CircleMe Features

What is Planting?

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So what is Planting?

With the launch of our iPhone app in March, we introduced a cool new feature on our site, “Planting”. Some of the community members wanted to find out more about “Planting” so we decided to write a blog entry and explain more about it.

On CircleMe you can collect all the things you like and discover new ones.  So, we thought that it would be very cool if you could add one of your Likes not just on your profile, but also somewhere in the world. For instance, you might discover the best ice cream ever and want to add it as a Like, but not only on your profile: What about placing the like somewhere in the world? What about placing it where that awesome ice-cream parlor is? And so we decided to create “Plants”: The possibility to place things you like somewhere on the map.

What’s the benefit?

First, you get to collect all those things you liked or found interesting somewhere in the world: Imagine you discovered that amazing ice cream whilst visiting a new city… you wouldn’t like to forget where it is, right? 😉

But also, if you are placing interesting likes, others will be able to discover those (that is, unless you want to mark them as private) which means you can also discover other cool “plants” shared by other CircleMe users related to the things you are passionate about.

But… I don’t have an iPhone! No problem: Planting is also available on the web version of CircleMe where you can not only explore Plants, but add your own ones.

Right, so how do I plant?

We’ve created a quick video tutorial on how to plant that you can find below:

We hope it’s useful for you! Are there any other features you would like a video tutorial for? Please let us know by commenting on this blog entry or our Facebook or Twitter pages. And even better! On our CircleMe page on… CirceMe!

You can now invite your Twitter friends on CircleMe!

/ CircleMe Team / 6 Comments

Back in March we asked you on our Facebook page how you preferred to invite your friends to join you on new sites like CircleMe. Well, Twitter was the second most popular result just behind invites via Facebook and ahead of invites via email.

Result of CircleMe Poll on how to invite friends

Well, that’s right! Although just days ago we released the option to find and invite  your Yahoo! Mail contacts on CircleMe, we’ve worked hard on it and from today, you can also invite your Twitter friends to join CircleMe!

Finding Twitter friends on CircleMe

To find this new option, you simply have to go to the “Find people” page. Once you click on Find friends for Twitter, you’ll see a screen where you can select the contacts you want to send the invite to.

Selecting Twitter friends on CircleMe

Once you select the friends you want to add, then you simply have to click on Add. Then you’ll be requested access from Twitter for our Twitter app to send the invites… and voilà! You’ve sent the invites to your friends!

We hope you find this useful! And if there is a service that you think we should add to CircleMe to find and invite new friends, do not hesitate to let us know!

Finding friends via Yahoo! Contacts

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

Hi Circlers!

This Monday we’ve got some cool news for those out there who use Yahoo! Mail. As you’ll know, until now you could only invite your friends via Facebook and Gmail. Some days ago we asked our users what their email provider was, and this was the result:

Results of the question about email services

So yes: we worked on it and we’re very happy to announce you can now invite your friends using your Yahoo! Mail account. For this, you need to go to http://circleme.com/users/import and you’ll see the button to invite your contacts on Yahoo! Mail:

Finding friends from Yahoo! Mail

And if you don’t have Yahoo and use Gmail or Facebook, don’t hesitate to get your friends in too! CircleMe is much more fun with friends!

What service would you like us to add next in order to be able to invite friends? Let us know commenting on this blog entry, on Facebook or Twitter!

CircleMe’s Best Profile, Announcing our New Video and Last.fm integration

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

You know what happens when we go quiet for some days. that’s right: It means there’s cool stuff to come! We’d hate to disappoint you, so we made our best to add some great new features to CircleMe and surprise you! Take a look at our fresh updates from CircleMe:

The Best Profile Contest

If you wander around on CircleMe it is rather difficult not to stumble on some amazing user profiles. We thought you might enjoy a nice reward for making your profile the “fairest of them all”, so we prepared some nice gadgets and cool CircleMe T-shirts as prizes for the 10 most inspiring profile, ranging from cool CircleMe T-shirts to an iPad (yes, we’d prefer the T-shirt too!). What you need to do is to play cool and share your profile with your friends so that they vote for you. Then lay back and wait for the votes to increase! 😉

Best Profile Ranking on Thursday just after the start of the contest

Our brand NEW CircleMe Video

As you all know, we’ve been working hard these couple of months to make CircleMe the best place to connect with the things you care about and to people who share your passions. Since we want everybody to be able to make the most out of CircleMe, we created a short video explaining the main features of CircleMe, both on the web and on the iPhone app. Turned out really well, don’t you think?

Add your musical likes from Last.fm

We all know how important music is in your lives, right? Here at CircleMe we also think that you’d love bringing all your likes to CircleMe in an easier way. So it was only fair to help you guys out by adding Last.fm to the list of services from which you can import your interests. Ramble on and rock our world!

Now that April’s secrets are revealed, we would love to hear what you think about our latest updates. Feel free to share them with our team! You can share them with us via Twitter, Facebook, as a comment on our blog or email!

Introducing the CircleMe iPhone app

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We’ve been talking about our new iPhone app on the blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. However, you might be wondering what it looks like, and more importantly, what’s so cool about it 😉 We’re writing this blog entry to introduce you to the CircleMe iPhone app!

The CircleMe app doesn’t only extend the CircleMe experience onto your mobile, but also allows for some pretty cool uses in real life. It also comes with a unique feature called ‘planting’ that we think will change the way you use CircleMe. If you haven’t downlaoded it yet, you can now by clicking below:

Ok, got your iPhones ready? Here we go!

CircleMe app on iOS

First Steps

As you open the CircleMe app, some screens will quickly explain how to use the CircleMe app. Then, you will be able to log in with your account or create a new one if you’re new to CircleMe (and if so, welcome!)

The Activity Feed

Right, ready to start circling? When you arrive at your activity page you will see the CircleMe activities, which is the equivalent of the Activities section on the web version. Here you will see activities related to the things you like, as well as those related to your friends.

CircleMe App – Activity feed

Navigation

If you want to go to any other section, you simply have to tap on the three horizontal lines on the top left corner and the Menu will appear:

CircleMe App – Menu

CircleMe Profiles

But you will be wondering how your beautiful CircleMe profile looks like on the iPhone, right? Well, we worked hard to make your profile as beautiful on iPhone as on the web version, and this is how it looks:

CircleMe App – Profile View

Yes, the images can be a bit small and become a bit tough to identify the likes that you (or others) added, which is the reason why we added the possibility to change the view so that it is easier to identify the likes.

CircleMe App – Profile View 2

Taking CircleMe into the real life : – )

Now, imagine what this would allow you to do… You know those times when you’ve been in a bookshop… and in front of sooo many things to chose, you just couldn’t remember what was that book you wanted to buy? Well, now with the CircleMe app, you can just bring up your phone, check your To Do’s, and voila!

Using the CircleMe app in the bookstore

You can obviously use this for many other things such as films, songs, etc. Or on a lazy Sunday where you’re wondering what you could do, you could check the many things you wanted to do when you didn’t have time but that you then added as To Do’s on CircleMe.

CircleMe App – To Do’s

Neat, isn’t it? But there is something we think is even cooler than that: What if you wanted to mark items on a map? Yes, we call it “Planting”.

Planting

Why on earth would you want that? Well, you might like pancakes, but what if you had some great pancakes in a cafeteria and you wanted to tell the world about it? You could also leave a comment with the plant such as  “Here you’ll find the best pancakes in London!”. You can think of many ways you could use these “plants”, for instance, you could plant your favorite romantic song on a very romantic spot for your partner to find 😉

iPhone App – Planting

Also, wouldn’t it be cool if you could discover new items as you walk around town? If you like pancakes, wouldn’t it be great if you could be alerted if someone had marked a pancake on the map? Yes, this too is possible with the CircleMe app and the planting feature.

CircleMe App – Explore

Exploring

But there is more to the CircleMe app: you can find new likes in the explore section, whereas on the web version, you will find the trending, most popular and featured likes.

CircleMe App – Explore

Inviting and finding friends on CircleMe

You will also be able to invite your friends from within the app, by clicking on the ‘Who to Trust’ section.

CircleMe App – Who to Trust

Account Settings and Privacy

Finally, you will be able to modify your account settings as well as your privacy settings from the ‘Account’ section.

CircleMe App – Account settings

We hope you enjoy the CircleMe app and if you have any feedback or questions, as per usual, do not hesitate to let us know! You can comment on this blog or find us on Facebook or Twitter

Making what works… well, better: Announcing the Activity Page & Endless Scroll!

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They say if something works, why break it? Well, we disagree and think that if something works, why not break it and make it even better? We launched the Activity Board some weeks ago and we got some great positive feedback. The Activity board allows you to easily keep track of the activity related to your interests as well as the activity of your friends.

However, that is not our only new feature this week: we also implemented a endless scroll so that it is easier to navigate likes!

The new Activity Page

Yes! We decided to take that great (but perhaps hidden) feature and create a page for it on it’s own. So what is new in the Activity Page?

Out with the old…

In with the new!

The new Activity Page will allow you to easily read updates about the things you care about. And in case there are 2 or more activities for an item, you can easily click on the icon of the second person to see the activity!

Endless scroll

However, that is not all! We’ve also changed the different pages to show all your likes and to dos and now once you reach the bottom of the page more items will be loaded!

Endless Scroll

We hope you enjoy these new features and do not hesitate to leave your feedback! As usual, you can comment on this entry, on our Facebook fan page or on Twitter.

Announcing the Reach Score, improvements to our To Do’s and more!

/ CircleMe Team / 2 Comments

Since February is a short month, we thought we had better make the most out of it by launching cool new features as soon as possible, so let’s get on with it! This week we’re announcing the launch of the Reach Score, wine.com integration, improvements to the “To Do” activity and a new homepage.

Announcing the Reach Score

CircleMe is all about True likes, interests and passions. You can suggest these to other users and they might find a new book, artist or even drink thanks to your profile, and if people trust you, they will be influenced by your tastes. Wouldn’t it be great if we came up with a way to measure how influential people are? Well, that is what we thought and so we came up with the Reach Score.

In fact, if you click on your reach score, it will show you how many tastes you influenced organised per category and how many people trust you on CircleMe. You can also see other users’ Reach Scores!

Expanding our Wine list

If you are a wine connoisseur, you might have been frustrated in the past that although some generic wines could be found, perhaps you couldn’t find those wines you really wanted to add on CircleMe. Yes, you could like “Sauvignon Blanc” but not your favourite brand and year. Well, we have now added an extensive list of wines from wine.com and you will most likely find exactly the wines you truly like on CircleMe.

Improvements to the To Do’s

Has it ever happened to you that after adding an item as a To Do you noticed you had already added it in the past? Then, you would have the same item twice in your To Do list. Annoying, right? Well, starting from today we’ve simplified this for you and when you check an item that you already added as a To Do, instead of showing a button to add it again, you’ll see a button to “Undo” the To Do.

New Homepage

You probably noticed some changes on the Homepage: We thought it would be great giving new visitors an idea of what there is to like on CircleMe and add a link to our “Stop liking, start circling video”

This is it for this first day of February that will certainly come full of cool new features for CircleMe users! We would really like to know your feedback about these updates, so feel free to share your feedback with us via Facebook, Twitter, commenting on this blog or mailing us to support@circleme.com.

The “neighbours” moved, and that’s a story worth voting on!

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

It’s Tuesday, which means the CircleMe team is bringing you cool new features to enjoy on CircleMe. Ah, yes… this blog post title sounds a bit odd. No worries, it will all make sense after reading this:

The “neighbors” moved!

No, we are not talking about our real neighbors (about whom we don’t have any complaints!) but those CircleMe users who have similar interests to you. As you might have noticed, there was a “Neighbors” section below the “Trusted” category.

The old positioning of the “Neighbours” section

As we said, they moved… but whereabouts? London? New York? Tokyo? Nope, nope, nope… the neighbors simply left the crowded “Me” page and moved to a more appropriate and spacious “Find friends” page.

New “Neighbors” location

Please take into consideration that in order to see this section of suggested CircleMe users, you need to have some likes!

Voting Stories

We believe that allowing users to express their preferences is fundamental. For this reason, we enabled voting features for views written on Item pages. However, those who enjoy this feature might have noticed that this feature was not available for other kinds of content, especially Stories. We are happy to announce that from today this has changed: you can now also vote up (or down!) stories shared about other CircleMe.

We think this will not only improve the CircleMe experience by allowing users to express their preferences, but also by allowing users to quickly see which stories related to a certain topic are the most liked by other CircleMe users.

We hope you enjoy these changes and please do not forget to share any feedback with us!

You say “New Year”, we say “New Features!”

/ CircleMe Team / 3 Comments

Happy belated new year!

At CircleMe we like traditions, and no, we aren’t going to talk about Christmas again but what has already become a CircleMe tradition: The Tuesday release of new features! We don’t plan on stopping coming up with cool stuff, so are you ready to try these?

Activity History

Starting from today you can enjoy your own activity history: Wouldn’t it be cool if you were able to track your activity on CircleMe? Yes, we mean every single activity including adding a like or to do, sharing or voting a story, trusting someone… Everything summarised on one page! You can find this new feature clicking on the Account Button on the CircleMe Navigation Bar as seen in the screenshot below:

Adding your website to your profile

We knew adding a website to the user profile was a common request amongst our users. This is why when we received this request five days ago from a user to add it, we couldn’t contain a smile of satisfaction knowing we would be delivering it straight away 🙂 That’s right, you can now add your personal website or any link you would like on your profile. Your blog? Your Twitter account? It’s up to you!

We hope you enjoy these new features and we would like to remind you that most of these improvements were implemented thanks to you: you inspired us and suggested us many ideas that helped make CircleMe better. This is why we can’t stress enough the importance of your feedback so if you have any suggestions or feedback, please share your feedback with us on GetSatisfaction, getting in touch with us via Twitter or Facebook or even directly via support@circleme.com.

CircleOn!

Santa brought an Activity Board to CircleMe

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Hi CircleMe’rs!

We hope you enjoyed a very merry Christmas! Here at CircleMe we had a great time and we even received a new CircleMe feature from Santa that we are very excited to share with you all: The CircleMe Activity Board.

Why an Activity Board? Until now, on Circleme there wasn’t a place where you could find all of your friends’ activities: what your friends are liking, the stories they are sharing on CircleMe…  Furthermore, it wasn’t easy to track all the activities about the things that you care about. That wasn’t great, right? We thought so and that is why we developed asked Santa for an Activity Board.

How to find the CircleMe Activity Board? You can always find it within the navigation bar and near the CircleMe search box as you can see below:

Once you click on the button represented as three circles, the CircleMe Activity Board will appear:As you can see, the Activity Board not only keeps you updated about the activities of your trusted friends and things that you care about, but also allows you to easily like or mark as to dos the items that appear in the board. In fact, the Activity Board even allows you to filter the type of information that appears: You can choose to only see Stories, Views or who your friends are Trusting.

We hope you enjoy this feature that Santa found on your Christmas wish lists and please do not forget to leave your feedback by commenting on this blog entry or getting in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter