State of the Potato
By justinshaffer
We’ve rolled out a bunch of new features and functionality, including our release of the new iPhone app, new look for hotpotato.com, and full API - docs coming asap, we’re working on it! We also got a great techcrunch writeup right before SxSW. Since then, we’ve been working on refining the release, talking to you all, our users, and adding some new features (oh, and we have an iPad app that will be out for all of you early adopters).
Next up, we’re working on some neat new features to make Hot Potato even easier and simpler to use. We’ll be using the blog to keep you more updated on goings on at the office as well on a regular basis.
A quick recap of the some of the new hotness on Hot Potato since SxSW:
Accounts: We changed so much stuff prior to our release, that our early users had to migrate their old accounts. Thanks for being early supporters! Instead of using just facebook connect, we’re now letting users create their own Hot Potato profile (which you can still link to FB and Twitter). This lets us do things like link to your profile, via your username. Here’s mine!
Friends: In addition to your own account, you can now add Hot Potato friends. Find friends via facebook, twitter, or gmail, or invite users via email. Hot Potato is more fun with friends, so we encourage you to give this a try. Your public profile will now list your friends and upcoming events. Check out mine: Justin Shaffer on Hot Potato
Events: We like to think of events as a shared interest amongst a group of people, happening now or in the future. TV shows, sports, concerts, politics, conferences, even your birthday - all fair game. We’ve started to pre-populate interesting events, which you can find by exploring Hot Potato.
A few more updates on events:
Events now have start times, meaning you can create an event in the future, and add your friends to it. When the event happens, everyone who is part of it will get a notification reminding them to participate. In addition, for the twitter users in the house, you can now specify the #hashtag when you’re creating it. This gets attached to tweets from people sharing content from Hot Potato to Twitter and makes your event easier to find.
Pro Tip: We’re making it really easy to add links to your events so that you can let others add them to their Hot Potato calendars.
Say I’m the organizer of the NY Auto Show and i create it on Hot Potato.
Here’s the link to my event:
http://hotpotato.com/events/ny-international-auto-show-19jG0R
If you add “/add” to the end of the url like this:
http://hotpotato.com/events/ny-international-auto-show-19jG0R/add
Then anyone who clicks on it will be able to add the event to their calendar automatically. Stay tuned for an embeddable widget that you can put on your blog/site/etc. to promote your events.
Calendars: This is my favorite new feature! Every Hot Potato user gets a calendar now for keeping track of events they’re interested in. The coolest part, I can add events to my friend’s calendars, and my friends can add them to mine. This is a really lightweight way to “invite” people, or let someone know they should check out an event.
Notifications: If you’re on the iPhone, you can now receive push notifications. Turn them on and off by event, if you’d like. We find them a nice way to stay updated when your events are on, and when your friends and others are talking about stuff you’re interested in.
Features in events: We’ve added a bunch of new tricks to the iPhone, including the ability to add short 10 second videos (and play them back on your phone), see all updates in an event, or just updates from your friends, and to see everyone else who’s in the event. More on these later..
Twitter integration: Some of you using the app during SxSW noticed us testing twitter integration around the conference. More on this soon, but if you have an event that you’re planning, and you’d like to have us pull tweets about it in using some neat new technology we’re building, drop us a line. We’re working on some stuff that we haven’t seen done anywhere else yet - namely the ability to filter based on who you follow, and/or your Hot Potato friends.
We’ll be updating Hot Potato with the feedback from all of you, so feel free to contact us with any comments, suggestions, or requests. We’d be more than happy to answer them!
