Archive for June, 2008

Keep it simple

Published June 20, 2008 design 4 Comments
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One of the changes mentioned in the last post was the simplification of the settings page. We want to make sure that people can control who has access to their journal content, particularly as there is location information in there. However one risk you always face when you make security settings very customizable is that no one bothers to use it, or doesn’t understand what the effect of the settings are.

As we discussed how to make things simpler, we realised that there are actually two main types of information in peoples’ journals – user posted content and automatic tracking information. When you post a message, either through the web, or from your phone, you choose the privacy level you want. On the web there are check buttons to choose between public, family and friends, or private. From the phone you can send to 8555 for public, 8888 for friends and family and 8000 for private.

As you get to decide what you are posting about and who should see it there isn’t any need to have other settings to control the access. If you want to say in your post that you are in London and you set it to public, there’s not much point in the journal only showing your location as “United Kingdom” as anyone reading the post can see that you’re in London.

On the other hand, the automatic tracking entries get posted by the system, so you do need a way to specify who gets to see them and how detailed they should be. So now there is one check box to let you turn tracking on or off, and one setting to make your tracked entries public, friends and family, or private. There are advanced settings if you do want finer control but these are now mostly to control what things people can do on your journal, such as posting a comment, calling you, or sending you a text message.

Release three – bells and whistles

Published June 15, 2008 releases Leave a Comment
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Another month has passed and we’ve rolled out a new release. This release we have mainly focussed on improving usability, but also added a few bells and whistles to improve the look and content of your journal.

One area we have spent some time trying to improve is the settings page, and in particular managing the privacy settings. I’ll write another post about this, but we hope we have made this area a lot easier to understand and manage.

The journal page now clearly labels whether posts have been sent from the phone or the web, or if it is an automatic tracking entry. If there are several automatic entries in a row from the same place, we now only show one entry. We’ve also made it a lot clearer whether you’re looking at the public view of a journal, or the friends and family view, or your private view.

The entry editing page now lets you chose a place from a map as well as being able to just enter a name. There are also a lot more photos available for many more places to add to your post.

Our database that maps cell towers to places is getting better, but we don’t always get a city level location and can only identify the country you’re in. To make this clearer, when you view an entry for a country we show the whole country and highlight it. We have some big enhancements in the pipeline that will allow us to track to city level a lot more often.

As well as many more photos we have started to add links to information about places so the people reading your journal can learn a little more about the places you are visiting (and maybe you’ll find it interesting too).

To help you keep in touch with your friends and family, we’ve also added a ’share your travel journal’ link to the settings page so you can quickly send an email with your journal details to make sure people at home know what a great holiday you’re having.

Sharing your information

Published June 11, 2008 future plans Leave a Comment
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These days everyone has different ways of sharing their information. You used to share your travel news by postcard, expensive international phone calls and maybe a slide night when you got home. OK it’s probably been a while since you’ve been to a slide night, but these days you’re more like to send an email, call with a phonecard or mobile phone, or send a text message. You may even have online places you use to share information with friends and family.

We hope that we’re building something that’s a great way to share your trip, but we don’t want to lock you into having to use our site. We are planning to enable different ways to share the information from your Travel Journal. We have plans for a Facebook application to allow you to share your trip with your friends on Facebook, but initially we have added support for a service from Yahoo! called Fire Eagle.

Fire Eagle is a location broker, which means that it acts as an intermediary between different services that want to share location information. The big advantage for users is that you can control it all in one place. If you want to disable access by an application you just log into Fire Eagle and turn it off.

So why is this useful? As location aware applications become more common you can mix and match the service you use. Tell Fire Eagle to allow the Travel Journal to update your location and now the Facebook application that uses Fire Eagle will be updated as you travel. Have a fancy phone with a GPS? Use Navizon to update your location and the Travel Journal can retrieve your accurate location from Fire Eagle.

Fire Eagle is currently in private beta, which means you need an invitation to join. Send us an email with your journal id to tjfeedback (at) ekit-inc (dot) com if you would like an invite.