to the article:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/arktan-com-distribute-your-content-online-easily
We just launched featured users on Arktan, to feature a few popular users and their channels on the site. This set of featured users will change every few weeks. You can see the featured users on the people page.
We know that you are always looking for new and exciting content on Arktan. By featuring a few popular users we want to help you discover interesting new content on Arktan. You can follow these users to receive their new content automatically. We will soon be augmenting featured users with specific featured channels.
We picked the initial set of featured users based on their number of followers, their activity on the site, number of views of their channels etc. By featuring users we also wish to provide an avenue to promote the content of popular and active users on the site. If you wish to be featured on the site or would like us to feature a user you follow, please let us know. We would love to hear suggestions!
The much requested feature request is here! You can now delete content items from your channel page. Go to the channel that you wish to delete one or more content items from. E.g.:
http://www.arktan.com/user/cbaldwin/channels/Microblog
Now go to the content item that you wish to delete. Hover your mouse over the title of the content item and you will see the delete icon that you can click on to delete the item.
Mashable reviewed Arktan and wrote an excellent post about the product on September 4th, 2009 . This post by Christina Warren at Mashable was the first post about us in a major blog. A big thanks from the Arktan team to Mashable and Christina. The Mashable post launched our product and we are happy and excited with the results! Here is an image of the post. Please keep reading below for details on the impact of the post.
The above Mashable article resulted in thousands of hits and heavy traffic to the site. The traffic increased as the Mashable post was picked up by other sites and re-tweeted for a few days after the post was published. We want to thank all the blogs, sites and users who spread the word and wrote about us.
A vast majority of the users who visited the site were able to try it out. A good percentage of these users signed up. We were able to handle the traffic surge reasonably well. We had put in a throttle mechanism, to control the load, that kicked in when traffic exceeded several thousand concurrent hits. This allowed us to gracefully manage the load on the site. The users who visited the site when it had exceeded its maximum allowable concurrent load, signed up for invites. If you were one of them we will be sending invites to you soon. Thanks for your patience!
We want to extend a big welcome to our new users! Enjoy the site and please let us know any feedback or requests that you might have. We are here to make the Arktan experience fun for all of you!
We just went live with a very exciting new feature.
You can setup a channel such that new entries in that channel are automatically posted to Twitter. To enable this, you need to go to your “All Channels” page and mouse over the channel in the left central region of the page, that you want to “Link to Twitter”. Click on “Link to Twitter”. We will use oauth to link your channel to Twitter and start posting entries to Twitter as your channel content changes! That is it.
How does it work?
As shown in the example above if you are linking a “Multimedia” channel with a mix of Flickr and YouTube, to Twitter, we will automatically post your photos and videos to Twitter as you add them on Flickr or YouTube.
If your channel is updated with a plethora of entries at the same time, our software is smart enough to apply some throttling so as not to generate a burst of tweets.
You can’t do this at present. We intend to add this ability pretty soon.
