And here’s another screenshot.
We’ve learned a lot during the first few months of Phile’s existence. One of the main things we’ve been responding to is that it seems like a lot of people are having trouble making their sites look presentable and do what they want.
For the last month or so, we have been working feverishly on a new approach to putting components together that should make it a lot easier to build a site that looks and feels good.
Here is a quick preview.
Two new widgets: Image gallery and video field
Our whole mission with Phile is to make it easy for groups to create a website where the community can publish information back IN to the website. But we didn’t have a way for the community to publish images into the site…
…which is why we added the image gallery widget. Use the image gallery whenever you want to allow the community to share pictures of something. For a restaurant Phile site, you can use this to share pictures of food. For a stamp collecting Phile site, you can use this to share pictures of… well, you get the idea.
We’ve also added a video field. People have started using this for videos of bands, screencasts of iPhone apps, etc. Also, as an extra bonus, when you share a Phile page with a video on it via Facebook, the video embeds properly.
So check out these new widgets and send us feedback at feedback@phile.com.
Enjoy!
New Feature: redesigned activity feed
We’ve added a bunch of new features during the last two months, but we’ve been too busy to write about them! (whew) So here is some belated news about new things we’ve added. First up, the redesigned activity feed.
After looking at how people were actually using Phile sites, we decided that the recent activity list was too text-heavy and dry. Here’s how it looked before:
And here’s how it looks now:
We’d love to know what you think of the new activity feed. Feel free to send email to feedback [at] phile.com.
Cheers!
— The Phile Team
Tatoeba is a cool project where people submit translations of entire sentences. It’s kind of like a crowdsourced phrasebook. Definitely makes us think: what else could be crowdsourced? Anyway, you should check it out.
We love The Noun Project, which is assembling a free collection of visual symbols, but it makes us think: wouldn’t it be better to crowdsource this? Just imagine a user-generated guidebook full of symbols where anyone could contribute and people could vote on the best symbol for a particular word.
Hmm…..
What this blog will be about
We had a few meetings yesterday with some friends of Phile, and one of the takeaways for us is that we should think about what we want to communicate on our blog.
We want to use this blog to talk about what we believe, and to comment on the trends we see happening on the web.
We believe that information on the web is going to be more structured 10 years from now (think “semantic web”) but no one really knows how it will ultimately happen.
We believe that this structure is going to happen “bottom up” instead of “top down”. No one company or standards body is going to decide how information should be structured. It’s going to be up to individuals and groups to figure out how they want their information organized.
We believe that groups of people are powerful, and they’re under-represented right now on the web. There are great tools for individuals to publish their thoughts, and there are great places for people to congregate en masse, but the choices for smaller groups are limited. Right now, groups congregate using forums, Yahoo Groups, meetups, etc., but it feels like there’s something missing to us.
Anyway, those are the kinds of things we’re interested in. We’ll try to post our thoughts on these topics on a regular basis.
Thanks,
- The Phile team
We turned on the first bit of Facebook integration to Phile today. Now, when you write a review, you can post it on Facebook.
Try it out!
Phile public beta!
Hi folks.
We’re super excited to be able to talk more publicly about our startup, named Phile. There is a lot to show and explain, which is probably best done through the stuff we put directly on our website at http://phile.com.
We’ll use this blog to tell you about all the stuff we’re working on behind the scenes, as well as passing on any links to articles or other news we find interesting. Probably mostly having to do with startups and technology.
We’ll probably also do some archaeology at some point, digging through our old notes to show you how things got to be the way they are today with Phile.
So if you’re interested in any of that stuff, subscribe to our RSS feed. Or just follow us on twitter at @philetweets and we’ll post links there.
