memeriver.com/notes

Matt has just published a new post over on the shiny new PageDo Landing Page Optimization Blog discussing the definition of what makes a good landing page. There’s a ton of confusion around what is, and what is not, a landing page. So simply put, in our own words, a landing page is:

A web page that is focussed on achieving a single goal, normally containing a single call-to-action to encourage the person reading the page to respond in a very specific way.

There’s plenty more detail in the original post, including the benefits of building a carefully optimized landing page. You can read the full post here.

We have just unleashed a new version of FollowThing online which comes with a number of enhancements and bug fixes, particularly in the area of speed and posting links to Twitter.com.

What’s new in FollowThing 0.1.1

• 1-Click Twitter posting is now a lot more stable. OAuth connections are now stored permanently and not in cookies.
• You can now disable a connection to Twitter (and re-connect to a different account if required). You may need to log out of your Twitter account if you wish to re-connect another.
• Pagination now works more effectively, only appearing where it should do, operating correctly where it does
• Many database queries are now cached, so loading should have improved for commonly repeated queries.
• User comments are now correctly filtered user (e.g. http://followthing.com/matt/comments)

We are pleased to announce that the first wave of FollowThing Alpha accounts will be going out later today.

With this release (v 0.1.0) we have the first prototype of the FollowThing filtering engine in place. This essentially condenses your list of sources and all of their posts from the last twenty-four hours into a manageable ‘24hr Snapshot’. We do this based on your personal viewing activity – so only the most relevant items to you appear in your view. This means that you can scan an entire day’s news in just a few minutes.

If you need to see more detail than the Snapshot, you also have the option of viewing stories as they come in via the FollowThing Real-Time streaming engine, which gives you everything, as it happens, in real-time. This of course will give you more ‘noise’ than the snapshot, but it will allow you explore almost everything.

If you would like give FollowThing a try, please register your details over at FollowThing.com and we’ll be in touch. During our Alpha phase, all accounts will be free.

We want to improve Technews.am – we want it to be the best place to get all the latest news on technology, it jobs, gadgets, hosting, SEO and mobile. So we’d love to hear your comments on how we can make the service even better!

We’ve put together a short survey to get some quick comments on how we’re doing, and what we can do better. So if you would like to help us improve Technews.am, then please complete our survey.

Thank you!

A big thank you to the Bootlaw team who hosted a great Summer BBQ last night in South Kensington, London.

We had chance to catch-up with Mitzi (Mitzi TV), Ken (Qontix), Josh (Mino Monsters), Andy and Alaric (GenieDB) and a few other forward thinking entrepreneurs. As usual, Moo cards were out in force, although not to the level you’d normally see in a tech only gathering. I’d love to see some new products coming out of Moo to help at networking events – they seem to have gone a bit quiet this year compared to the summer of 2007 when everyone ‘had’ to have, and had, a Moo card.

Last night we launched our new sign-up page for those of you wanting to get advance access to FollowThing. Simply leave your name and email and you’ll be one of the first to know about future releases of FollowThing.

The new page features our new product mascot, ‘Thing’, who will be appearing throughout our promotions over the next few months. We’ll talk about Thing a lttle more in future posts, but for now, please leave a comment and tell us what you think!

We have just updated the design theme on this blog to get rid of the narrow content area we had in our first version.

We should now have plenty more space to publish screenshots of some of the cool new features we’re working on for FollowThing and Technews.am.

Hello everyone. We thought it was about time that we had our own dedicated platform for sharing news and research about our projects. As many of you know, the team has been using Twitter for quite some time (here, here, here and here). And QueensSpeech has had its own dedicated blog for a couple of years now. But we’ve not really had a place to communicate about all them in one place. Sure, we could easily have aggregated all of those comments into one stream, and we probably will, but we needed somewhere where we could go into far more detail.

MemeRiver Notes will be our outlet for communicating updates, ideas, research and opinion on our projects, and the areas of the internet that excite us the most – social interaction, social aggregation and social publishing. That’s a lot of socials, and that’s a lot of conversations to be had. But we need to start somewhere, and for now at least, we’ll be starting some of those conversations here.