We’re nearing the end of 2012, and besides looking back at what happened to CircleMe in 2012, we wanted to look at what happened within the CircleMe community!

2012 was an extraordinary and exciting one: We had massive product launches such as the iPhone 5, we thoroughly enjoyed the Oympic Games, great book and movie releases… And so, we couldn’t stop ourselves from looking into our data and see what was hot (and not so hot!) in 2012 on CircleMe!

Goods

2012 saw some greatly anticipated and competitive product launches: As Samsung’s Galaxy SIII launched, so too did the iPhone 5! And there was a ferocious fight for Circlers’ love. However, in the end the iPhone 5 claimed victory with 12.67% more Likes than the Galaxy SIII!

When it comes to fashion, Circlers are increasingly sharing more posts about their favorite products, which meant there was an increase in brand Likes. There were two big trendy names: Dolce and Gabbana grew the most in 2012 with 102 Likes but Burberry wasn’t too far with 101 during that period of time.

Food & Drinks

The Brazil 2014 World Cup? The Brazil 2016 Olympic Games? No: Coxinha is the word! This Brazilian snack food made of shredded chicken and spices took CircleMe’s foodies by storm going from 0 Likes at in May to 92 at the end of the year. We’re now booking our flights to Copacabana to try this popular Like!

Movies & TV

Geek seems to be the new trendy, and The Big Bang Theory keeps on becoming ever more popular! This year alone it bagged 926 Likes.

And what was the most Liked film released in 2012? For the Hammer of Thor!… That was The Avengers with 325 Likes, closely followed by The Dark Knight Rises with 314.

No surprises in this category you say? Well, although it was a top grossing film this year, we didn’t find the latest Twiligh movie amongst the top films of 2012.

Heroes

It’s been a bit over a year without Steve Jobs, yet his name certainly is not forgotten. This Like still managed to gain more Likes than any other ‘heroes’ out there in 2012!

Music

After winning countless awards and even having a baby, this was definitely a great year for Adele. And yet another proof is that she was the fastest growing musician in terms of Likes this year, increasing 4.76% from 2011!

A flop you ask? Our surprise in this category was Justin Bieber. Although he increased his following towards the end of the year, he still didn’t manage to reach the top 100 of Music Likes of 2012!

Passions

Photography continues to reign amongst artsy Circlers: 1956 people Liked this passion in 2012!

 

And so we finish the highlights in terms of Likes during 2012. We hope you found this info interesting and if you’re hungry for some more interesting CircleMe stats, don’t forget to check CircleMe’s ‘half-birthday’ infographic here.

Also, if you had to guess, what do you think will be the fastest growing Like in 2013?

Merry Christmas from the CircleMe team!

Dear Circlers,

As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we thought we’d look back at what happened in 2012 as it was a truly important year for us:

Since our private beta launch in October (2011), we kept on working on new features and improvements to finally release CircleMe publicly in March 15th. To add yet a bit more excitement to this launch, we also released our iPhone app! We received a great coverage of the launch, and our app was even featured on the App Store, which was pretty awesome! 🙂

To celebrate, we started our CircleMe meetups, which took place in London, Milan, Paris and Rome!

However, we didn’t only travel to meet our fab users. We also attended exhibitions and conferences, including Luxembourg, Brescia, London, Istanbul and many more!

Participating at these conferences and competitions brought us some great rewards too. For instance, we were the winners of the AppCircus London, and we were finalists at other events such as the WebIt and TheEuropas (by TechCrunch).

And how could we forget the first CircleMe ‘Best profile’ competition?  As you might remember, James Cook won with 868 votes, ahead of Marlon who achieved 819 votes. We were very excited to receive James in our London office to pick up his gift.

We also started our CircleMe user interviews! We interviewed 7 users so far, and in case you were wondering, our first user to be interviewed was Dick Stoppels

When it comes to our app, we continued to improve it not only by adding cool new features, but also working with third parties to make CircleMe better. For instance, we launched collections of geo-targeted items called “Plant Guides”, such as the ‘best restaurants’ by Cibando. Furthermore we integrated with Songkick to show nearby upcoming concerts.

However, at the same time we certainly didn’t stop improving CircleMe.com, making it more social, interesting and easy to use.

So… What’s coming in 2013?

Alongside our fund-raising efforts, required to allow us to continue with our ambitious project, you can expect many things to come to CircleMe in the coming year: CircleMe will continue its efforts to become more social, more interesting and more useful for you.

But that’s not just it! You can also expect CircleMe to learn new languages, and to be used on more platforms. We want 2013 to be the year that puts CircleMe on the map of the world’s largest Social Networks, and we hope you help us get there! 🙂

Dear Circlers,

As you’ll know, you could import your Likes from Facebook, Goodreads, Last.fm and Foursquare. Well, we’re happy to announce that the latest CircleMe iPhone App update will allow you to scan the artists of your device’s music library to quickly add them as Likes on CircleMe.

In the menu area, you will see a ‘Import Likes’ now appear.

Once you tap on it, you will be able to select the options available on mobile: Facebook and Music Library.

Then you will be able to select the artists that you would Like to import from your Music Library

 

We hope you find this new functionality useful! Is there any service you’d like to import your Likes from? Please let us know commenting here on the blog, or on our Facebook or Twitter pages!

Hi there! It’s Javier Galán from the Marketing Team and I’m really, really excited to be announcing that we’ve just released a very cool and useful feature on CircleMe: Showing you the next concerts of your favorite musicians and keeping you updated when they play nearby.

This will be possible thanks to an integration with Songkick, a site we love and that is the leader in the field of tracking live concerts.

How does this change the CircleMe exerience? Well, from now on, you will see concerts of musicians on the top right of the page:

But that’s not just it! You will also receive in your CircleMe Update Email the upcoming conerts by the musicians you Like, so don’t forget to check your CircleMe emails! 🙂

We hope you find this new feature interesting and we look forward to continuing on making CircleMe more useful. How do you think we could make CircleMe more useful in other areas such as movies, books, heroes…? Please let us know by commeting on this blog post, or finding us on Twitter, Facebook or even better… CircleMe!

Kind regards,

Javier Galán

Marketing Manager

Update 2: Voting is back on the Activity Page, hooray! Have you voted on some stories today?

Update: Looks like we’re having some technical difficulties with voting from the Activity Page. We’ve taken the feature down temporarily so that we can see what’s going on : -)

As we continue to work hard on making CircleMe more interesting, we’re really excited to share that from now on you can vote on posts without even leaving your Activity Page! Simply hover over the post and you’ll see the comment icon and voting arrows appear.  Now this gives you a great excuse to check out all the interesting posts that can be found on CircleMe every day : -)

Voting on posts shows the person who shared it that you like their story. As well as this, your votes help push the best posts on CircleMe up to the top of item pages!

As soon as we saw the taller screen on the new iPhone we got to work to make sure that the CircleMe app made use of all 4 inches of screen display. Because what’s better than even more of your Likes on one page?

But not only have we extended the size of the display area in the app, we’ve also given all the graphics a spruce-up  so that the app looks great on your lovely new phone.

Don’t have an iPhone 5? Don’t worry, you can still download the update for your device, as we’ve also added some bug fixes! We hate bugs as much as you do, so let us know if you see any (on CircleMe, that is).

CircleMe also has 2 new brand new Plant Guides for you to check out: Family Fun and Famous Film Locations. You can see these in the Plant menu : -)

Got any questions about the app? Want to know more about what we’re working on? Send us an email at info@circleme.com and we’ll help you out. You can take a look at our Facebook and Twitter accounts, where we post the coolest stuff we find on CircleMe!

Not long ago we showed you the brand new look for item pages, where shared posts looked great with the new 2-column layout and link previews. We had so much good feedback that we decided to add link previews to the Activity Page as well!

Now when you visit circleme.com you’ll see previews of all the content shared by other CircleMe users on your Likes! Not only does this make the Activity Page look great, but it helps you discover really interesting posts too! So, with even more people seeing your stories, perhaps it’s a good time to start posting news and interesting content related to your likes!

Check out your updated Activity Page here, and have a look at our Facebook and Twitter too while you’re at it : -)

You might remember back in August we introduced a really cool feature to the CircleMe app called Plant Guides. These are collections of plants all related to one subject. Did you miss the announcement? Check the blog post.

We’re now adding two more Plant Guides, bringing the total to five! Previously you could find art masterpieces near you, check out the best boutique shops, and discover amazing restaurants. We wanted to help you discover even more interesting places near you, and so today we’re announcing the Family Fun and Famous Film Locations Plant Guides : -)

Family Fun

Weeks ago we asked a question on our Facebook page; what Plant Guides would you like to see added? We weren’t expecting such a great response, and you can check out the results here! The most-requested feature was places that you could take children to. We realized that Mums all over the world would love an interactive map of the best places for family outings, so that’s exactly who we reached out to. We’d like to say a big thank you to Learn With Mummy and all their readers for their help in creating this. You’ll find plenty of places to take the kids out with this Plant Guide!

Famous Film Locations

Open this new Plant Guide, and you’ll be able to see over 150 Plants.  Every one of these is a location where a scene from a movie was filmed! Open up the Plant Guide and you’ll be able to see them all displayed on a map. With this new collection, you can relive some of your favorite movie scenes, right from the CircleMe app!

All you need to do to start using the 2 new Plant Guides is download the app! Follow this link to download the app and start exploring our Plant collections. You can find the new Guides (as well as the less-new ones) under the Plants section of the app, just tap on the star!

We’re looking for content partners to help make CircleMe better. If you’re interested in distributing your content on CircleMe, send us an email at partnerships@circleme.com

Reach Scores tell you just how influential a user is on CircleMe. We thought we’d use this to make a fun game for you all! Below is some information about 4 CircleMe users. You have to match each user with their Reach Score, can you guess who each Reach Score belongs to?

First up here are the users, as well as some clues to help you out : -)

1. Andrew Neal

‘A student, a screenwriter, a film director, and an imagination that can take you to more places than a long distance car-ride.’

2. Robert Scoble

‘I’m a geek looking for world-changing technology.

I’m now into Startup‘

3. Emanuele Fumagalli

Emanuele works for CircleMe, so he’s on the site all day long (when he’s not working on the CircleMe app)!

4. Michela Dezzana

OK, so now you know the profiles, here are the Reach Scores for you to match up with them.

A)

B)

C)

D)

Need some help? Here are a couple of hints that should help you out : -)

Hint #1: The order of the categories is Places, Movies, Music, Books, Passions, Heroes, Food & Drink, Goods, Other.

Hint #2: Don’t forget that websites come under the ‘Other’ category!

Think you’ve matched up all 4? Comment on the Facebook post or tweet us with your answers! Good luck : -)