The Yog Blog

New Oyogi Release! New Features!

OK, its been a bit in the making, but we are proud to announce the latest release of Oyogi. Lots of new stuff here, ranging from responses to user feedback to shiny new features, so please check out the latest version of Oyogi when you get the chance.

New features include:

• Tagging!  
  • Rather then attempt to (awkwardly) fit an hierarchical classification employed by many Q&A sites, Oyogi has opted for a looser meta-data based ontological classification system. What? Yeah, its also known as tagging.
  • Yogis can now tag questions, at any time, and there is, of course, the mandatory tag cloud!
  • (Stay tuned for future releases where Oyogi will use the tags our users provide to do other nifty things)
  
  
• Oyogi HTML Badge
  • You can now show your Oyogi pride on your website/blog. Simply cut-and-paste the badge code (available under MyOyogi-->Profile) into your HTML page and viola! Your personal view into the Oyogi universe.


• Message Signatures
  • You had it for years in email, now you've got it in Oyogi. You can now put a personalized signature in your profile to be appended to your questions, answers and comments.

• Avatar Support
  • No longer need you suffer under the impersonal little blue man icon to represent your virtual counterpart within Oyogi. You can now display your individuality by uploading a personal avatar icon to replace the default little blue dude.


• Better Email Notification
• Oyogi is a bit more proactive then it used to be. Any activity on a question you have participated in will send you an courtesy email. (Don't worry, you can disable this behavior through the My Oyogi profile management section)

There are lots of other tweaks and improvements, and even (gasp) the occasional big fix.

As always, please send us feedback with your ideas and comments-- it's how we make the site better.

Technorati tags: oyogi web2.0 tags badge avatar

New Release, new mentions

So, we've spent that last few weeks cleaning up and paving the way for a handful of new features that we're planning. Thanks to every one for all the input and guidance. Its been very helpful; for those that have not had the time yet, we're all ears, so have at it. The main visible change you'll notice in the latest release is a modification to the main page. We've added some additional AJAX to collect info on latest yogis, questions, and chats -- we had been planning this, but a number of our early adopters including Pete Cashmore persuaded us to prioritize this ahead of some of the other heavy lifting we're working on.

Oyogi in the news .... Michael Arrington, an entrepreneur who has earned a reputation as a force within the Web 2.0 digerati and the author of both Tech Crunch and Crunch Notes  happened to mention, briefly, Oyogi in a post a couple of weeks ago (Thanks, Michael). The long and short of the state of the concept is that there are an increasing number of entrants emerging in the space ... we're looking forward to the exchange, competition, and potential partnerships.

Holiday Release

Ta da! We've taken much of the input from our Friends & Family releases and have made the changes most requested. Thanks to everyone who spent the time exercising Oyogi and coming up with ways in which we could improve the site. A special thanks to Lee who inspired the visual treatment of the dashboard and search bars. This inspiration led to other refinements of more visual elements. There are a number of items that we are continuing to work on that we'll unveil in the coming weeks, but we've been hard at work for the last few weeks implementing your suggestions ... we believe that you'll agree that the improvements are noticeable

So What's Changed?

In short, a lot has changed. In addition to alignments and spacing, the major modifications enable you to:

• Answer a question anytime you wish; you do not need to be approved to answer as was previously the case
• Continue to comment on a question even after its been successfully resolved
• Comment or clarify a question, we hope, in a much easier fashion
• Quickly post questions related to a particular entry
• Visually and functionally distinguish between posts intended to clarify a question and those intended to answer the question
• Report any offensive or abusive content
• More easily select "the answer" for your question from a list of posts by Yogis
• Provide "assists" and indicate posts that are helpful, even though they may not fully answer the question
• More easily navigate from the landing page into the interior of the site (many of you indicated that the initial page could be improved to help the intuitiveness of how to get to relevant content on the site)
• Instant message anyone who is commenting or answering a question if they are on-line; you could instant message people before this release, but we've made it easier to access Yogis online by showing you their details on any content they've posted
• Enter a subject for your chats / instant message in order to give them more context
• Quickly browse those Yogis who are on-line
• Edit your specialties
• View hits for your keyword searches on all sections of the site in boldface type

So, those are some of the highlights. You all have really helped us to build a release that, we feel, represents a noticeably better Oyogi. We look forward to you helping us press forward ...

Happy Holidays!

Inaugural Post

What is this ? ...

Here we go. The Yog Blog begins. We'll be using this forum to keep all of our Alpha (aka friends and family) testers up-to-date on happenings and improvements with Oyogi.

Thanks to all of you for all of your comments regarding the initial release. Your feedback has been invaluable and we've taken note. The team has worked hard to implement many of your common suggestions and to fix things that were not as intuitive or easy to use as they could have been. Moreover, we continue to move forward on other suggestions and numerous other key improvements as we begin inviting others to take Oyogi for a test drive.

So, What Have You to Show ? ...

Some key highlights of what you said, and how we responded are:

• 'Extend time' and 'Increase tip' were confusing, especially when there is no moolah involved so far... So, we removed it.
• As one person put it "having the 'my questions/my answers' links under each tab is kind of redundant, when there is the big tab for it an inch away" ... So, we removed it.
• The colors for showing if a Yogi was online or offline were not distinct enough ... So, when a Yogi is offline, their icon is now gray and when they are online, the icon is blue
• There were too many links (options) under the My Questions/My Answers tabs ... So, we reduced the number of options .. you can still get the same information, we just tried to make it easier to navigate
• What in the heck is 'accelerated time' ? We agree, its gone.
• What does 'add a conversation mean' when viewing questions? Yep, also confusing. We've changed it to 'add a clarification.' Please let us know if this solves the issue.
• Too many chat windows start up when I try to chat with someone else ... We now make chat start on a single click, but double clicking will do no harm
• There were a number of questions around "offering to answer", "accepting answers", "choosing responders" and the like ... We've made some changes that will hopefully make the whole question-and-answer cycle more understandable. We're also working on more fundamental changes for future releases that will hopefully make it easier to collaborate.
• Mutliple windows for chatting with the same Yogi and not having chat history with the Yogi was confusing. We've made a lot of changes to chat that take care of this issue as well as make it more obvious as to the fact that chat is intended for meaningful, storable conversations
• "Buddies"  was a confusing term in this application, so far. So, we've renamed it to 'connections'. This may not solve the problem, but hopefully some of the confusion will be eliminated.

So, these were some of the recent changes inspired by your comments. We've also made changes which hopefully make it easier to browse and see things that may be of interest to you -- and, we continue to work on other suggestions you've made, so stay tuned.

Thanks again for your support and putting Oyogi through its paces.

Happy Thanksgiving !