I own an iPhone. I live in San Francisco. As such, it’s basically a total crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll be able to make a phone call in the city. Skype had always been a pretty good back-up solution, but an even better one came a few months ago: Gmail Calling. And now Google has just extended the free period of the feature through 2011. Yes, through next year.

Gmail Calling is great because it exists fully in the browser in an app that I always have open anyway: Gmail. If you use gChat, it’s right below your status message marked with a phone icon and the words “Call phone”. Hitting this launches a dialpad window within Gmail (similar to a chat window) and you can call any number in the U.S. or Canada for free. In my experience, the call quality and reliability have been excellent.

All of this is done by way of a Google Voice plug-in. We were all excited for the desktop version of Google Voice — which we got to test out — but Google decided to go this route instead, and I do think it’s a better idea.

When the feature launched back in August, Google would only commit to keeping it free through the end of the year — so this 1 year extension is great. But a Google representative at the time also told us that they hoped they could keep calls free indefinitely if the margins on international calls could cover the U.S./Canada ones. No word on if that’s the case yet, but again, the 1 year extension is a good sign. It currently costs 2 cents a minute to make calls through the service with dozens of other countries.

Gmail’s Holiday Gift: Another Year Of Free Calling To The U.S. And Canada

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time Magazine’s person of the year. He will, of course, grace the magazine’s cover for the special edition, as the individual who has done the most to influence the events within a year.

Zuckerberg isn’t a surprising pick, considering the huge year Facebook has seen in terms of massive user growth, controversy surrounding privacy issues, and the release of new products. And The Social Network’s success also contributed to the media frenzy surrounding the company and its founder.

Here’s what the publication had to say about why they chose Zuck: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.

Zuck will join a host of Presidents who have received the honor including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Other tech luminaries to have graced Time Magazine’s cover include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Mark Zuckerberg Named Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of The Year

Last week, Tim Wu challenged me to another, longer debate about the future of the Web. His new book, The Master Switch, argues that every time there is a major communications innovation, a handful of big companies find a way to close it off, keeping the future spoils for themselves. That hurts incremental innovation and ultimately hurts consumer choice in the name of convenience and low-prices. His book is about all the ways the Web is no different from, say, radio and the telegraph and old Hollywood studios.

I’ve argued the Web is different because of technological reasons, community reasons, and capitalization reasons. Because of the way startups are financed this time around, there is more money on the side of the Web staying open than there is in closing it.

My evidence is simply how things have gone so far: Most of the early Web giants like eBay, Yahoo and AOL have struggled at the hands of well-funded upstarts. The fact that in just a few years Facebook has racked up one of the largest valuations of a Web company in the world and even younger Groupon just turned down billions from Google proves the Web is nowhere close to being locked up by the incumbents.

In this longer debate on bloggingheads.tv, Wu raises a few good counter arguments that concern him about the industry’s future. And they hit home because they are two things I worry about too: Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on acquisitions for exits and apps running on top of platforms like the iPhone and Facebook for distribution. We also talk about the distinction between the computer Web and the mobile Web when it comes to openness.

The whole debate is below.

http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf

Wu vs. Lacy Round Three: Is the Enemy of an Open Web Apple or Is it Apps and Flips?

Editor’s note: Brand dollars are still the biggest unclaimed prize on the interent. Guest author Steven Carpenter handicaps the players who are most likely to get them.

One of the biggest business opportunities in the consumer Internet space is to create products and services that attract a share of the billions of dollars in held-up brand marketing that has yet to find its way onto the web. With the explosion of various kinds of content and the innovative ways advertisers can segment and track users, why are marketers so reluctant to open up the floodgates? Quite simply, because the current online solutions—search, lead generation, display, video—do not provide a high enough return for these kinds of categories and are not consistent with the image these brands have invested so heavily to achieve.

Commensurate with the potential riches, there is an enormous amount of startup energy and experimentation going on in this area. In this installment of the TechCrunch Teardown, I will look at the four leaders—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon—and how their new interactions—“like”, “follow”, “friend/check-in”, “group coupon”—are fairing with brand advertisers.

The $20 Billion Opportunity

According to Ad Age, the Top 100 Global Advertisers spent over $100 billion in 2009 across the various print, television, radio, outdoor, and Internet channels; based on data from the previous year, 39 of the 100 had budgets of $1 billion or more (see table 1, click to enlarge). Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of 50 leading brands (such as Tide, Dawn, Pampers, Gillette, and Crest), of which 23 generate $1 billion or more in sales, is the world’s largest advertiser, spending close to $9 billion annually. It should follow, then, that the Internet economy as a whole is effected by how the brand managers at these companies decide to allocate their funds online.

As you can see from the last column in the table at right, the leading marketers are only spending $1.8 billion, or 2.6% of their total budgets, online, despite the fact that consumers are spending close to 30% of their time on the Internet. Of the top marketers, only General Motors, Disney, Bank of America, and News Corp. allocated more than $100 million to the web.

So who has found the best marketing value online? Companies that market and sell financial services, insurance, automotive, communications and media, and consumer technology. It makes sense: these are companies with products that can be found easily using search, and whose customers are most likely to be acquired online because they can transact online. To date, Google and vertical content sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Bankrate have been the largest benefactors of these re-allocated dollars.

New Kleiner Perkins partner, and former Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, estimates that closing the gap between consumer attention and ad dollars spent on the Internet to be a $50 billion global opportunity. If the Top 100 marketers bring their marketing budgets in alignment with 30% of time spent, I estimate online brand marketing to be a $30 billion global opportunity and $20 billion in the U.S. As evidenced by Google’s recent pursuit of Groupon, its traditional CPC and display advertising may not be sufficient enough to meet these marketers’ needs.

The Four Horsemen

There are four Internet companies currently best positioned to work with brands to create innovative marketing solutions that will appeal to millions of consumers—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon. I acknowledge it is not exactly a fair comparison for two main reasons: 1) Facebook has enjoyed a 3-4 year head start on the field and 2) each product has a different use case and thus attracts a different audience with distinct revenue opportunities. Each company, though, has found its way into the mainstream and now finds itself with an attractive platform for brand experimentation.

I see the four product experiences these companies offer on a continuum of online-to-offline interaction on one axis, and requiring passive-to-active behavior on the other. The Facebook experience, for example, is largely an online one where a user can say something about herself by associating with a particular brand by “liking” it. This is an incredibly passive expression that requires a split-second action with little to no long-term repercussions. She can choose to visit the brand page and see the news feed at her convenience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a personal tool for gathering realtime information—no one knows which feeds the consumer decides to consume or to ignore. While Twitter is similar to Facebook in its largely online-focused consumption, it is a much more “active” medium. Users are constantly reminded when they are following a brands’ information stream. As soon as the information becomes unimportant, too frequent, or spammy, she will simply cut off the connection.

Groupon (which I wrote about in an earlier teardown) is the lightest application, ironically, even though it is the only one of the four that requires a user to make a purchasing decision. Transactions occur easily online and the offline experience of presenting a coupon is consistent with decades of proven user behavior.

As of now, Foursquare asks the most of its users in relation to branded campaigns, but it is also the closest of the four to placing customers in the physical proximity of brands and retailers.

How They Are Doing

You can see how the four different interactions 1) naturally lend themselves to different brands and 2) exhibit a large disparity in terms of the sheer number of participants. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: 44,000 passionate luxury fashionistas at NY Fashion Week may be more valuable to Yves Saint Laurent than 5 million fans on Facebook.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest brand in the entire social ecosystem is Coca-Cola with 20 million Facebook Fans. Whole Foods is the biggest brand on Twitter with 1.8 million followers and the Gap, having sold 440,000 half-off coupons using Groupon, is that startup’s largest brand experiment.

Of the top 50 pages on Facebook, 8 of them are leading advertisers and brands, compared to Twitter which doesn’t have a single brand in its top 50 users. Of Facebook’s top 50 brand pages, 31 of them are food and beverage companies, while 11 are consumer products such as Converse All-Stars and Victoria’s Secret. The most important takeaway is that brands have a far greater following on Facebook than they do on their own sites. Facebook’s best move has been to convince brands to market their Facebook pages rather than driving traffic to their own websites.

The most interesting finding is that what seems to be popular on Facebook is not so on Twitter. If you click on the table at right an dlook at the top 50 brands on Facebook, the “Follower/Fan Ratio” (the result of dividing the number of Twitter followers to Facebook fans) does not get higher than 8% (Disney). This indicates that Twitter might have a more difficult time than Facebook in attracting overall brand dollars with its current product feature set.

This is evident when you look in detail at one CPG company and its portfolio of brands. I did a comparison of the differing success of P&G’s top brands using the two platforms (click on table at right to enlarge). In every case except one (Dawn), the branded experience on Facebook is more popular in terms of numbers than on Twitter. In a few cases, there does not appear to be a reason for even having a Twitter presence. It is interesting to note that the most followed P&G Twitter account is the company’s own corporate PR team.

Facebook still has a lot of work to do and it is far from a foregone conclusion that it has won. While the lightness of its interaction makes getting to scale easier, maintaining enough valuable interactions on the branded pages and engaging long-term customer interest is a huge challenge. For example, according to eMarketer, nearly 1/3 of Facebook users who unsubscribed from a branded page simply were no longer interested in it. And, more to the point, simply because Coke has 20 million Fans does not necessarily mean Coke will pay for the privilege to advertise on Facebook if it cannot see a return.

So what brands seem to be working well on Twitter and far better than on Facebook? Daily deals, such as Dell Outlet, Amazon, and Woot, and companies that place customer service and community at the heart of the brand experience, like Zappos and Etsy, exhibit the most lopsided Follower/Friend ratio. It is important to note that two companies that had horrific customer service challenges over the past few years—JetBlue and Toyota—have fully embraced Twitter as a direct communications channel. The biggest driver of Twitter success as compared to Facebook is the timeliness of the information.

Twitter, then, is well positioned to capture marketing dollars from companies optimizing for deals, retailers that have frequent specials, ticketing and events, movie studios, television shows, last minute deals, airlines, and hotels.

It is still early days for both Foursquare and Groupon in terms of working with big brands. Foursquare has seen traction with high-end luxury and media brands, likely as a result of its headquarters being located in New York and early media partnerships. Of course, Foursquare’s long-term viability as a stand-alone “check-in” company is still an open question with Facebook Places breathing down its neck. This is a strategic move on Facebook’s part to get closer to offline actions, transactions, and local commerce.

While Groupon is the defining company of next-generation e-commerce, it has a tougher road in terms of working with brands and large retailers. These companies tend to be more sensitive to heavy discounting as they don’t want to train their customers to wait for 50%-off coupons. And, they don’t like to be so indiscriminate with their offers.

Overall Assessment

I evaluated the four companies along the six different types of offers and campaigns that I can see consumer brands wanting to engage in:

• Coupons: Simple discount off purchases
• Location: Physical check-in or product scan
• Loyalty: Frequency, “Mayorship
• Time-based
• Special Events: VIP’s
• Inventory Close-Outs

Based on my research, while Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon are the best positioned to capture the estimated $20 billion in pent-up consumer marketing dollars, none of the four are currently optimized to execute along all of the necessary dimensions. There are considerable opportunities for startups to innovate and capture share. I look for this to be one of the most attractive areas for entrepreneurs in the consumer internet for years to come.

Bugatti teardown photo credit: Flickr/David Villarreal Fernández

TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize?

Flying out to attend TCDisrupt in New York, a bunch of us were delighted to discover we were all on the same plane together, the infamous #VX22. Let’s face it, being on the same flight with someone you know is pretty fun most of the time, as a plane flight is a pretty unique shared experience and oftentimes results in a lasting bond. Don’t believe me? Shortly after sharing #VX22 with TechCrunch staff, I too started working for TechCrunch.

Planely co-founder Nick Martin is trying to tap into precisely this effect with his Copenhagen-based startup Planely. Travellers can connect with Facebook, enter their flights and see what other users will be at the same departure airport, on the same flight and/or at the same arrival airport.

This is great especially in the use case of massive early adopter attracting conferences like LeWeb, which is the first conference to partner up with Planely. Conference attendees can share rides, information or simply get better acquainted while travelling.

Planely users can also message each other beforehand, and start building a relationship before they even leave for the airport. So if anyone else is leaving for Paris on Sunday, you know where to find me.

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Planely

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See Who Is On Your Flight And At Your Airport With Planely

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/see-who-is-on-your-flight-and-at-your-airport-with-planely/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/ http://www.invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 03:10:18 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed.

I’m not even talking about loading times or anything necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it.

The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button.

And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up.

But that’s just one part of it.

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/ziplist-raises-2-million-helps-you-manage-shopping-lists-search-recipes/ http://www.invisionskins.net/ziplist-raises-2-million-helps-you-manage-shopping-lists-search-recipes/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 17:15:43 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/ziplist-raises-2-million-helps-you-manage-shopping-lists-search-recipes/

ZipList, which lets you manage and share your grocery lists online and on the go, has raised a little over $2 million in funding, a SEC filing reveals.

ZipList combines a robust recipe search engine with a free shopping list management service that allows users to easily create and manage grocery lists and efficiently share them with others.

Family members can add items to the list by email, IM, text message, on the Web, from a mobile web browser, or from an iPhone or Android application.

Any changes to shopping lists get synchronized in real time, which guarantees users that they are always up-to-date, no matter how they’re accessed.

Essentially, the tool wants to help you cut down the time you spend creating your grocery lists, planning meals, and actually doing the shopping at the store. An admirable goal.

ZipList was founded by CEO Geoff Allen, who previously founded digital media production solutions provider Anystream (formerly Grab Networks), which was acquired by Telestream last September.

I’ve contacted the company to learn who the investors are, and what the startup plans to do with the capital, but a spokesperson said she couldn’t immediately answer my questions.

Update: just got word that this round brings ZipList’s total raised to $4.5 million. Investors include Softbank Capital, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and unnamed angel investors.

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ZipList

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ZipList Raises $2 Million, Helps You Manage Shopping Lists, Search Recipes

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/ziplist-raises-2-million-helps-you-manage-shopping-lists-search-recipes/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/hitwise-facebook-accounts-for-1-in-4-page-views-in-the-u-s/ http://www.invisionskins.net/hitwise-facebook-accounts-for-1-in-4-page-views-in-the-u-s/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:03:22 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/hitwise-facebook-accounts-for-1-in-4-page-views-in-the-u-s/

Hitwise has released another staggering data point in favor of Facebook’s domination today. According to Hitwise’s data, 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com as of last week.

In March, Hitwise reported that Facebook overcame Google to become the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google was second at 7.03% at the time. As of September, comScore reported that Facebook was behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Hitwise also says that visits to Facebook have increased by 60% from the same week last year and represented 1 in 10 US Internet visits last week. And the market share of page views for Facebook was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.93%.

Of course, it’s important to note that this doesn’t include visits from outside the U.S. and excludes mobile traffic.

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Hitwise

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Hitwise: Facebook Accounts For 1 In 4 Page Views In The U.S.

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/hitwise-facebook-accounts-for-1-in-4-page-views-in-the-u-s/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/yahoo-begins-to-integrate-zynga-games-launches-mafia-wars-fishville/ http://www.invisionskins.net/yahoo-begins-to-integrate-zynga-games-launches-mafia-wars-fishville/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:03:30 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/yahoo-begins-to-integrate-zynga-games-launches-mafia-wars-fishville/

Back in May we reported on a partnership that social gaming giant Zynga had forged with Yahoo that would integrate some of Zynga’s games throughout the Yahoo network. At the time both companies were a bit vague when it came to discussing what the integration would look like (the details were still being worked out).

Today, we’re seeing the first fruits of the partnership: Yahoo has just launched Mafia Wars and FishVille. The games will appear as part of Yahoo’s Messenger, its Games portal, ‘My Yahoo’, its browser Toolbar, and Pulse. Which means more eyeballs for Zynga that are located away from Facebook.

Obviously Zynga has a close relationship with Facebook (after heated negotiations, the two reached an agreement over the use of Facebook Credits earlier this year). But it has a strong incentive to ensure that it is not totally reliant on the social network, because Facebook has been known to change the rules on the fly (see their changes to the notifications viral channel, for example). So Zynga is expanding to Yahoo, and it will be coming to Google as well. Earlier this year Zynga also attempted an integration of Farmville with MSN, but that’s since been canceled.

This is also only the first part of the Zynga’s Yahoo integration — I suspect it’s a trial run of sorts, in preparation for launching Zynga’s flagship titles like FarmVille, Poker, and FrontierVille.

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Yahoo Begins To Integrate Zynga Games, Launches Mafia Wars & FishVille

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/yahoo-begins-to-integrate-zynga-games-launches-mafia-wars-fishville/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/ips-company-blog-ip-downloads-2-3-dev-update-consistency/ http://www.invisionskins.net/ips-company-blog-ip-downloads-2-3-dev-update-consistency/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:03:03 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/ips-company-blog-ip-downloads-2-3-dev-update-consistency/

The term “consistency” can encompass many facets of a software package. Consistency can refer to backend code, ensuring that one piece of the application is utilizing available classes and methods to ensure it behaves as similar as possible to every other piece of the application when executed. Consistency can refer to the user interface, ensuring that users navigating a piece of an application can easily familiarize themselves with it, whether that be comparing the interface to other established websites the user is likely to have visited, or comparing the interface to the rest of your application as a whole. Consistency is important in software development, because it helps ensure that the application will behave as expected, and that users will know exactly what to expect.

We are focusing a lot of our efforts into usability and consistency in our applications, in an effort to ensure that users can easily navigate and use our software, without having to first “learn” how to use it. IP.Downloads is no different, and I wanted to talk in this blog entry about some changes you can expect to see with IP.Downloads 2.3 which we feel will help improve consistency between IP.Downloads and the rest of your IP.Board applications.

Sphinx Support

Arguably the least exciting thing I would like to mention in this blog entry, is that beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3, Sphinx search support has been reintroduced. This means that websites utilizing Sphinx for their search engine will be able to also use Sphinx for IP.Downloads. With previous versions of IP.Downloads, MySQL is used for searching.

Similarly, if you do not use Sphinx, you may still gain from a small performance boost with MySQL searches, as proper “fulltext” search support has been added for IP.Downloads as well. For those of you who may be technically inclined, but not quite sure what this means, basically instead of running a query with a where statement like

WHERE file_name LIKE '%search term%'

we now will run a query like

WHERE MATCH(file_name) AGAINST ('+search +term', IN BOOLEAN MODE)

This is a minor backend change, but will help performance if your site has a large downloads section that is heavily searched.

Custom Field Formatting

IP.Downloads has featured custom fields support since it’s initial release. This is a powerful tool that will help you collect additional meta data from your users when they submit files. Custom fields show up on the file information page when filled in, allowing you to easily customize the data collected and shown for users in IP.Downloads.

We have enhanced custom fields in IP.Downloads 2.3 to allow you to define how to format them from the ACP. Similar to the formatting options for member custom fields, you can use a {key} and {value} macro when defining the formatting options for your IP.Downloads custom fields, allowing you to display the data exactly how you intend to. One common use scenario we have run into ourselves is wanting to display a custom field that should contain a link as an actual link, instead of just the link text. This will now be possible in IP.Downloads 2.3.

Share Links & FaceBook

IP.Board 3.1 introduced the new share links strip functionality, and included a robust and easy to use FaceBook “Like” feature throughout the forums. We have implemented this into IP.Downloads 2.3, allowing your users to easily share and like the content throughout IP.Downloads just as they would throughout the forums. In doing so, we have removed the old “Email File” link that would appear on file display pages, as you can now use the Email share link option instead.

While I presently do not have FaceBook enabled on my development board, you can see the share links strip in the following screenshot. The FaceBook like hook will show up on the left side on the same line, when enabled.

(Please be aware that this is an early screenshot, and the user interface is subject to change before release)

Comments & Likes

As well as implementing the share links and FaceBook Like hook into IP.Downloads, we have gone ahead and implemented our new commenting and likes systems into IP.Downloads 2.3 as well. Matt previously discussed these new features in a Gallery blog entry (take particular note of the ‘Favorites’ feature, which we have renamed to ‘Likes’ and the new comments area), so feel free to check that out to get a better overview of how these systems work. As part of our efforts regarding consistency across our applications, these features will work identically in IP.Downloads as they do in IP.Gallery.

All content that you ‘Like’ throughout IP.Board is available in a new ‘My Liked Content’ option from your user dropdown in the top of every page. We will be further expanding this central control panel in IP.Board 3.2. When you like a file, you can choose to like anonymously (so that other users do not know you have liked it), and you can choose to receive notifications of updates. If you enable notifications, you will be notified when the file is updated and/or when someone comments on the file. This new like system replaces a couple of existing features in IP.Downloads, but in a manner that will make it more consistent with every other application: Favorites (including the UserCP “Manage Favorites” area) and Subscriptions (including the UserCP “Manage Subscriptions” area). You can now manage these from one central area of IP.Board for all applications, including IP.Downloads.

The comments area will now support AJAX replies, hovercard moderation, and more, all in an interface consistent with our other applications. Again, check out the previous blog entry with a video of Gallery for an idea of how this section works.

I would take a couple of screenshots here, however we are in the process of overhauling the user interface and as such I don’t think screenshots will help you visualize the changes much at this time. When we blog about the user interface changes later on, we will be sure to point out these two specific changes to show you how the look and work.

In addition to changing these systems for our file view page to be more consistent with our other applications, we have also added the ability to “Like” a category of files, allowing you to optionally be notified when new files are submitted to a category. This is analogous to the “Watch Forum” option in the forums, allowing you to be notified if new topics are submitted. We believe this will help your members monitor areas of your site more effectively and with better control, keeping your members interested in your downloads area as new content is submitted.

Summary

We are working towards improving usability and consistency in IP.Downloads (as in all of our applications) and to that end we have implemented some new functionality that will allow your users to navigate your downloads area with ease. They can expect to be familiar with how the downloads area works based on consistency with our other applications, without having to figure this out on their own. Additionally, the inline AJAX functionality of the likes and comments systems provide for a more robust user experience, allowing them to interact with the site in useful ways, without having to jump from page to page unnecessarily. We hope you like these changes, and stay tuned for other upcoming blog entries regarding the direction of IP.Downloads 2.3!

IPS Company Blog – IP.Downloads 2.3 Dev Update: Consistency

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