G-Snap!: An Interactive Live Blogging Platform

Just a quick win for you folks who enjoy using Twitter within your live events. Due to rather popular demand, we’ve bumped up the number of Twitter users you can auto-approve (from 5 to 10). We hope you enjoy! By the way, did you know that you can also push status updates to Twitter (and Facebook). It’s a great way to manage your live event and your Twitter feed from one place.

Ever wonder how many folks check out your live blogs/events once they’re over? Well, we just recently released an upgrade that gives you this valuable insight.

As you are all aware, live blogs not only have their value when live but if run correctly, they can also contain valuable information for your readers after the event is over. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re live blogging a conference keynote. Towards the end, you enable our Q&A feature to transcribe the Q&A session. Your readers are excited to learn the latest and greatest but a few days after the session, you take down your live blog. Well, not only is the live blog gone but the knowledge from that session is as well. If you were to keep your event up within a live blog archive, your readers will always have your site as a point of reference for that event. Even better, you have now created another level of engagement with your site visitors. More time spent on site, more…you know. Go ahead, give it a try. It’ll surprise you have many people visit your event once it’s over. And now, have the stats to prove it. Simply look in the live stats module once the event is over to see the goodness.

Go on folks, keep those live blogs coming…and as you’ve just learned, consider creating an archive of all your events! Perhaps a little reverse logic might work. Don’t go creating that archive, it’s bad for you. People won’t like it.

Now you know how many viewers visit your event once it's over!

-Ramsey

In the midst of our largest project to date (more on that soon we promise), we realized that we needed to beef up capacity and do a quick once over on our overall performance.

So, on that note, we’re happy to let you all know that to date, G-Snap has never run faster, better or with the ability to quickly scale up for large events than it has now. Some of the changes included bringing up additional web servers to handle the exciting increase in traffic, optimizations to our code to serve content even faster/more efficiently, and a new (small) UI feature that asks your users to “click to play” to join the event. “Click to play” was introduced to enable us to more accurately track the number of people who actually engage with the your liveblog. Secondly, “click to play” enables us to serve your event only to those that really want to participate. For larger sites (such as our friends at the LA Times, dlisted.com, and popbytes.com), this will be a fantastic performance win. Anyway, we hope you like the changes.

Bottom line, we’re really excited about the live blogging space (if you can’t tell!) and are proud of the infrastructure that is unique to this space that we’ve been able to build up to ensure you have the best performing live blogging platform out there.

// Tangent warning //

So, speaking of “live blogging platform”, we’ve come to realize that while that’s the standard term of the day to describe our space and how folks search to find us, we are starting to feel like we’re more of a “real time journalism platform”. Chew on that a bit…would love to hear your thoughts.

// End of Tangent //

Take care all…and believe in what’s coming. It rocks.

-Ramsey

Today we want to introduce our latest feature for our Premium users: an XML feed for completed events. What’s this for you ask? Well, it enables our advanced users to archive their live events on their servers by tapping into this feed once an event is over. If this is something that’s of interest to you, please let us know and we’ll send you the info you need.

Thanks everyone.

-Ramsey

–
G-Snap! Inc
An Interactive Live Blogging Platform
http://gsnap.com

It has been a little while since we’ve updated our blog but we really have been hard at work improving *your* product. Most of you know how much we believe that this product is a great combination of a lot of internal thinking/strategy combined with the passionate ideas we get from each of you. Thank you for that. We are proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish not only because of what we’ve managed to build and release but because you keep coming back for more. You’re feeling ok, right?

So, what’s the latest? Well, it falls into two buckets.

Upgraded Embedded Widget
First, we have made a technological switch. For the past year or so our embeddable widget has been based on Adobe Flash. There were good reasons for this that no longer exist (this market changes quickly!). So, starting today our embeddable widget is built on a simple HTML iframe. While this might seem like a trivial change, it was quite an intense process. Regardless, this new architecture should enhance the widget’s overall performance as well as provide better cross platform support (Apple iPad for example).

Custom Themes
Secondly, G-Snap! Premium Users now have the ability to customize our embeddable widget. As you can see below, virtually every piece of the widget is customizable to match your brand. You can insert custom headers/footers, change text colors, background colors, scoreboard colors, and much more.

What Happens to My Old Events?
In terms of previous events you have embedded, those will continue to function just fine (although they will not respond to a new theme change). If you’d like, you can replace the embed code for old events with the new iframe embed code. If you’d like to do this, go to the console for those specific events and grab the updated embed code and replace it with the old code already on your site. I’m assuming most of you will choose to keep the old events just the way they are.

That’s it for now. Thanks for tuning in. Oh, if you would like to become a G-Snap! Premium User to have access to our new Custom Themes feature, please contact us now. We’d be happy to give you a demo.

-Ramsey

Here’s a scenario:

• You’re live blogging an event.
• In your web browser you have three tabs: 1, your G-Snap! console 2, your Twitter account and 3, your Facebook account.
• You are furiously switching tabs as you try to cover your live event by adding updates and corresponding with people on all three services (at the same time).
• You find yourself pulling your hair out because neither of the services are getting your full attention and your live blog is suffering as people slowly walk away.

Today, G-Snap! makes managing your social experiences during a live event much easier. As a first step to become your one stop social stop for your live events, it is now possible to push status updates from G-Snap! to Facebook, Twitter, and even Yahoo!. Simply select edit event status, type in a status update, and select the services you wish to push to. If you haven’t connected with these services in the past, you will be prompted to do so.

One tab, access to all your social accounts, and 100% focus on your live blog and your readers. Go ahead, dive in. Live blogging just got a lot easier with G-Snap!.

Comments/questions? Drop us a line. Or, create an event now and give this a try! http://gsnap.com

Hello everyone, hope you’re having a great Thursday!

Today, we wanted to let you guys know of a quick product update for our embedded widget. It is now possible for your readers to share your event with their Facebook and Twitter contacts directly from our widget. Our hope is that this gives you additional incentive to host your live events with G-Snap! and embed them on your own websites – where your regular visitors can help spread the word.

So, what’s the best way to leverage this new feature?

1. Go to http://gsnap.com and create your event
2. While filling out the Create Event form, make sure to specify your “live event url”. That is, the URL or the page where are you going to be embedding the event. eg. http://mysite.com/live
3. Grab our embed code (from the right hand side or the bottom of the page) and insert it into your site

Once you’ve done that, your regular website visitors can share your event to Facebook or Twitter by selecting the icons in the footer. That’s all it takes!

Enjoy folks. More good stuff coming soon.

Greetings everyone,

We’re excited to share with you some innovative enhancements to our service that are truly fantastic. If you haven’t come by to visit us lately, come on over and take a look at http://gsnap.com. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how far we’ve come.

Engaging Your Readers
Our goal at G-Snap! is to create the tools and user experiences you need to give you a better way to connect with your readers in real-time in order to build deeper, longer lasting relationships. We do this in the hopes of opening up new revenue opportunities for your business. We believe the more engaged your readers are, the more value they get, the more likely they are to come to your future events and engage with your business model, ads, or sponsors.

Feature Update
As a result of our focus, today we are proud to introduce G-Snap! Polls. Polls will be a phenomenal new tool in your live blogging arsenal to help you reach your audience in new ways. Create and manage up to twenty polls, include one question, up to six answers, embedded media or even a YouTube video. You have to give it a try to see just how great – and easy – it is.

Secondly, launched just about a month ago, we developed a better system for your readers to comment in your events without requiring a G-Snap! account. This fundamentally removes any barriers that might have otherwise prevented them from participating. Coupled with our advanced moderation features, you are still be the one who decides who and what goes into your event.

Lastly, based on your great feedback, we have also released the ability to change the scheduled start time of your event and delete an event. As always, these exciting new enhancements are live today and available on our web, mobile, and embedded widget experiences.

Looking Ahead
The second half of this year contains some exciting new updates that will drive even more engagement with your readers. Until those are released, continue providing the valuable feedback you have been as that’s a big part of how we prioritize the product we’re building for you.

Thanks everyone. We couldn’t do it without you!

Ramsey Ksar
VP Product
G-Snap!, Inc.
http://www.gsnap.com

Hi folks,

Today we have a quick update from G-Snap! HQ regarding some exciting product upgrades that are now live.

Prior to today, commenting in a G-Snap! Event required your readers to have a G-Snap! account (or connected via Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!) before they could submit their comment.  While this enforced a certain level of quality control, it restricted the flow of potential users who wanted to comment but didn’t want to bother with registering with yet another new service.  As a result, the new upgrades available today allow your readers to join your event, pick a nickname and send in a comment  – all without requiring an account.

As most of you know our focus is laser-like when it comes to designing the best experience for our users – especially for those that run events.  These event hosts should be pleased to know that there is *NO* incremental overhead as a result of these upgrades.  That is, comments from users without accounts can still be trusted, banned, followed, etc just as before.  This was not a trivial task but we’re glad we made the “experiential” investment.

Here are a few other upgrades that made it in to this release:

• For those of us who like a clean workspace, a delete button is now available in the pending comments list
• Accounts are no longer required to RSVP for an event (this should help you increase you event attendance)
• Performance and stability improvements (web experience loads much faster)
• Custom skinning of our widget experience (contact us for details)

As always, these upgrades were released on our web, mobile, and widget experiences.

The G-Snap! Team
http://gsnap.com

PS.  Just around the corner is a VERY cool upgrade.  I’m giddy just thinking about it.  $5 per hint. 

Check it out folks, G-Snap! is powering Motorola’s developer event in Mexico City.  The tour will continue on to Argentina and Brazil with more coverage powered by G-Snap! – all in Spanish and Portuguese (and the occasional English) of course.  That’s right, G-Snap! is now localized!  If you have any event you’d like to run in a language other than Spanish and Portuguese, let us know.

To check it out:  http://developer.motorola.com/eventstraining/summit/mexico10/