qubox blog

An update on qubox

It's been quiet on the qubox blog for a long time. 

I've posted to our corporate blog to explain a bit about what we are up to behind all the silence.

We still welcome users for qubox.com and qubox for Facebook, but in the short term we don't plan to add any new functionality - we're concentrating our efforts on our next-generation technology.

If you use qubox we'd still like to hear your feedback!  We hope to have the opportunity to add new quboxes, and perhaps some other enhancements, later in the year.

qubox application now available on Facebook

You can now use qubox within Facebook!  We've used the excellent Facebook Platform API to embed qubox like-mindedness searching within Facebook.

You can try the qubox application at http://apps.facebook.com/dothequbox/ (of course, you'll need a Facebook account).

If you already have a login on qubox.com, you can link that to your Facebook account so that your existing quboxes are immediately available inside Facebook.  Watch out for the prompt to make this link as part of the application install process.  (If you skip this step, you'll have to do your quboxes again in Facebook.)

We're planning to add more functionality to the Facebook application soon, but we're already pretty pleased with this first version.  Take a look and tell us what you think!

Blogfeed from qubox - get the latest from like-minded bloggers

We've added a new feature to qubox.com to help you discover and keep up-to-date with interesting blogs.

The qubox blogfeed works like this:

• bloggers register their blogs with qubox.com (there's a shortcut for this: www.qubox.com/bloggers) and complete one or more quboxes
• We monitor the RSS feeds for the blogs to spot new posts
• We use the qubox information to merge and prioritise the different blog feeds based on the degree of like-mindedness between the blog author and blog reader

The resulting merged feed shows you all the latest posts from blogs registered with qubox that are written by people with a degree of like-mindedness that you choose.  So for example, I can choose to see recent blog posts by authors who are at least 90% like-minded about Love.

If you want to read blog posts you don't need to do anything special to set up this new feature - just log in at www.qubox.com and you'll see the blogfeed widget on the home page.  The widget looks like this:

On the left are the most recent blog entries.  You can scroll down this list with the buttons on the top right.

The other controls on the right let you choose how like-minded the blog author needs to be.

Once you have the controls set to filter blog entries the way you want, click "get this as RSS" and qubox will give you a link to an RSS feed that you can monitor with your feed reader of choice.

If you write a blog and want to see it appear in the blogfeed, go to www.qubox.com/bloggers to register your blog.  And remember, the more quboxes you do, the more people will be able to find your blog!

The qubox.com beta is live!

It's official - our alpha site is archived and the new-look beta is up and running at www.qubox.com!

Congratulations and thanks to our development and design team for making this happen, and to all the testers and users who gave feedback on the alpha.

If you are already a user of qubox.com you don't need to do anything - all of your quboxes and other information will be automatically transferred to the beta.

If you haven't tried qubox yet, it's an ideal time to give it a go!

We think the beta looks great with a much slicker layout and more interesting stuff right from the home page.  But we are still planning to add lots of new functions over the next few weeks.  Check back here for more details soon!

RSS feeds on qubox.com

In a previous blog entry I hinted at a new feature that we snuck in a few weeks ago: RSS feeds.  With our beta launch just around the corner I wanted to highlight how they work - they are a great way to keep up with new things on qubox.com.

If you are RSS-aware you may have spotted the feeds already.  If you have RSS myopia (like me! I had to have David, our development team leader, explain this very patiently to me...) then here's how to find them.

1. First off log in to qubox.com and go to someone's profile page (for example http://www.qubox.com/me/john).  Or go to your own profile page if you prefer.  It's important that you are viewing a profile page, as that's the only place we link to the RSS feeds at the moment.
2. Your web browser should automatically discover several RSS feeds.  The way this works (this is where RSS myopia may strike...) depends on your browser.  In Internet Explorer 7 the "View feeds on this page (Alt-J)" icon lights up on the toolbar.  In Firefox it's a "Subscribe to this page..." link at the right of the location bar.  In both cases you'll see the orange RSS icon.  (If you are a Safari user you are on your own here.  If you work it out, let me know!)
3. Pick a feed you like the look of and you are away.

The feeds we offer at the moment include:

• new people registered, by qubox - so for instance I can keep an eye on "new people who are likeminded about Love"
• new bookmarks and other links - so I can see new links that like-minded qubox users have chosen to share

Note that the feed looks at like-mindedness with the person whose profile you are viewing when you get the feed.  So if you view my profile page at http://www.qubox.com/me/john and grab an RSS feed from there, you'll get updates about people who think like ME, not people who think like YOU!  That might be interesting for you, but most of the time you'll want information about people who think like you - so go to your own profile page and grab the RSS feeds from there.

We'll be adding more RSS functionality to qubox.com in the future but we think this is a good start and a great way to see new like-minded people as they arrive.

Coming soon - the official qubox.com beta!

If you've been visiting qubox.com for a while you'll have seen a few new things in our alpha version.  For example, we've added a messaging function so people can make contact with like-minded people via qubox.  We also have two more quboxes under development (Music and Sports).  And we've sneaked out a few other features such as RSS feeds (I'll blog about those soon!).

We're pleased with the way things are going and the feedback we're getting from users of the alpha version.  So we think we're almost ready to move to the next phase and launch an official beta.

There are lots of small jobs still to do ahead of the beta and one big task: we are updating the whole look-and-feel and graphical layout of the site.  The logo and styles we've used for the alpha are OK, but we want to have something more polished and easier to use for our beta launch.

We've been working on the graphical design for a few weeks and I've just seen some near-final layouts from our design team - we think they look great!  I'll be posting a sneak preview here in the next couple of days.

Check out this blog for more details on our progress towards the beta launch!  As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Thirty days of the alpha!

We have been live with the alpha-test version of qubox.com for just over a month now.  I thought I'd share a few reflections from the qubox team.

First off, we feel that things are going well and we're really excited!  We have real people using qubox.com and we're getting a lot of great feedback!  If you are one of our early users - thanks for helping us make this happen!

The basic functionality of the site is working well and we've made a lot of improvements based on things we've learned from our first few users.  For example, if you registered with qubox.com early on you'll have noticed that the process of uploading a photo was quite challenging - we think we have it a lot smoother now.

We're pleased too at the number of users.  We'd set ourselves a goal of getting about a hundred users for the end of March, and we've beaten that number (there are around 140 users as of today).  Those are tiny numbers by internet standards, of course, but we have to start somewhere!  And we know that the functionality of the site is far from complete so we don't expect to see explosive viral take-up at this stage.  Our priority so far has been to get sufficient people signed up for the "search by like-mindedness" function to return interesting results, and to give us a meaningful sample from which to get feedback.

Some things we've learned and that we're working to improve:

• A lot of people think that qubox.com is "another social network".  We need to do a better job of explaining how we see ourselves - we want to be a way for people who think alike to make connections into their existing social networks.  So for instance, if you use MySpace for social networking, qubox.com should be a way for you to make connections with other MySpace users who think alike.  We're going to make some changes over the next few weeks to address this.  In particular, we're going to make the homepage more informative.
• We've hidden the "share with a friend" functions of qubox.com!  Most of our users haven't found these great features, which we think are one of the most exciting things about qubox (they are in the "share" menu, www.qubox.com/share).  We'll be enhancing  these features - for instance, we're building better widgets - and making them easier to discover.
• We need to encourage people to round out their profiles with bookmarks.  Adding a bookmark to qubox.com is a way to help people who think like you find interesting things.  We need to make that easier and more obvious - we're working on it!
• Some people found the registration process too long.  We've streamlined it and added a very lightweight fast-track registration option (we call it "just let me in!").

We are also working to expand our range of quboxes.  Right now we're developing a "Love" qubox.  (You can help us build it at www.qubox.com/development_zone!)  That should be live in a week or two, and there are more in the pipeline.

Finally it's great to see that we already have a whole bunch of really interesting people with great profiles!  Here are some of my favourites:

• Multi-talented Spanna: www.qubox.com/me/Spanna
• Sports-mad Flower: www.qubox.com/doyouthinklike/Flower
• Easy-going Indy: www.qubox.com/me/Indy

Keep the feedback coming!

Another way to link to qubox!

If you want to let your friends know about qubox and find out if they think like you, but you need something quicker and easier than a qubot widget - for instance, something that you can easily paste into a plain text email - then how about our new link format:

http://www.qubox.com/doyouthinklike/john/about/Celebrities

Intuitive, eh?

All you need to do is sign up with qubox.com and do a qubox.

Introducing qubox widgets: qubots!

One of our goals for qubox.com is to allow you to embed qubox's measurement of likemindedness into your own pages: profile pages on social networks, your blogs, anything.  Our vision is that the people reading your pages will be able to tell how like-minded they are to you - which will help them understand how they might relate to your opinions.   Plus, it's fun!

So we've built a widget.  Here's an example: the widget below will let you find out if you think like me about TV shows.

(If you DO think like me... you might be interested to know that my favourite TV shows at the moment are Battlestar Galactica and The Green Wing!)

qubox.com countdown

It's been frantic here at qubox Towers for the last few weeks!  But at last we're ready to unveil our new creation.

So: welcome to qubox.com!

qubox.com is a new way to search for like-minded people.  It works like this:

1. You complete a short "qubox" word puzzle, based around a theme that interests you.  (We already have quboxes about TV Shows, Celebrities, Holidays and more; and we'll be adding new quboxes soon.)
2. We analyse your responses to the qubox puzzle, which gives us an idea how you think about that subject.
3. We compare your responses to other qubox users, and show you who is most like-minded.

quboxes use a technique called "attitudinal matching" which has been developed by a team of psychologists and pattern recognition specialists at Synature Ltd.  It's a scientifically-validated approach to measuring like-mindedness.

Right now qubox.com is still under development.  We're not even ready to call it a "beta", so you'll see the site is still labelled "alpha".  There are lots of bugs and lots of things we still want to improve.  But the basics are working and we'd love for a few people to give it a try and give us feedback.

So take a look at www.qubox.com and see who thinks like you!  And tell us what you think.