Now you can set your status at all of your favorite social networks and Twitter with the push of a button.
I’m so excited today because we’ve released a feature that’s been on the product roadmap for some time now. Most sites that have social aspects to them that allow you to set a status. For instance Facebook or Twitter. The trouble starts when you realize that you’ve got a number of sites that you need to set your status at. How do you maintain statuses at all of the different sites? Well, we’ve solved that problem for five of the major social networks across the web.
Fuser now allows you to set a status and have it update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Linkedin. Create your status once, choose the social networks that you want to send it to and presto-chango it’s there. We’ve designed a quick drop-down menu too that allows you to select the services you want to populate with a new status. It’s that simple.
Each time that you log in to Fuser we’ll grab your current statuses from all of the social networks you’ve added and display it in this cool status bar. Notice the arrow next to the services? that allows you to scroll through different statuses you have set at each site. Identical statuses are grouped together too.
I’m excited for you to give it a try. Please let us know what you think, you can send us feedback at http://support.fuser.com
Please note: This post has been updated. Please see below for the latest information.
Sometimes your hands are tied behind your back and there’s not much that can be done. That’s how I feel right now for all of our users running Firefox 3.0.11 and Windows XP. Over the past week we’ve run into some trouble with Firefox that is causing some major issues with sites that employ Java applets, like Fuser. Unfortunately this affects all of our users that are running Windows XP and Firefox 3.0.11
We’ve reached out to Firefox to let them know about the issue and so have quite a few other companies. You can view the status of the bug resolution here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498132
This issue isn’t specific to Fuser but to any web application that also uses a Java applet, like Fuser. Firefox has documented the issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible.
What can you do to continue to use Fuser?
Please use one of our other supported browsers.
For Windows users:
We recommend using Safari 4: http://www.apple.com/safari/
We also support Google Chrome 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8.
For Mac OSX users:
We recommend using Safari 4: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Safari 2.x and 3.x are also supported as well as Firefox 3.0.1 and higher.
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Update 1: We’ve just released a hotfix that should resolve this issue for MOST of our users. The problem will continue to exist if you are running FireBUG, Firefox 3.0.11 and Windows XP
The Fame game continues; now with achievements and badges
Achievements
Okay, sing with me. Fame Fame bo bame, banana fanna fo fame, fe fi fo Fame, Fame. The fun is never going to stop here at Fuser. We’re so excited to announce yet another round of Fame goodness all within the same week. Besides gaining points for doing what you do best in Fuser; checking mail and sending messages to friends and colleagues. We’ve just introduced Fame achievements and badges.
Play the Fame game
Are you ready to move from the B-List to the A-list? Here’s your chance. We’ve lined up all kinds of great extras you can complete within Fuser to gain extra Fame points. For instance, add three email accounts to Fuser and you will gain Fame.
An example of an ahievement in Fuser
You can use strategy too. When you complete Fame achievements we stack up your Fame points and allow you to use them when you want to - it’s like having a nitro pack in a race car. You get to choose when you want to make it to the top of the Fame leaderboard and jump above other players.
Achievements are divided into categories as you see from the graphic above. Make sure to check back often for new achievements that you just might have unlocked.
Badges
Great things come to those who use Fuser. Depending on your use of Fuser, completion of certain achievements and point totals you could be lucky enough to earn an exclusive badge showing you why you’ve earned it. Keep you eye out for badges in you Fame leaderboard.
We’d love to know what you think about the new Fame game. You can send email to support@fuser.com and give us your thoughts.
Fame Leaderboard
Do you have what it takes to be famous?
We’re rolling out the red carpet to announce the most ground-breaking feature to-date for Fuser, Fame. Fame makes it exciting to interact with your email, contacts, social networking messaging and tweeting. Based on your actions in Fuser, like reading your email and sending tweets, earns you Fame. The more Fame you acquire, the more famous you are. However, Fame isn’t a one-person popularity contest; you’re competing against all of the other Fuser users.
Figuring out ways to earn Fame will really be your key to moving to the top of the Fame leaderboard. Fame and fortune come to those who use strategy and Fuser often. There really are no limits to the ways in which you can earn Fame.
And you really can’t be famous without a head shot, right? Fuser now allows you to upload an avatar to represent yourself to the rest of the Fuser community. Upload a glamor shot or you at the beach. We support uploading your own image, using a Gravatar or choosing your Twitter pic.
How long does the game last?
New games start each week and run from Monday at 12am to Sunday at 11:59pm CST. See what you can do to stay #1 week over week.
Do I lose all my points at the end of the game?
Fame doesn’t always last forever, but your mark does. At the end of each week your weekly Fame is added to a lifetime Fame score both Fame totals can be seen from the Fame leaderboard view.
There’s more exciting Fame coming too
We’re just getting started with Fame. Keep your eyes peeled as we continue to release new and exciting features to Fame over the coming weeks.
We’d love to hear what you think about Fame. Please send comments to support@fuser.com
Fuser continues to bring you seamless integrations with the most important social networking sites across the internet. Today we’re proud to announce our new built-in support for Linkedin and Friendster.
About every week or so we all sit together in a user support meeting and review the most requested services from our users. Linkedin and Friendster were at the top of the list - we pride ourselves in listening to what our customer are telling us. It’s so rewarding as a product manager to build features that you know your users are clamoring for.
Friendster allows you to send messages, post comments and send broadcast bulletins to all of the friends you’re connected with. Fuser brings support for all of these message types and it’s all within our easy-to-use interface.
Linkedin means business and so do we. You can be bombarded with a number of different types of communication in Linkedin and it can make the conversation confusing. The most important communication type is messages and Fuser brings that support to you today.
So, what are you waiting for? Log in and get your Friendster and Linkedin accounts added to Fuser right now.
Contact Manager
It’s new and one of our most exciting features in Fuser. All of your contacts in one place, Perfect! Fuser now allows you to import and combine contacts across all of your email, social networking and Twitter accounts in one easy-to-use contact manager.
- Find a contact easily by using the fast-click alphabet, just like your mobile phone.
- Drag-n-drop to combine contacts from all of your different accounts together. The more your combine, the more efficient you can be. You’ll be the coolest kid in town.
- Double-click a contact to view details including intimate social networking info on your friends and colleagues.
- Look at all of your contacts together or filter out a specific service to get a clear view of your contacts.
- Quickly start a communication by clicking a service icon on a contact.
Check out this video by clicking on the play button. We show you all the ins and outs of working towards contact bliss. It will be the best 30 seconds you’ve spent all year, trust us.
Contact Manager from Fuser on Vimeo.
Now you’ve got one place to manage all of your communications and your contacts. Fuser’s contact manager helps you combine contacts across all of the accounts you’ve added to Fuser and makes it easy to start communications.
UK Email Support
Fuser is committed to continuing to expand our webmail support internationally. This is great news for our friends across the pond. Fuser is officially announcing UK support for four major webmail services including Gmail, MSN/Live, AOL and Yahoo! - We’ve also built in support for standard POP and IMAP protocols too.
Setting up your UK accounts is easy. Fuser detects that you’re in the UK so all we need from you is your email address and password for your account and we’ll take over from there. No extra buttons to push or options to set.
As always we live on customer feedback. Please feel free to tell us what you think about Fuser as often as you’d like. We can be reached at support [at] fuser [dot] com or you can tell us your thoughts right inside Fuser by clicking on the feedback button on the navigation bar.
A few other quick notes:
- You can add our blog to your RSS reader by clicking HERE
- Fuser is on Twitter. Our Twitter username is FuserNews
- Check out all or our screencasts that outline all of the major features of Fuser: https://fuser.com/screencasts.aspx
There’s never a dull minute around the Fuser offices. We have a wonderful team of very talented software folks that have very interesting lives outside of spending time with us too. For instance Mike Wilson, the guy who first Tweeted that Continental flight 1404 had run off the runway and crashed at the Denver International Airport. Mike infamous Tweet from Twitter read “Holy fu**ing shi* I was just in a plane crash” Mike went from being our own personal celebrity for the awesome work that he does for our team day in and day out, to being a spectacle to the world. The experience for Mike was unreal and quite a ride on the media roller coaster, but only Fuser.com brings you the story that no one else could. The unboxing of his MacBook Pro after it was sent back to him from Continental Airlines.
Here’s your exclusive look:
Along with all of the live interviews on various news networks including NBC and FOX Mike also did a ton of interviews for local and national publications. To top it off Mike accepted an invitation for a live interview at the Tweet-A-Thon 2009 to turn the spotlight from himself to a great cause. Proceeds of Tweet-A-Thon 2009 went to the www.WaterIsLife.com project on a quest to provide clean drinking water to 1.1 Billion (yeah billion with a B). You can donate to HERE.
The Interview
Additional Links:
Mike Wilson’s Twitter Account: www.twitter.com/2drinksbehind
Mashable.com - “10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates”
New York Times - “Plane Crash Survivor Tweets The Aftermath”
Courtesy of www.ohgizmo.com
Recently I’ve been posting about what it takes to put a software release together for an online product. Tonight is a good example of one of the final steps in
the process. As I type (10:45 MST), the Fuser.com team is working on pushing a new release of Fuser to all of our users. This has been a well orchestrated plan that has been in the works since the day we set focus on this new release. Most of the planning however comes down to the last few hours.
The last few weeks
A ton of work has been completed over the last few weeks to get ready for tonight. The development team has been working overtime to get the last few defects cleared up before the release. The quality engineering team has been working day and night testing Fuser over and over again against 10+ browser and operating system configurations. The rest of the team has been chipping in with user acceptance testing and writing up bugs when we find things to not be in working order. We’ve also been working on all of the paperwork that’s involved. Including a detailed release document that calls out all of the features that have been built into the release and notable behind the scenes work that has been done to make Fuser run better. Published by the quality engineering team, the release doc also lists all of the defects reported and fixed during the release as well as those defects that are unresolved at the time we plan to push to production.
The last few hours
Part of our newest release required us to upgrade our SQL server to a newer release. About a week ago we thought we’d need a number of hours, during the early morning work day to do the upgrade, just in case something happened. This was to take place before the actual upgrade to Fuser.com would happen. I was worried from the users perspective that we’d be down way longer than our users would like. But as always within a few days the team had come up with an even better solution that allowed us to upgrade the SQL server prior to the actual production release. - The Fuser team is very talented.
The last few minutes
We met today for our Go/No-Go meeting. The team gets in a room and reviews our release doc, asks questions and discusses unresolved defects that will go out with the release. We all have a stake in making this a success so when we’re done, we pass the release document around and everyone signs it. Our signatures say we’re cool with the document and are willing to do whatever it takes to work through issues that might come up during pre or post launch.
In closing I’m going to call out a mistake that I made. I’ve been working on a screencast that needed to be included in a new step of the tour that will feature our new contact manager. I finished it late. Way late, like today way late. Ultimately I added quite a bit of burden to the team as they had to make the changes to the tour, push and re-test our production ready code. – With all the planning that took place I still let the team down on this task. However, the Fuser team pushed on and did what was right for our Fuser users. I will always be grateful for the efforts of the team.
A continuation from a previous blog post: Contact Manager - Part 1
Development
The rubber meets the road in this phase and we’ve been going for miles now. You might remember my discussion about Agile Scrum development in a past blog post. Fuser continues to
Contact manager in action
use this particular development method and how the contact manager was developed. Scrum has really held together well for us during this phase of feature development. The size of the Fuser team contracted and then expanded but the project continued on. We also discovered all kinds of questions along the way that were best handled by only dealing with certain problems in two week chunks. We discovered that a couple of the features that we were going to have ready for version 1.0 of the contact manager just couldn’t be done right now - we aren’t getting all the data we need. These features got moved to our next release to give us more time to sort out the problem. The beauty is that the project continues and there are still lots of great features coming your way.
Testing/Alpha
It feels so great to start to be able to use the product that we all put our heads together to develop. The Fuser team is in full-speed-ahead mode on testing and we all feel really good about the overall “strength” of the code that has been developed. It felt awesome the other day when I was testing to be able to combine my friend Allan’s contacts across Facebook, Gmail, AOL and Comcast into one nice contact. In the contact detail view I can see all the up-to-date data about him on Facebook and then instantly fire off an email from his Gmail account. Our QE (quality engineering) team, Chris and Dennis, have been knocking it out of the park writing test cases to test all of the features that we’ve built into the contact manager. Dennis, our automation guy, has been hard at work developing automated tests that we’ll have in place ongoing, to make sure the contact manager is always running in top-notch fashion.
Launch
Fuser’s contact manager is almost ready for prime-time. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for an announcement in just a few weeks.
There are always funny things happening at the Fuser office. Sometimes those funny moments extend home to family life. Not so long ago there was an addition to Chris’s family, David. This video made the whole office laugh and I thought it was worth sharing with the Fuser community. Keep your eyes out for a surprise ending!!!
Eating Avocados - Take 1 from Chris Young on Vimeo.
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