Help us out. We want to know how you share news articles, cool websites, crazy internet phenomenons, or anything else you find online. What do you want out of the sharing experience? Reframe It already lets you mark up the web in any way you see fit, so how do you want to share those comments? Be specific, be general, just let us know how you feel about sharing within the margin.
Join our “What do you think Group” or just reply to this post.
It is with feigned sadness that we bid adieu to an old friend. Well, acquaintance. Ok, really just a slightly annoying houseguest who was always lurking on the periphery, taking up space, stealing from the fridge, and generally requiring a lot of ugly coding.
Yes, we’re talking about the “Follow Anonymously” feature, the primary function of which has apparently been to generate confused user questions. We’ve decided to evict this feature; in the very near future any following will have to be of the regular, non-anonymous variety. The feature is barely being used, and it makes other aspects of the user experience unnecessarily complicated.
The option to follow anonymously will be disappearing shortly from both the web site and the margin, and soon thereafter any existing anonymous links will also disappear. This means that if you are currently following another user (or users) anonymously you might want to upgrade them to following normally. ( We don’t want to just convert them all for you because maybe you were following anonymously for a good reason. Although we can’t really think of one.)
If you really really really want to keep anonymously following somebody, such as your ex-wife, we suggest you create another Reframe It account, with a suitably anonymous name (or even an intentionally misleading one, such as “HollywoodTalentScout” or “KGBAgent”) and use that to follow her.
As always, thanks for using Reframe It.
It just came to our attention that we have been offering an older version of the extension on our site. We figured this out because many of you (our users) informed us that the margin was open by default in every new browser window including pop-up windows.
This is not normal behavior.
If this describes your current Reframe It experience please update to the latest extension (1.1.3.20090302) by going to:
Tools > Add-ons > Find Updates (Extensions tab - lower left corner) > Install Updates
The Add-ons page - “Find updates” is in the lower left corner
This will solve the problem. The margin will not be open by default in pop-up windows and it will remember its open/closed state across new tabs and windows. Please remember you can toggle the margin open/closed by clicking the Reframe It icon in the lower left corner of your browser or by pressing: command / on Mac or control / on a PC
Sorry for the trouble. If you have any problems contact us at support@reframeit.com.
We just added two new kinds of comment digests: comments that were made in reply to your comments, and comments on pages that you are watching. For either list, log in at www.reframeit.com and click the “Comments” tab; both features have been added to the list of choices.
Both of these features were added in response to user requests. We really do want to know how you are using Reframe It, and how our software can work for you better. Please send any questions, requests, or criticism you have to: feedback@reframeit.com.
“Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it.” –Admiral Motti, Star Wars
The upside to to recent “events” is that all that traffic gave us enough data to find some weak points in our systems. We are pleased to report that a number of virulent bugs have been squashed, and truth be told the malevolent gleam in our eyes as we did so would have made even Darth Vader flinch.
Our engineering staff is now waist deep in upgrading some core systems to highly-scalable technology that will enable us to serve orders of magnitude more people. And of course we’re working on both a number of new features that we think you’ll like, including integration with every more social channels, as well as plans for a next version of the Margin that will knock your socks off.
“Had a slight weapons malfunction, but everything’s perfectly alright now. We’re fine, we’re all fine, here, now, thank you. How are you?” –Han Solo, Star Wars
Life in Reframe It’s semi-complete orbital headquarters have been, umm,”exciting” lately…in many meanings of the word: we are thrilled about a huge upsurge in downloads and traffic, but we are also running around like madmen trying to keep our computers up in the face of the onslaught. If you are having trouble accessing our service, please forgive us! Mozilla made Reframe It a “Recommended Add-On” late last week, plus we had some other publicity, and the huge spike in traffic has uncovered some bottlenecks in our software.
We’re in the middle of fixing things right now, which in the short term will include two things:
Longer term we have been preparing for an upgrade to some much higher performance technologies, and were within a few weeks of that transition when this spike in participation came. Hopefully once we have the flood under control we can get that migration back on track.
So please stay tuned! We’re working like crazy getting everything running smoothly again and hope to see positive results within 24 hours. Thanks for using Reframe It!
We are pleased to announce the release of the next major version of our Firefox Extension.
Bugs Fixed:
* Comments will now attempt to load earlier
* Margin menu entries cleaned up and simplified.
* Facebook functionality now appears in a floating window as opposed to opening a new tab.
* Fixed a longstanding bug where comment reference Y position was being miscalculated
* Share By Email will now check to see if a valid email address was entered but was not added to the distribution list via the “Add Email” button
* Fixed bug where highlighting and dehighlighting image references would cause the image to disappear
* Margin is now hidden by default in pop-up windows.
* Margin remembers hidden state on new window open.
The extension should auto-update or can be downloaded directly from Mozilla
We recognize that some people get a flood of emails from Reframe It, which wasn’t so hard to figure out since we’re some of those people. Previously we’ve given you the option of disabling some of the updates, but of course the downside to doing that is you don’t find out what your friends are doing on Reframe It.
We now have a new feature, “Daily Digest”, that can combine all your email updates into one summary email that gets delivered…you guessed it…daily. To enable this feature, log into Reframe It, click the “Edit Account” button, then “Email Preferences”, and enable the Daily Digest check box:
Don’t forget to click “Save Preferences” afterwards.
Right now the feature will put all your notifications (with the exception of a few important ones) into the digest. Down the road we plan to give you more options, including more control over what goes into the digest, and how often…and when…it gets sent out. Stay tuned!
We’re almost done with a big improvement to our Facebook integration, which we think you’re going to like. As you probably know already, currently you can use your Facebook ID to log into Reframe It. Soon, however, you’ll be able to post your Reframe It comments directly to your Facebook Wall. Your friends will be able to both read your comments on your Wall and click through to see them, in context, on the web pages where you wrote them.
At Reframe It we’re always looking for better ways to help you stay better connected with the friends you already have via the services and technologies you already use. If there’s a particular way you want to use Reframe It but can’t right now (or don’t know how to…) please drop us a line and tell us about it.
If you checked the reframeit.com web site this week you probably noticed some significant changes, as we modified both the landing page for new arrivals and the tabbed views for members. These changes are part of an ongoing shift in focus, driven by feedback from the Reframe It community, with less emphasis on “discovering” comments from strangers and more emphasis on sharing content and comments with people we already know, through whatever channels we already use to communicate with them.
For example, if you have a circle of friends you share emails with, we want to let you keep using email to share your Reframe It comments with them, without forcing them to join Reframe It. Or if you are a blogger, your Reframe It comments should simply show up in your blog for all your readers to see. Of course, we not-so-secretly hope that your friends and readers will be so impressed with your Reframe It virtuosity that they’ll eventually join the party, but our first priority is to give YOU the best tools possible for sharing with your existing social groups.
What does that mean in terms of specific changes? Most importantly, we’ve been improving our features that let you share with non-Reframe It users: that means email, Twitter, Facebook, and blog integration. Then we moved or even removed some of the options that displayed comments from people and groups you don’t know, both to reduce screen clutter and improve performance.
Long term we have lots of plans for helping you to discover new content, new groups, and new friends. But first we want to make sure that it’s worth your while to use Reframe It with the people, sites, and tools that you already know.
We hope you’ll keep sending us your feedback and ideas on what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d like to see.