G-Snap!: An Interactive Live Blogging Platform

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/

Howdy folks…just a quick note to let you all know that we have a tutorial we posted over at YouTube on our new Q&A feature.  Feel free to head on over to learn the ins-n-out of this new feature.  We’ll keep adding to the library over time.  For that matter, if anyone would like to help, let us know!  We’ll definitely consider all entries.  We’d love this to be populated with community video!  I have a few serious G-Snappers in mind…don’t make me call on you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfurW_iAdMo

Thx,

The G-Snap! Team

Start a live blog/event now!

Hello everyone, what an exciting day! We have some great product updates to tell you about. There a lot to read but we think it’ll be worth your while to browse through it all.

As a quick into, we’ve been very busy over the past few months. A fair bit of analysis has gone into our product, experience, business model and more forcing us to think outside the box, inside the box, around the box…basically, a lot of thinking. The first result? Well, a new version of our product of course that includes some slick new goodies. Well, what are they? Never thought you’d ask.

1. Updated Design: we focused here on creating a design that is easier to understand, utilized available space more efficiently (comments appear further up the page as compared to before), just better on the eyes.

2. New Moderation Modes: as we thought about how our product could be better suited for larger audiences (30+), a new mode for comment moderation became very apparent. Here’s how moderation works now on G-Snap!:

• Option 1, Moderation On: when “on” you’ll notice a column on the left hand side of the console consisting of comments pending approval by the event moderator(s). To make processing these comments easier, a new filtering option is available for comments, questions, or Tweets. Questions? More on that below…
• Option 2, Moderation Off: when “off” you are basically inside of a “live chat”. We think it’s important to give you this option and even though we don’t recommend “off” for large audiences, it does work well for smaller audiences.
• Option 3, Comments Disabled: If choice was a menu item, you’d be dining at Chez G-Snap! tonight. This option was requested by several of our customers so we’ve added it in for anyone to use.

3. Ask a Question!: this is one of our favorites for this release. The new G-Snap! Questions and Answers mode is there for a couple good reasons. A little history first. One of the problems we saw in previous events was that there was no distinct difference between a question and a comment…other than perhaps a question mark. Additionally, when a question came in and was answered by the event moderator, there was no context as, more often than not, the original question was below the fold and the answer above with no way to tie the two together. With the new Q&A mode set to “on”, a question can be entered as an actual question (by the moderator or viewers) by simply typing in a question and selecting “Ask a Question”. The moderator then has the ability to answer the question and when they do, the question AND answer appear as a single entity in the live stream. Neat huh?

Also, if the moderator assigns someone as a trusted user (such as a guest celebrity or topic expert), they can assign questions to the trusted user(s) so the actual expert can answer questions from the audience. Hopefully this will give you a few new reasons to use G-Snap! for engaging Q&A sessions with featured guests!

4. RSVP Count: so let’s say you create an event on G-Snap! and you set it for a future date. Viewers are sending in their RSVP but guess what, we didn’t tell you how many signed up! Ehh… Well, that’s taken care of now. From your profile page, or the event console, you’ll now find the RSVP count for events that start in the future.

5. Removed the 140 character restriction: it was just time. We love it. We’re sure you will too. Oh, we did increase the overall height of the comment area too to help.

6. New status feature: our status feature is an upgrade to our good ol’ “snapshot”. The upgrade consists of better placement and functionality. Give it a try, we think you’ll like it! Coming soon, you’ll be able to push your event status to Facebook or Twitter.

7. New Filtering options: ever wish you could just see the images in your event? Or perhaps turn off viewer commentary? Well, these options sort of existed before but are now there with a new look and feel. In addition, we’ve added Q&A as a filter option. This is a great tool for your viewers to use when your event is over. By selecting Q&A, they can see just the Q&A portion of your event without having to filter through the other comments.

8. Set your Embed URL: today, when events are created on G-Snap!, they are accessed via your G-Snap! profile (or perhaps via our Twitter or Facebook page). With the new embed URL feature, you can specify the website where your G-Snap! event will take place (if you choose to not host it with us) to ensure that any traffic from gsnap.com or any promotion we do, sends all the traffic to your live event page. Remember, we firmly believe that this is “your” event, your viewers, and the traffic should go to your website. Note, for the moderator, the event URL on your view of your profile will continue to point to the console on gsnap.com (as that’s where all the goodness happens). For your viewers though, they’ll be sent to your live event page.

9. Easier access to banning/trusting users: with the click of your mouse, it’s now possible to trust or ban users from your event. When moderation is on, you can ban and trust from the pending comments column. When moderation is off , you can hover over a viewer’s avatar and ban/trust them from there.

10. Updated method for hiding/showing messages: sticking with our goal of simplifying the experience, when a message is hidden it is gone. But wait, don’t worry. At the bottom of the live stream you’ll now find a link (on the console only) to view and “un-hide/show” hidden messages. Our goal with this feature, was to provide a clear model. That is, when moderation is on, unapproved comments are in the left column and approved comments are in the live stream. This way, you know exactly what your viewers are seeing and what they’re not!

Our Top 10 list covers all the big updates but this release also included a bunch of random bug fixes and minor tweaks.  Give the new updates a try and let us know what you think. They’re live and available on all our experiences – web, mobile, and our embedded widget.

As we mentioned at the very beginning, we’ll be rolling out our new and improved business model over the next month or so. While we work on that, there are a few other exciting features in the pipeline, including the ability to comment within a G-Snap! event without requiring a G-Snap! account, customization of our embedded widget, and more! Stay tuned folks, the best is yet to come.

Hey boss, can we sleep now? I mean, next feature comin’ right up!

-The G-Snap! Team

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Create an event now on G-Snap! @ http://gsnap.com

Check out a great article on mysanantio.com about a fantastic event called “A Todo Dar” that G-Snap! is a big part of.  Here’s the URL for the article as well as our press release (that comes out tomorrow).

http://voices.mysanantonio.com/sxswlive/2010/03/even-though-nan-palmero-and.html

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G-Snap! Showcases Snapcasting Technology at “A Todo Dar”, a SXSW Interactive Concert

March 19, 2010 — The South by Southwest® (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals taking place now in Austin, TX, FPO Marketing and their primary sponsor, Gibson Guitar, have tapped live interactive blogging company, G-Snap!, for their “A Todo Dar” interactive music concert on Friday, March 19th featuring top Latino artists from Movic Records including PXNDX, Insite, Los Claxons, and Nina Pilots.

G-Snap!’s Snapcast interactive technology platform will make it possible for fans all over the world to experience the “A Todo Dar” concert via a live interactive broadcast where they can see the performances and chat with other fans in and outside the venue.

“By bringing our events to life on the Internet, G-Snap! offers us a really innovative way for our audiences to engage with South by Southwest,” says Jaime Garza, General Manager of FP Marketing. “This innovative technology will play a key role in enhancing the experience we’ve created, and ultimately help us increase our reach and gain new sponsorship opportunities.”

With the simple click of a link, “A Todo Dar” fans will be taken to the live interactive broadcast destination where they can tune into the concert, check out what others are saying, and participate with their own comments, all without hitting the refresh button. G-Snap!’s innovative tools are ideal for any type of event because they’ve made it easy for anyone to report on news and events as they are happening, interact directly with their viewers, and add pictures and video imagery to their stories.

“Whether it’s major sports and entertainment events or breaking news, we are fundamentally changing how people consume content by delivering rich, real-time information that matters to them,” says Ramsey Ksar, Vice President of G-Snap! “We are excited to have the opportunity to be at SXSW and the “A Todo Dar” concert as this event is the blueprint for future concerts and other live events looking to increase audience interactivity, engagement, and monetization.”

Event Information
The “A Todo Dar” event can be found at http://atododarmusica.com. The live interactive broadcast begins at 7PM Central and can be accessed via the “watch” link.

About FPO Marketing
FPO Marketing (www.fpomarketing.com) has been creating multicultural marketing programs since their inception in 2004. A full service, award winning firm based in San Antonio, FPO has established itself as an agency that is not afraid to think beyond. FPO understands that successful brands are built on “ownable” and defendable communication pillars that have real meaning to consumers. We take over 60 years of combined experience in Hispanic and multicultural marketing and blend that with a youthful energy that embraces change. Brand planning and research, advertising and promotions, interactive and design as well as full service media, our collective team can develop, implement and mange every aspect the marketing communications process. FPO is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas with offices in Houston, Texas as well.

About G-Snap!
G-Snap! (www.gsnap.com) has developed a live interactive blogging platform that gives content publishers a better way to engage and connect with their audience. Whether it’s mainstream media journalists or citizen bloggers, G-Snap’s tools make it easy for any writer to cover news and events as they are happening, interact directly with their readers, and add pictures and video imagery to their reporting. The live blogging experience is changing how people consume content by bringing life to the Internet and captivating audiences like never before. G-Snap! is a start-up headquartered in Livermore, California.

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While you were hopefully enjoying a nice weekend, we rolled out a new feature we wanted to make you aware of.  In addition to Twitpic images now auto-rendering in the live stream, we now support yfrog and Flickr!  We hope this will encourage you to continue to use your favorite services while you’re on G-Snap!.  Here’s a snapshot of what the integration looks like:

How does this work?  Well, it’s quite easy?  Grab the “link url” from yfrog or a standard Flickr photo page URL, and drop it into the live stream.  After a few magical seconds, the link you pasted will auto-render into what you see above.  It’s really easy.  By the way, if these URLs come in as a result of a Tweet that you import, the photos will also auto-render.  Neat, huh?

Also, in case you haven’t noticed, it is now possible to sign in to G-Snap! with your Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo! IDs.  With these services, we bring in your profile picture for you as your G-Snap! avatar (or you can choose to use your G-Snap! photo) as well as a few other features that will be coming out soon.  As always, we’re building this product and these features for you so if there’s something you’d like to see us build in, please let us know.  Your influence is a critical part of keeping this service what it is!

Next up for G-Snap! (other than raising our next round of funding) is a really exciting supersized feature/design update.  If you’re interested in being a part of the preview group, let us know.

Thanks everyone…

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

Feel free to stroll on over to George Drapeau’s blog to see what he has to say about G-Snap!.  And if you’d like, you can join his Snapcast of the Pac-10 championship blogged live right here on G-Snap! (http://gsnap.com/rich/1011).

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

Thanks Robert, I had  a great time taking you through our service.  We’re all looking forward to your Le Web Day One Snapcast (to access, go to http://gsnap.com/scobleizer and select the LeWeb Snapcast to RSVP).

As some of you might have noticed, things are a little zippier on G-Snap! lately.  We’ve been so busy building new stuff that every once in a while, we stop to take stock to see how all the parts are running under the hood.  For most, nothing will change…but for some, you’ll notice the experience on gsnap.com is substantially faster, especially when first loading a Snapcast.

Oh, we also improved our Facebook and Twitter share features.  The Snapcast title and the URL now come along for the ride.  Give them a try!

That’s it for now…

-The G-Snap! Team

Sports fans, listen up!  We’ve just completed our latest round of feature enhancements and we’re ready to share the good news.  Here’s the breakdown:

Enhanced Scoreboard for Sports Snapcasts

1. Improved Game Clock:

There are many things that could be said about how big of a leap our game clock technology has taken with this release.  Rather than describe the specific details, let’s just say we’re excited by how it works now.  One thing you might notice immediately is that we took away the slider bar (unfortunately, there were too many complications with it) but we think the new found simplicity will be exactly what the doctor ordered.  It’s always amazing to us how our most complicated features can appear so simple.

2.  Scoreboard Options:

Running sports related Snapcasts don’t always have to be about “the game”…it could easily be about a “live chat” during a draft.  When this is the case, it’s now possible to hide the Scoreboard and simply have a basketball chat by selecting  “Hide Scoreboard” in the Scoreboard Options menu.

For those of you actually reporting a game, another new feature we’ve introduced is to give you control over whether or not you want to manage the game clock.  If you’d rather not, selecting the options menu and hiding the game clock removes the game clock from your Snapcast.

3.  G-Snap! Game Actions:

Starting with Football, we’re introducing G-Snap! Game Actions.  G-Snap! Game Actions enable you to quickly indicate what’s happening in your game with the click of a mouse.  Starting with Football, it’s easy to manage who has possession of the ball (clearly indicated by a football icon in the scoreboard).  You can also specify if there’s a penalty on the field by selecting the penalty icon.  Selecting either of these, also puts in a quick Snapshot update to reflect the fact there’s a big change in the game.  More Game Actions are on their way (for football and other sports) but we’re going to leave the definition of those to you!  That’s right, if there are Game Actions you’d like to see for your particular sport, send us an email via http://gsnap.com/contact.html and let us know!

4.  Improved Scoreboard Counters:

As a core component of our Scoreboard module, the ability to track the game score was always one of our favorite features.  While it may look the same, trust us, a lot of work has gone into make sure these counters run smoother and faster.

We hope these various configuration options will help you customize your Snapcast to better suit your individual Snapcasting needs!

Game Stats Module

As one of the most requested features, we are happy to introduce a module for tracking customized game statistics.  The G-Snap! Game Stats Module allows you to track up to 10 different game stats.  Just plug them in and click apply.  Don’t want to track stats?  Simply “hide” the Game Stats module via the Scoreboard Options.  By the way, this feature is available to your viewers only when they are viewing the Snapcast from G-Snap!. Down the road, it’ll be available in the embedded Snapcast.  Thanks for requesting the feature, we hope you enjoy it!

RSS Feeds

Access to who is doing what on G-Snap! just got one step easier.  With our new RSS feature, you can now subscribe a feed of our “Featured Snapcasts” module (on the homepage) or a feed of any G-Snap! user and the public Snapcasts they’ve created (via their profile).  This is a great way to staying plugged in to what’s happening on G-Snap! via your favorite RSS reader/tool (such as My Yahoo! or iGoogle).

RSVP from an Embedded Snapcast

This has been available on our web interface for a little while but today we’ve made this feature available on our embedded Snapcasts.  RSVP’ing is a great feature for reminding your viewers that your Snapcast hasn’t started quite yet.  If your readers decide to RSVP, G-Snap! will send them an alert just before things get underway.  So don’t forget…if your Snapcast starts “in the future”, make sure to select that when you’re creating your Snapcast.  Oh, and if it’s created for the future, the room is still open and people can come in and read/chat as usual.

Twitpic

As a nice little extra, TwitPic URLs now automatically render an image preview (instead of just a link).  Selecting the image preview will take you to the TwitPic site (in a different browser tab of course).

Well, that’s the news for today.  There was a lot of additional work and bug fixes under the hood but let’s leave it at this….  We love sports and we know you do too.  We hope you enjoy the new goodies and trust that you’ll put them to good use.  As always, please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or additional features you’d like us to build.

Thanks everyone!

-The G-Snap! Team

Hello folks…

Just a quick note to let you know we’ve added two features today.  The first is a  new option for when you’re creating a Snapcast.  Now, it’s possible to choose whether or not you want to notify your followers of a new Snapcast you’ve created.  FYI, followers will still “see” the Snapcast in their Snapcast Activity module but this option gives you the choice of not sending an email notification.

Secondly, we added a module on your Profile that lists some of the top Snapcasters on G-SNAP!.  We’re hoping this will help you on your way to finding new people with whom you can connect.  If you’d like to be featured in this list, let us know!

Thanks all…

-The G-SNAP! Team