Hot Potato

We've Moved to Facebook

vanessagene — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:08:00 -0400

It’s been an exciting year at Hot Potato. Since going live last November, we’ve been inspired and energized by your reaction to the service and people’s appetite for socializing around activities and live events.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that some of the features and thinking behind Hot Potato are going to be exposed to a much larger audience: We’ve been acquired by Facebook.

This wasn’t an easy decision, especially since we’ve built up a base of dedicated users. If Hot Potato was going to sell to anyone, Facebook was the natural choice. Facebook is still small, moves fast, provides a great supportive environment for people to be entrepreneurial, and most importantly, Facebook builds great products. We’re looking forward to joining their team.

We’ll soon be wrapping up operations at Hot Potato. We will no longer be accepting new user registrations, and we will be offering existing users a way to download their information from the site. To do this, go to: http://hotpotato.com/dashboard/history. In about a month, Hot Potato will close up shop and delete all user data. No user data or account information will be kept by Facebook. We will be sure to keep you posted on this process over the next few weeks.

Finally, we just want to say a big thank you — and give a big spuddie hug! — to all of you for sharing your events on Hot Potato and sending us thoughtful feedback that pushed us to think harder. It’s been real, friendos!

— The Hot Potato Team

New app release available

vanessagene — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:14:00 -0400

Over the weekend we released v2.0.2 of the app, so be sure to update. Some of the new goodness you will find:

• Support for Retina display. Get excited for this iPhone 4 owners, because now your Hot Potato experience will be “cleaner, sharper and more beautiful,” says Jeremy, our amazing iPhone developer.

• Adding friends to activities. To make things a little more intuitive, we’ve reordered your list of friends by first name.

• Bug fixes. We’ve tweaked a bunch of things, here are a few specifics:

- When you add a brand new activity name, that name will no longer get buried at the bottom of the search results. It will now be sitting pretty as the first item. See screenshot at right.

- Your friends list will now include all your HP friends. Some of you noticed a few holes in your friends list — should be all good now.

- We’ve worked out some of the bugginess with accepting/declining friends. Pending requests should disappear once you have taken an action, and the red number badge on the HP app icon should go away too.

- When scrolling Foursquare locations, tapping the top of the screen will now quickly return you to the top of the list.

Let us know how you like it, and please report any issues you may have via ZenDesk.

- The Hot Potato Team

Team-building at Gutter

vanessagene — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:56:41 -0400

On Friday, we thought it would be fun to do some team-building at Gutter, the bowling alley not too far from Hot Potato HQ. We split into two teams: the engineers versus UX. And who won? UX!

Amid all the celebratory high-fiving, the team learned a few things:

1) We kick butt at bowling. Saadiq crushed everyone, and after the crushing, casually mentioned, “Oh, and I’m actually lefthanded.” Jeremy’s got a killer technique, ask him to show you some time. And Will got a turkey. Go, Will!

2) Word of advice so you don’t make the same mistake: Langer didn’t quite understand the rules of bowling, saying after round one: “Wow, I thought bowling scores worked like golf scores? 70’s good, right?” Oops!

3) Not enough trust falls. A team can never do enough of those!

Next Friday’s team-building activity: the Human Knot!

World Cup Fever

vanessagene — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:28:00 -0400

Sadly, the World Cup has come to an end. But before we put away our jerseys and

vuvuzelas, we wanted to say a big THANK YOU to all you Hot Potatoes out there for sharing your (often hilarious) commentary and photos on Hot Potato during the matches.

See you all in four years!

Hot Potato Presents at the NY Tech Meetup

vanessagene — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:54:00 -0400

On Tuesday night, we presented the latest Hot Potato release to a packed house at the NY Tech Meetup. We had a lot of fun demo’ing our new stuff and had the pleasure of sharing the stage with some amazing startups (Foodspotting, LearnVest, Jetsetter, HowAboutWe, to name a few — and Clay Shirky too!). Bravo, all!

A big thanks to the NY Tech Meetup crew for giving us the opportunity to present. If you were in the audience and get a chance to check out Hot Potato, please do send us your thoughts and tell us what you’d like to see. We’d love to hear from you!

See you at the meetup next month,

- The Hot Potato Team

Update: In case you’re interested, a couple recaps of the evening from Nick Cavet and NYConvergence.

Hot Potato Mobile Website goes live

vanessagene — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:09:00 -0400

Good news! We just launched a mobile-optimized website for those of you who don’t use an iPhone and have access to our app. We hope this allows many more Hot Potato users to easily share what they’re doing on the go.

Here’s a shot of the new mobile homepage:

One note: The site works best on newer devices (like Android phones) and will not work on non-WebKit browsers (like older BlackBerrys and feature phones)

Report any issues you may have via ZenDesk, and let us know what you guys think!

- The Hot Potato Team

Version 2.0.1 of the app is here!

vanessagene — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:16:00 -0400

It’s been an exciting few weeks here at Hot Potato HQ. We pushed out a brand new release that we hope you’re finding easier and more fun to use, and we’ve been hard at work improving the experience and building new features, including a way for you to easily invite friends to join Hot Potato (stay tuned!). Thanks to all of you for sending such amazing feedback.

We’ve just released v2.0.1 of the app. You can download it from the app store here. Here’s what you can look forward to once you update:

• Bug fixes. We fixed a few of the crashes you’ve been reporting, especially the one that happened in the custom tab (not entering a verb + hitting ‘Done’ crashed the app).
• iOS 4 goodness. We’re still working on some more features in this area, but now you will be able to use multi-tasking, making your experience with the app that much faster.
• Browsing conversations. Before, when you clicked a search result or trending activity in the Activities view, the app would take you directly to the confirmation view. We’ve tweaked that to allow you to get to an activity’s conversation via this view (just click the blue arrows, screenshot below). This should make it easier for you to explore activities, their conversations and who’s doing it before you confirm you’re doing it too.

• Activity names. These will no longer be truncated, so you’ll be able to read those really long ones.
• Better location integration. People feed updates will now display your Foursquare location. Check it out:

Let us know if you experience any issues with this new version by sending us a note on ZenDesk. We’ll keep you posted as we roll out more updates and fixes.

- The Hot Potato Team

An animated video tour of Hot Potato, by Patrick Moberg. Enjoy!

vanessagene — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:46:08 -0400

An animated video tour of Hot Potato, by Patrick Moberg. Enjoy!

On Hot Potato Awards

vanessagene — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:32:00 -0400

One of the new features that we are really excited about here at HQ is Hot Potato awards. We have only mentioned the awards briefly since launching our new release because we wanted to let you play around and discover them yourself. So now we would like to take a minute to explain more about the awards.

When we were building this latest version, we knew we wanted to reward you and make you feel awesome for using Hot Potato in creative ways. These awards, which live on your profile, give others a nice little window to your interests and deem you a sort of expert in certain areas. Here’s a few of the awards, along with how to get them:

• Couch Potato – share what you’re watching on TV
• Shutter Spud – upload photos to an activity’s conversation stream
• Foodie – share what you’re eating
• Loveable – post comments, photos and videos that the community “likes”
• Bookworm – share what books you’re reading

And, of course, the You’re a Big Deal award, which you received when you shared your first activity on Hot Potato (go you!). There are other awards out there, and more to come in the future. We’re not always going to tell you how to get them; we think it’s more fun when there’s an element of surprise.

To congratulate some of our power users — and to inspire a little friendly competition among the HP community — we’re going to reveal our top three achievers, along with a snapshot of their awards so far.

Damien Basile, with nine awards:

Chris Carella, with seven awards:

Aubrey Sabala, with seven awards:

Congrats to Damien, Chris and Aubrey!

Want your profile to be as decorated as theirs? Start doin-it, Hot Potato style!

- The Hot Potato Team

"You have to talk to a lot of people and find the team and the work that really resonates with you...."

vanessagene — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:11:00 -0400

“You have to talk to a lot of people and find the team and the work that really resonates with you. For a really early stage company, you have to fall in love.”

- Saadiq Rodgers-King, co-founder of Hot Potato, on hiring and keeping a great staff in Brooklyn. Read Inc. magazine’s story on how to a open business in Brooklyn (and why you should).

The low-down on activity update push notifications

saadiq — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:47:32 -0400

With the introduction of sharing your activities with your friends in the latest app, we’ve also introduced a new iPhone push notification type. I’d wanted to write something up explaining it at as we rolled it out but I wasn’t able to pull it off. Here it is, better late than never and hopefully it will clear up some of your questions.

The basics
You can modify your global push notification settings on the iPhone app by going to the “Settings” tab and then pushing the “Push Notifications” button. The settings are as follows and you can toggle to enable and disable.

Friend Activity Updates: This is the notification for when a friend tells Hot Potato what they’re doing. “Lincoln is playing with Hot Potato”
Added to Activity: This is the notification for when your friend says what they are doing and that you are doing it with them. “Vanessa is watching tv and says you are too”
Friend Requests: This is when a someone on Hot Potato requests to connect as a friend. “Jeremy added you as a friend”
Responses to my Posts: This is when you write or comment on something in an activity stream and someone else subsequently comments on it. “Christina commented on your message”

Per user activity settings
You can also toggle on and off individual people’s activity update push notifications from the button in the top right of the iPhone user profile page. If the global “Friend Activity Updates” toggle is off, all of your friends will be off and their profile pages will give you the option of turning on alerts for that individual alone.

Quick Tips
Turning everyone off: Prefer to get your updates by launching the app when you please rather than push notifications? In the iPhone app, navigate to “Settings” -> “Push Notifications” and change “Friend Activity Updates” to off.
Enabling just a couple of your friends: First turn everyone off as indicated above. Now navigate to the user profile pages of just the friends you want on and tap the button in the top right that says “Turn Alerts On”.
Temporarily toggling activity updates: After you have turned everyone off with the global “Friend Activity Update” toggle, reenabling them will reenable all of the friends that were previously on. If everyone was on before, they will now all be on again. If you’d customized your list so only a couple of your friends were enabled, only those same friends will be reenabled when you reenable the global option.

So that’s the low-down on the added notifications. We hope you find them useful and please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve the experience further. Thanks!

State of the Potato Vol. 2

vanessagene — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:27:28 -0400

Sup, friendos!

First things first, we want to thank all of you for your support and feedback over the past several months.

Our goal at Hot Potato is to make it easy to share what you’re doing with friends and connect with others who have similar interests. We’ve been hard at work on some new changes to Hot Potato that we think makes it even easier to do just that.

Here’s how it works. Say you’re watching the England v USA World Cup match.

First, choose your verb — “I’m watching.” Then pick or type your activity — “I’m watching England v USA.” Are you the first one doing it? No problem – you’re a trendsetter – you’ll get to create the activity.

Optionally, let us know with whom you’re watching England v USA (by inviting friends to confirm they’re doing it too) and, if you’re using your iPhone, where you are (using a nifty Foursquare integration). You can also let your friends on Facebook and Twitter know. Once you’ve confirmed, you’re connected to everyone else watching England v USA on Hot Potato. Join the conversation about that activity by asking questions, sounding off, and sharing your photos and videos.

This latest Hot Potato goodness is very much organized around the activities you are doing right now. We still want you to be able to set up future events and we’re working on the best way to do that. Stay tuned. For those of you who have already set up future events on Hot Potato, you should be able to find your event and any conversation updates associated with it by searching the “watching” and “attending” categories.

So why use Hot Potato? Hot Potato activities are an awesome way to discover and share the experience with others doing the same thing as you. You can engage with others by asking questions and reacting collectively; you can keep a history of your activities and events; and now, you can receive Hot Potato awards for being an expert in a particular category (TV shows, the 2010 World Cup, etc.) and build street cred within the Hot Potato community.

We’ve fixed a lot of the buggy stuff, but as you know, these things have an annoying way of popping up. So don’t be shy. Having technical troubles? Got a question? Just want to say hello? Get in touch with us through Zendesk. Or visit our FAQ for more details on the newest release.

Enjoy!

- The Hot Potato Team

Holla, KickBALLAs

vanessagene — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:06:00 -0400

So last Friday, we (from left: Will, Lincoln, Saadiq and Vanessa) played some kickball against a bunch of other NYC tech startups. We also discovered that here at Hot Potato we’re kinda awesome at kickball. Who knew?

Hosted by Image Space Media, the first annual Internet Week Kickball Tourney turned out to be a ton of fun and a really nice opportunity to meet fellow techies (check out our Hot Potato event for some play-by-plays). Playing in Chelsea Park, we joined forces with Next New Networks (also kinda awesome at kickball) to create The Ball Crushers. We didn’t take home the big gold, but we did win all three of our games and Best Team Name. Though it should be said that those teams we played — drop.io, Mashable and Howcast — made us work for those wins (where the heck did Adam Ostrow learn to kick like that?). Good show, guys!

Oh, and just because we really liked it: Check out this amazing sign made by Evan, one of our teammates. Evan stopped by the office earlier in the day for the Walkabout NYC open house. We liked him so much, we invited him to play kickball with us as an honorary Hot Potato. He was a really good sport and did his best to psych out the competition with his creation. Spelling shortcomings were more than made up for with enthusiasm:

Thanks to everyone for participating and making the tourney happen — we’ll see you next year. BRING IT.

Cooking up something good at Hot Potato headquarters. Stay...

vanessagene — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:23:45 -0400

Cooking up something good at Hot Potato headquarters. Stay tuned.

Hot Potato Infrastructure: MongoDB

lincolnh — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:39:00 -0400

Update: Someone was kind enough to translate this post into French. Thanks!

At Hot Potato, we’ve been using MongoDB for 6 months with great results.

I feel that Mongo’s value proposition among storage technologies is pretty unique and well suited to what we do. The things I particularly like about Mongo are:

It has great documentation and excellent support. The Mongo team is really supportive of the community and goes the extra mile in helping people resolve issues. Check out the user group or IRC channel #mongodb.
The database as well as the language drivers are open source.
Schema-less document storage keeps things simple and flexible.
It has very full-featured ad-hoc query support.
It’s fast and supports a wide variety of atomic operations.
It has Map/Reduce for data aggregation.
Administration is really easy and uses a full-featured shell with native javascript support.
It is designed for scale.

A lot of people are impressed with Mongo and have blogged about it:

But personally, I don’t think Mongo’s ability to scale out has gotten enough attention. By scale out, I mean the process of gradually optimizing for more load over time as your schema and use-cases are discovered and evolve. The interaction of Mongo’s features is attractive because it’s adaptable in the face of change, while still allowing straightforward scaling. This is of particular use to startups but is certainly applicable to any project where requirements are unclear.

Consider some of the typical steps that must be followed when scaling a relational database:

At some point your application starts to catch on and the first thing you notice is that you are being overwhelmed by reads. As the responses from your application don’t have to be up-to-the-second dynamic, you add an external caching layer in front of your RDBMS - something like memcached. Although more complex, with a high number of reads you can also go down the road of using read-only slaves to help scale.
Although many web applications have a high read/write ratio, after you’ve optimized your reads at some point your write traffic eventually starts to cause problems. In response you vertically scale your hardware in terms of CPU, RAM, and IO. This step is often expensive.
Even with cache in front of your reads and/or read-only slaves, as you continue to scale you notice that many of your reads are still taking longer than you would like and are generally too expensive. You don’t want to throw hardware at your problem forever when you know your application could still be optimized. So you start to de-normalize your data. At first you strategically copy small amounts of data around to avoid joins, but over time, with continued scale, you eventually go farther down the road of de-normalization than you ever thought you would and eliminate more and more joins. Throughout this process you are repeatedly changing your table definitions and dealing with the overhead of doing so.
You’ve optimized both reads and writes but with continued scale, you are finding that the load on your db boxes is getting uncomfortably high. In response you eliminate as much logic from the database layer as possible by killing triggers and stored procedures wherever you can. Additionally, you pre-materialize your most complex queries which, due to their complexity, resisted your attempts to de-normalize.
Last, but certainly not least, you may find that your writes are starting to bottleneck, even with beefed up hardware. At this point you could go the route of trying to horizontally partition your data which, with most relational databases, is not handled transparently by the database, but needs to be handled by your application. Or, you start to remove your secondary indexes. You begin building and managing your own secondary indexes where needed but in general you depend on your application being more intelligent about how and when it gets its data.

The end-game of this process results in you basically using your RDBMS as a key value store. Unfortunately all the features, structure, ACID guarantees, etc. are now working against you. Things like rigid schemas and transactions are just adding weight to every operation even though the vast majority, if not all of them, no longer use these features.

Let’s compare the above process to how things would work with Mongo.

In Mongo, reads are pretty darn fast to begin with. They can certainly be externally cached just as easily as with an RDBMS but in our experience this tends to come later in the process when using Mongo. Why? Mongo uses memory mapped files, so you can basically throw RAM at your Mongo instances and the OS VMM will utilize it efficiently to cache data. Either way though, there is at least no disadvantage. Additionally, Mongo was built from the ground up to support sharding (which should be production-ready in another month or so). So aside from just adding more RAM or cache, you have a way to horizontally partition your data and parallelize your reads across multiple machines.
With writes as well, Mongo starts out pretty darn fast since it doesn’t support transactions or isolation. Also, as an alternative to scaling vertically, with sharding you have the option to scale horizontally in a way the database was designed for. It doesn’t require any application intelligence to do this other than choosing appropriate shard keys.
In Mongo, joins never have to be dealt with because they aren’t supported. This could be looked at as a downside. On the other hand, since Mongo is schema-less it is pretty easy to copy data around and gradually discover the best structure. As you experiment you don’t have to deal with the difficulty of updating, modifying, managing, and occasionally rolling back your schema definitions because there are none.
Map/Reduce is Mongo’s tool for the pre-materialization optimization step. The nice thing about map/reduce in Mongo is that it can be scaled via sharding the same way as regular reads and writes. Map and reduce jobs will be run in parallel across shards and then be combined. This is why Mongo map/reduce requires that the map and reduce functions return the same structure. Periodically running a map/reduce job is an excellent scalable way to pre-materialize queries and do data aggregation.
Lastly, Mongo has support for secondary indexes just like an RDBMS. In general you can follow the same process for optimizing indexes for Mongo as you can with an RDBMS - that is, gradually remove them over time as you change your application to not need them. Since Mongo is schema-free, the resulting changes that necessarily happen as you remove indexes and restructure can be made without worrying about schema definitions, potential rollback, etc. Also, indexes work in a sharded environment. Mongo’s sharding faq goes into it more but basically since the shard key determines what shards a query will hit, if your index contains the shard key, you will be able to engineer queries that:

hit the least number of shards necessary
get their data straight from an index on those shards

I like Mongo’s compromise between features found in RDBMSes and key-value stores. It allows for an gradual scaling process over time and doesn’t require foreknowledge of exactly how your application will work. Horizontal scaling is not an afterthought or bolt on.

If you are interested in learning more about Mongo and meeting some folks who use it, you should consider attending MongoNYC. You can use discount code “hotpotato” at checkout for a 25% discount. I’ll be there too so stop me and say hi.

We're Hiring a Web Designer

mikekarnj — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:07:00 -0400

“Good design is as little design as possible.” —Dieter Rams

Do you have dozens of notebooks filled with sketches and drawings? Do you enjoy designing and simplifying products for millions of people to use? If so, we’d love to chat with you.

Hot Potato helps people socialize around live events. As our team grows, we’re always looking to add talented and passionate people to our roster (especially someone that can represent us well on Layer Tennis).

You’ll be responsible for designing the interface and UX, brainstorming & implementing new features, and leading the creative process.

We utilize a user-centric approach to our design. Here are some other things we believe in and enjoy:

- We design honest interfaces.
- We believe in the little things that make huge differences.
- We like the movie Helvetica.
- We live by the “World Building in a Crazy World” vignettes.

If this sounds like you, send us your portfolio link, and we’ll take you out for coffee. (Position is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

State of the Potato

justinshaffer — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:58:00 -0400

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!

New York Isn’t Silicon Valley. That’s Why They Like It.

mikekarnj — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:56:00 -0500

Hot Potato was recently featured in a New York Times article on the bubbling up NYC startup scene.

DESPITE all the buzz, New York will never be able to match Silicon Valley in one crucial area: the weather.

It’s a notion that Justin Schaffer, one of the organizers of the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, and the founder of Hot Potato, chewed over as he pulled on a scarf and hat before heading back out into the blustery afternoon.

Jerking a thumb toward the window, he flashed a big grin and said, “Maybe on a day like today, yeah, then I think I should be in San Francisco.” Pondering that thought a moment, he said “being here is a no-brainer.”

More updates and the Boxee Beta!

saadiq — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:08:06 -0500

Thanks to everyone who has been playing with the web application as well as our recently available iPhone app! The feedback has been great and we look forward to more. We’re listening and here are some of our more visible updates in response.

You’ll now find that recent comments will display in the stream along with their contents if they are within 15 minutes of the latest message in that event. You can click on the comment to show the message, and other comments on it.

The controls for commenting, liking and sharing a message now appear to the right of the message on mouse-over. The number of likes a message has received as well as their comments are now displayed beneath a message.

Perhaps the most exciting news, is that 200 people used Hot Potato during an awesome event put on by Boxee at the Music Hall of Williamsburg last night to launch their new Beta and the Boxee box. You guys created over 500 notes and photos, and provided great perspective from the audience during the event. Check it out here: Boxee Beta Launch. It was a record event for a number of us working in the social media space - Foursquare reported well over 200 people checked into the venue as well.

Suffice to say, with about 72 hours under our belt with the iPhone app now, we’re happy to see so many using it. If you haven’t tried it out yet - get it here: http://bit.ly/hotpotatoapp

It’s a lot more fun with a few friends, so bring them along to your next event, be it a birthday party, a concert, or anything that a group might be interested in.

We're live in the App Store!

justinshaffer — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:43:27 -0500

Great news - the Hot Potato app is live. Thanks very much to Apple for the approval.

You can download it here or can search for hotpotato in iTunes.

Lots more detail coming on this over the weekend, and we haven’t forgotten those who have signed up for an email. We’re working on on the web that will make things easier to use and understand for all of our new users.

Thanks again for all of your support!