Kevo Blog

Scott just did a great interview over at SocalTech.com. I suggest you all give it a read.

Ben Kuo: How are people finding out about the site?

Scott Farrell: We’re seeing thousands of people browsing through the site. We’re seeing quite a bit of traffic from organic search. For example, when the JonBenet Ramsey news blew up we were on the front page of MSN when you typed his name. As Kevo grows, it should enjoy similar search traffic, like you see with Wikipedia. If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, if you type in any subject, Wikipedia shows up on the top page of any search. We believe that our organic search traffic will grow as the content grows. Kevo also provides a social platform you can use to create your own site, communicate with friends, and viral features to invite others in.

Along with a new Fame API which went up this morning, we figured we should help you out by giving you a simple mechanism to invite friends into kevo. When you register you’ll have the opportunity to invite some friends and you can also click the “invite some friends” links which reside within your user account pages.

We also re-styled the login and register forms, fixed up the validation and javaScript helpers and hopefully made everything a bit cleaner and more clear in the process

Now you can track people’s kevo fame rank anywhere on the web with this handy bit of link-code. It’s easy to grab inside of any profile and you just copy and paste it to your blog, social network profile or website.

See how Kevo tracks fame - Get fame tracker

Things have broken down into almost semi-daily updates on many sections of the site. These are often smaller things so I haven’t written blog posts about them specifically, but last night we did implement fame graphs so you can see a nice trend of a profiles history over time. The obvious extension is a mini-graph API which should be available within a few days(!).

Other fixes and updates include, but are not limited to:

• removed channel icons to clean up the homepage a bit
• fixed input style on mailing list signup
• fixing minor bugs
• Tons of work on new features and simplification of the site

We’ve got a big update to the profiles coming in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that.

You may have noticed a few bugs in the system because we’ve been upgrading many different components in parallell. If you find anything else, please let us know by posting a bug report - it only takes a second, and we’ll fix it right away.

I think we’ve gotten most of the ones that popped up in changing over the system to not require being logged in, but it would be nice to know if anyone finds anything left over.

After lots of great user feedback we redesigned the homepage to reflect things people liked and used, and removed things that people didn’t like. The colors of the header and site became a bit more bold and bright, movers and shakers became the top item because it helps get a glympse into what is happening with people’s fame. Recent updates is laid out and sorted better. We now feature top active users and generally explain what kevo is more clearly.

We like the “?” sticker. This almost became our logo. (haha).

One of the coolest features of KEVO is the fame rating system. We knew it would be cool to see people’s fame change over time with news events and one such thing just happened a few days ago. Sadly, Steve Irwin died - but this action also caused him to become a highly searched name on google and on Kevo. The result is that Steve Irwin is now the most famous person in KEVO a few days later.

We’re going to change out the Top 6 profiles for Movers & Shakers because of this. It took Steve’s profile two days to get into the top 6, but he was on the Movers & SHakers almost immediately. If the Movers & Shakers are then the first thing people see, they will get a better view of what is happening in the system

We want to make it easier on people to update and start getting involved in the site, so the there are several things coming - the first of which is allowing users to not be registered in order to post updates. These updates then *always* go as pending to be rated up by the users in the system, since they are posted with zero karma.

The nice thing is that after you post some stuff and do decide to register the system will associate your past contributions that are from the same IP to your new account (if you want them), this way you lose as little of your stuff as possible if you’re too lazy to register initially.

You can also see who else has saved each profile as their favorites, as well.

Long time since the last major patch, although we did several minor bug fixes along the way. Tonights patch introduces several new major features, although alot of this weeks work remains behind the scenes for the end-user as we are working on introducing some very cool new things for the profiles.

Bugs fixed

• 1) Fixed user profile not routing to user search when their profile was not found via URL
• 2) Login routing doesnt crash when typing login url directly now

enhancements

• 1) profile has new “share this page” code you can embed in any webpage
• 2) profile pages and sub-pages now each have their own discussion page
• 3) Flagging - can flag items/users/profiles if inappropriate (sucks currently in IE)
• 4) removed - start & end dates, they don’t really do much.
• 5) our mailing list tools are done, be ready for spammage! (jk) but we’re going to start sending out updates.
• 6) added styling to “pending revisions”
• 7) updated logo w/ slogan

Tonight’s publish includes new user settings, commenting notifications and AJAX enhancements.

Bugs fixed

• 1) fixed several login-link routings
• 2) fixed the add profile form
• 3) fixed community page to reflect proper # of karma and # of queries

New stuff

• 1) User-settings: can set personal preferences for recieving email and internal updates
• 2) more admin tools, mailing lists and such (we’re storing emails, but just building emailer now)
• 3) some user referrer tracking in admin tools

Ajax stuff

• 1) better ajax in-progress effect, which is now a fade
• 2) overflow issue in AJAX fixed, now you can rate multiple items quickly and update target works