OnMyList Blog

Now we tweed when OMLers create or edit lists. The list titles and shortened URLs are included in the update. You can follow it at http://twitter.com/onmylist

Derek and I met at Zazie in Cole Valley for a late morning brunch way back in June. He didn’t know me from Adam at the time but graciously agreed to meet up since we were practically neighbors. I wanted to run OnMyList past Derek and see what what his thoughts on the website and space were. I think we had just launched a week or two earlier. After our meeting I decided it would be good to have his opinion a little more often and began exploring adding him to the advisory board. Four months later we have.

Derek has a great set of past experiences on all kinds of interesting stuff from design to communities to publishing to photography to chihuahuas (that’s a funny word to type by the way). He played key roles at Blogger, Technorati, and was the founder of user generated magazine JPG. Derek also wrote a seminal book on online communities titled, “Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places.”

Derek joins our existing advisory board members, who I would be remiss not to mention, Jude Lange, Jim Spencer, and Jeff Wasson.

Over the last month, we worked very hard to design and implement a lot of new features and improvements for OnMyList and we’ve been so anxious to let the world know about it. Well, we finally did it! If you go to the site now, you should see a brand new user interface. It has a lot of cool new features. Here are some of them:

• Improved profile – The new profile page now makes it easy for you to see lists you created, lists you made as favorites, lists you rated, people you subscribe to, and people who subscribe to you. You can also sort lists by new to old, old to new, or view count. The Latest Updates tab shows a newsfeed of your OnMyList activities, described next.

• Newsfeeds – You can now spy on any list or anyone very easily because you will get notified when you make a list, comment on a list, someone else comment on your list or on a list that you commented on, subscribe to someone or someone subscribe to you, someone made your list a favorite, ...etc. We hope this will help our members to stay on top of lists that you are interested and facilitate interactions between members.

• profile questions & answers – When you go to your profile page, you will find a link at the bottom of the right sidebar to add new profile question and answer to show off your personalities. We’ve also made the editing more obvious with the Edit buttons (We feel the in place editors were too subtle).

• ticker news – There is a Overheard box on the homepage that shows selected lists that we’ve picked that are interesting. Pretty cool, huh?

• invite friends – Want to let your friends know you are an OnMyList superstar? Want to show off your lists and what your favorites are? Have a list of images and videos that you want to impress someone? We’ve made it easy for you. Look around at the top of the site.

• crop profile picture – We know you’ve been wanting to show your whole face in the profile picture. Now you have it.

• facebook app – We have a facebook application for some time. You can show off your lists to your friends whenever you create or update your lists. You can make a list of favorite gifts for my birthday and have it show up in facebook, and hopefully get a few presents. Isn’t that cool?

• widget – Just like the facebook app. And what’s more: You can choose to display your latest/favorites/highest rated lists. It just gets better! Get your widget to show off in your own blog or website by clicking My Widgets in your profile page now.

Please let us know whether you like it or not. Enjoy and list your pants off!

....because that’s what OMLers are listing about. In the last week or so we’ve seen a deluge of Halloween related lists at OnMyList. We’re quickly becoming Halloween Headquarters. I still haven’t figured out what I am going to be this year. Perhaps I will go as a giant list and make it a marketing event.

Here’s a rundown of ghoulish lists:

Eerie Eats for Your Halloween Party

Things You Can Do With Your Halloween Pumpkin

Halloween Costumes for Couples

My Favorite Halloween Costumes That I Can’t Afford…DAMN!

Cool Halloween Decorations

Famous Witches

13 Awesomely Creative Halloween Costume Ideas

Today Andrew, Margaret and I were all working from Ritual Coffee in the Mission. AS I walked in I looked on at the army of hopped up people working diligently on their computers. Staring back at me was a sea of glowing half eaten Apples. In fact I later did a little count. Of the 27 laptops in Ritual, 24 of them were macs. Pretty impressive! I wonder what the common thread is at Ritual?

Here’s Margaret designing the new OnMyList.

I guess its kind of like scoreboard watching down the stretch in baseball. Waiting to see what other teams in your division are doing. Jockeying for wildcard or division position. Except in the startup version your obsessively watching your own traffic statistics. The commonality being that you should probably be more worried about winning your game and less worried about watching scores. I must have checked our Google stats 50 times today. We’re getting huge traffic from Stumbleupon which isn’t so surprising. The OnMyList concept is meant to be viral and search/stumble friendly. It has been so far. It’s always fascinating to watch the traffic roll in though. All those potential listers out there just waiting to be found. There’s gold in them hills!!!

Back to work. Won’t check stats for at least another 20 minutes.

Top Ten List of Things Your Email Was

Irreverent Politically Incorrect Inflammatory Shameless Self-Promoting Debasing towards Certain Groups Stereotype Confirming Widget Flaunting Facebook Pandering FRIKKIN FUNNY AS HELL ahahahahaa

horns up \m/ but you shoulda linked to the Facebook appy!

We moved over to Amazon EC2 last night, went very smoothly and also deployed a new web widget that you can show off at your own website.

OnMyList being on EC2 helps us scale better and provide better performance. You will notice the site loads substantially faster.

You can follow these instructions to create your own web widget to put it on your website

We are going to bring down our site for upgrades and to move to Amazon EC2 tomorrow 8/28 from 8:30 to 10:30 pm California time. If it all goes smoothly we might be back before 10:30… :)

We have just posted a bunch of new features…

• stats bar
• new list create/edit page design
• ability to change passwords (instead of just resetting them)
• now you can login with either email or username
• new categories (politics, family, & shopping)
• you can post your lists to Facebook by clicking the little icon
• you can delete comments on your own lists
• RSS feeds for users and latest updates

get busy pimping your best lists! we’re going to give an 8GB iPhone to the person with the most popular list between today and midnight of July 14. you are only counted once per day so don’t bother repeatedly clicking on your own list. however, you can get 14 easy views by doing it once per day between now and the 14th.

see the skinny here: OnMyList is giving away an iPhone.

We have to bring the server down for a few minutes to install a card to provide console access, if everything goes smoothly we should be back online at 10:15 or so…

The server that hosts OML had a problem this morning and our site was down for a couple of hours. We couldn’t log onto it remotely so we had to get the hosting company to locate the server and reboot it from there, which took a good couple of hours. Unfortunately we didn’t have a serial rescue console setup with this server so it’s hard for us to figure out what went wrong. We will get that setup ASAP and will look through all the logs to try to figure out what happened… Will post updates to this blog…

We have updated the layout for list view, now there is a box for all the fun things you can do with your lists… If you see something weird please refresh your browser as the stylesheet get cached at times… Also, newlines/carriage returns now display correctly in list and item descriptions.

Not so bad for the first few days off the ground.  We have still been keeping it on the DL and not unleashing our secret marekting mojo yet….but that's coming soon.  We've got 101 thing to tweak and fix and some major enhancements on the way.  I am cautiously very optimistic at this point. 

So far the list The Danger of Crapping at work has been a huge hit.  Something to tell our grandkids about some day.  A list to go down forever in the annals of our corporate history.  Someone get our company biographer on the phone.

I think tonight is the night that we open up the floodgates. After a few months of development and a few more months of conceptualizing and even a few more months of talking myself and other people into doing this, we're finally ready to go with our first version of OnMyList. We've got all sort of future enhancements in mind, but the core is there. Big thanks for Jeff Rector, Andrew Ng, Robin Schick and all of our investors and supporters for letting us get this far. Now the real work (and fun) begin...