Nice to mee… Circle you!

We love when CircleMe becomes the place where our users enjoy conversations about their interests. We thought we could also start this conversation with them ourselves when we first ‘meet’ them, to make signing up less tedious, and more interactive! And so, we created our ‘conversational’ sign-up process.

As Circlers know, we strive to make the most of the latest technologies and keep on improving CircleMe, and we’ve done it yet again: From today, when users join CircleMe, they’ll be greeted by a new sign-up process containing few questions that will help them understand how to best use CircleMe.

And it’s not just good for users… After a few days of testing this new sign-up process (FYI – we have A/B tests running constantly on the site and we determine ‘test-winners’ each week), we’ve seen great results when it comes to business metrics for those new Circlers using the new Sign-up process, multiplying our conversion rate by x2.5. Also, these new users are 63.4% more active than those who do not, a proof that it does a good job when it comes to educating users.

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Second step of the easy peasy new sign-up process

If you haven’t joined, give it a try! And if you’re already a Circler, why not answering those questions by adding these interests to your profile? These things to add are: A movie they like, something they’d like To-Do such as a book or city to visit, a topic they often read news about, and concerts or events happening near you, which you can find here.

An Android app update blossoms with Spring!

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New recommendations section on the CircleMe for Android app

Dear Circlers, as we entered spring our best Android app to date has bloomed and we’re really excited to be telling you about it today:

Download the latest version of the CircleMe app to get a brand new recommendations section. You can use this section if, for instance, you’re at a library looking for a cool new book to read.
Readability of news has been improved, meaning you’ll have a better experience whilst catching up on the latest for your interests. In fact, we’ve even improved the posting and commenting areas so that chatting with other Circlers is easier than and more fun than ever.

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Now it’s easier than ever to chat with other Circlers.

We have also added Push Notifications so that you don’t miss on any important news and conversations. And you can manage your preferences for these notifications from the ‘settings’ section.

Finally, we’ve added a series of kick-ass performance improvements, to make circling as fast and smooth as possible. We hope you enjoy this last version and please do keep your feedback coming at support at circleme dot com 🙂

Happy spring Circling!

Never miss an event thanks to CircleMe’s Calendar reminders

With the launch of CircleMe second generation, we brought you the CircleMe Calendar, displaying nearby events related to your interests. Today we’re making it easier than ever not to miss a great event ever again with our Calendar reminders.Screen Shot 2015-02-27 at 14.43.17

Once you add interests and your Calendar fills with interesting events, these reminders will start appearing on your Updates Feed as the events approach.

We hope you find this addition useful. Keep an eye out on the blog for more news on how we’re making it easier for you to make the most out of your interests!

In the meantime, why not check what events you’ve got on your Calendar?

Share your own articles on CircleMe with the Post Editor

Do you like writing about the things you’re passionate about? Are you a blogger? If you answer yes to any of these questions, read on!

We help thousands of CircleMe users sharing updates about their interests such as news and event reminders. Now you too can help other Circlers enjoy their interests thanks to the new Post Editor, which allows you to share interesting stories with other like-minded Circlers.

When you start writing a post, you’ll now be able to launch the ‘Post Editor’, which will allow you to edit your post including adding photos, bullet points and more:

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If you’re feeling inspired, give it a try! Share something about one of your interest. For instance, you could tell us about your favourite hidden spots in your city or your crazy theories on a TV series you love.

You can find some of our handpicked articles written using the post editor here, including an article on opera for children and a review on a concert by music group Lamb, written my members of the CircleMe team.

Leave your mark on CircleMe today!

We welcome brilliant projects to use the CircleMe API!

Makers, Developers, Dreamers… Make something amazing with the CircleMe API!

At CircleMe we’ve always strived to help users make the most of their interests and today we’re taking a big step forward opening the CircleMe API.

Opening our API we aim to create an ecosystem around the interests of thousands of Circlers. For instance, a news website could personalize the information it displays according to users’ interests, which will benefit CircleMe users as well as the website.

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If you think you can make your project better using CircleMe’s API, we want to hear from you! You can find all the details about our API here and also contact us at partnerships [at] circleme [dot] com to express your interest or ask any questions you might have. This is an early release and partner’s feedback will help us shape its evolution.

CircleMe users should not worry: We use the standard OAuth2, which means interests are only available to sites which you eplicitly authorise. If you’re a Circler and have any questions about how we protect your data, please contact us at support [at] circleme [dot] com

CircleMe x Expo Milano 2015

Here at CircleMe we’re proud of being from Milan. Its foggy streets were once walked by some of our favourite artists like Caravaggio and Da Vinci, and it also has one of the most impressive buildings in the world: The Duomo. In 2015, we’re proudest than ever, as EXPO 2015 will bless its streets with culture and thought provoking topics.

Today, we’re super excited to contribute our bit to Milan’s legacy as the world capital of design and fashion as we’re collaborating with one of our favourite projects by EXPO Milano 2015: Women for Expo.

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During the six months of the Women for Expo project, views will be shared on the nourishment of not only the body, but of freedom and intelligence. The sustainability of the planet is expected to form a new alliance between food and cultures and it is women who will be the driving force behind this.

“Women for Expo is a simple and symbolic invitation to share the recipe for life. That is a recipe that has a personal story behind it.”

We think such initiative, which aims to involve women from every country, culture, profession and age is a fabulous one. Thus, we’re overjoyed to be able to collaborate by facilitating participation by women from across the world on CircleMe.

Those interested in the project will be able to follow the latest news and discussions originated from Women for Expo and make their own contribution in continuously evolving conversations. Like Women for Expo on CircleMe today!

Lots of GIFs for Xmas!

Ready for the X-mas holidays? We hope you are… we are just few hours away!

This year, instead of filling your e-mail inbox with another digital card, we thought of saying Happy Holidays to you in a different way: with lots of GIFs! Gifts <> GIFs… get it? 😉

Yeap! That is the news: now you can post GIFs on CircleMe! Oh, that’s gonna be fun. We got some Circlers already publishing GIFs here and there, but from today things are official.

Publishing a GIF is super-easy: whenever you are writing a post on CircleMe, you can just paste the URL for the gif-image in the text box, and we will do the rest.

We think the timing is perfect, not just for the pun, but so to enable you to post fun animated images like the following. So, from today, help us discover some awesome gifs to share!

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Here a little post our team made today to wish everyone Happy Holidays: http://www.circleme.com/activities/2273146

We hope the X-mas break will make you rest, have fun, and enjoy family, friends and life in general!

Have fun with this little new feature on CircleMe.

 #bewhatyoulike… through GIFs!

 

Let’s get some races going!

To spice things up a bit for the Christmas season, we thought of launching a couple of fun competitions among our Circlers. The races start NOW!

The reason? Mostly for the fun of it, but also certainly to have our Circlers interact more with each other and to increase our community of users on CircleMe. Hence, we launch just now a couple of “races” among our users and we will rank in real-time (1) the most trusted users [TRUSTERS], and (2) the users who invite the highest number of their friends on CircleMe [INVITES] (all measurements will start from the beginning of this month, for fairness).

Then, for the best performers, we will get some little treats: nothing fancy, but we’ll do our best. We know you were getting used by our gifts sent over the mail during the holidays, so we had to do something this year too. We had Blackberry very kindly provide us with few phones Z10 and Z30 (they are quite cool and powerful) to give away and then we have some CircleMe t-shirts, stickers and gadgets. I know, nothing huge, but still a good treat for very limited effort, don’t you think?

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So, competition is on! See immediately how you rank on the list, and what you need to do to get to the top of it:

#bewhatyoulike and get up those ranks! 😉

 

Fashion Trends 2014 in an Infographic by CircleMe

Are you curious to know what might be trending in fashion this Christmas season? Which brands will win the race for coolest and most wanted fashion brands of 2014? Well, just look inside CircleMe’s interest-graph!

Thanks to the activity that (many) thousands of users do periodically on the platform, expressing preferences and intentions to consume for millions of diverse interests, we were able to collect some of this data focusing on a very “trendy” (especially during the Christmas shopping season) topic, Fashion.

Identifying a pool of 10,000 active Circlers with an interest in Fashion (ranging from 20 to 40 years old and distributed globally), we were able to rank the top high-luxury, pret-a-porter, accessible-fashion and other popular fashion brands for overall popularity and also for trending popularity (considering the last 12 weeks of activities on CircleMe).

Some of the results are visible in this Infographic we developed. We hope you enjoy it and share it on the web. As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments on this.

#bewhatyoulike … also when you dress up! 😉

[Here the link to our post on CircleMe: http://www.circleme.com/activities/2230331

 

Trends in Fashion 2014 – Infographic by CircleMe (Nov.2014)

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The CircleMe Android app just gets better and better!

While we do not announce all our new product releases (e.g., so far in 2014 we had 15 releases for our Android app alone), we thought to mention at least some of the key innovations we brought to our Android app addicts in the last weeks. Together, these improvements and added features really make it for a top-notch mobile experience focused on all your interests.

To play with the new version of the app, go to GOOGLE PLAY now.

NAVIGATION SIMPLIFICATION

As we heard your feedback and your requests for simplification, we applied some key changes to the navigation structure. As a clear example, we allow now to access SEARCH and CALENDAR by a simple right or left swipe (you can access SEARCH from the Profile section and Calendar from the Discover section).

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Furthermore, we have simplified the Discovery section, which now splits just in two areas: ALL and PEOPLE. Not to worry though, if you want to access the PLANTS section, you just have to click on the overflow-menu on the top right of the screen.

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FRIENDLY TUTORIAL

As you access the app for the first time, we will welcome you with a tutorial which triggers itself only when there is something new to learn about the app. The tutorial consists of several tips showing just once per specific feature and which can be dismissed by a simple tap on the ‘GOT IT’ button.

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TRUSTING OTHER CIRCLERS

Next time you visit the Discover People section, you will be impressed by our little (but key) improvement to allow you to quickly decide who to TRUST on CircleMe. You will find the blue button visible on each user card, next to some key information about that user. If you know the person, or just think the user could be a good person to trust for his/her tastes, one simple click will connect you two. Make that BLUE button become GREEN: give it a try now!

 

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ADAPTIVE NAVIGATION BAR

You asked to get as much area of the screen dedicated to content as possible, and we did that for you! Of course. 🙂 Now, as you keep scrolling down in your Updates and Discover feeds, our navigation bar will ‘understand’ you have a priority (content!) and will get out of the way. How you get it back, you ask? Well, simple, scroll up and… ta-ta, hello again navigation bar! 

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OVERALL IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

Lots of tweaks were done to the code to speed up the starting of the app as well as loading times for content in all the different sections of the application. To achieve this we have done some coding improvements, and we use a bit more cache memory, but still careful about not taking too much of your device memory filled up.

There are at least another 10 features and improvement projects for the past 8-12 weeks we are not mentioning here, but which you’ll be able to appreciate as soon as you get back on the app.

We look forward to having you use CircleMe more and more, and for you to keeping on sending us feedback at support [at] circleme.com so we can continue to develop the best interest-based platform people want and enjoy.

To get the new version of the Android app, go now on Google Play.

Enjoy the Circling!

#bewhatyoulike