Have you ever used one of those fancy new e-ink readers? Compared to regular screens, it’s an entirely different experience. You can keep on reading for hours without suffering devastating pain in your eyes or being distracted by all the other stuff your tablet or laptop is able to do.
The Kindle is a great device and since we love it so much, we’re starting our Send to Kindle beta today. You’ll be able to register your device and have every article sent right to your Kindle.
If you’re a registered user, simply visit the Dashboard to sign up and join the beta. We’ll be in touch via e-mail as soon as the feature is available to you.
Listen up, kids!
Today marks the release of the first version of our API. Please note that, for now, it only features basic functionality and, most importantly, that it’s currently read-only.
Using the API, you can pull information on source pages, articles, recommendations and users. These should be sufficient in building first small apps which, hopefully, will improve the experience of QUOTE.fm for you as well as for others.
In case you’re already working on something cool that might be worth our attention, feel free to send us a note via our contact form.
As of now, there’s no mechanic for logging in using the API, which means you can neither get the personal timeline of a user nor post recommendations on a user’s behalf.
These features will be added in a few weeks (as soon as we get some science done), though. A side note for the curious among you: It’ll be based on OAuth 2, so don’t worry about complex code.
Also, note that the whole API is still considered beta and that some parts of it may be changed in the near future. In case you should stumble upon any bugs or you’ve got feature requests, please consult our GitHub project and file an issue.
That said: Go ahead and have some fun!
Here’s another small change we’ve made recently: From now on, anytime a user is up for curatorship and recommends articles of enough quality to make it to the first place in the voting, he or she is rewarded with an additional invite code.
Also, we’ve implemented RSS feeds for profiles, in case there’s somebody whose recommendations you wouldn’t want to miss.
With great power comes great responsibility. Our friendly neighborhood spider-man’s catch phrase has become one of the core principles of QUOTE.fm.
Although we’ve opened QUOTE.fm to the public, obviously some people believe it’s still closed because it requires an invite before you can post something. As described before, this is just us trying to ensure quality.
We thought it would be enough to let anyone see all recommendations and discussions, but there’s a clear need for someone without an invite to follow other users and, by that, building their own timeline and their own set of recommendations by people they trust.
Okay! Allow me to announce Apprenticeship. The folks at Dribbble gave a good and well-functioning example with their ‘Prospects’. We’ll have ‘Apprentices’, limited accounts which are able to follow other users.
Types of accounts
For the time being, there’ll be two kinds of accounts.
-
Apprentice
Apprentices are enabled to fill out their profile, to follow people and to send stuff to their Instapaper, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
-
Member
As a member, you’ll be able to recommend reads, write comments, like recommendations and basically do everything that’s there to do on QUOTE.fm. There won’t be any restrictions at all. The full QUOTE.fm experience. Incredible.
As usual, if you’ve registered as an Apprentice, you can redeem a code to unlock all features of QUOTE.fm. As we stated before, this is just a means to ensure quality. We don’t want any kind of foolish hype, merely to build something great.
When will this happen?
We plan to roll out this feature on December 6th. In case we miss our deadline, please be kind. There’s so much happening all at once right now. Among other things, Philipp is planning his move to Hamburg, so we can all sit in the same room and stuff.
Apprenticeship! Self-made timelines! Yay!
We’ll be rolling out (always wanted to say stuff like this) some new features in the near future. Among them is a new profile design that won’t contain displays for follower and following counts. Unless you count them by hand, you’ll never know how many people are following you.
Surely, social media managers and “experts” will be pissed off by this, but we think that these numbers simply are not as important as some imagine them to be. Let’s say you’ve got a lot of followers. Would you recommend better texts than if they were fewer? Whatever the effects of displaying these numbers are: they’re no good. Sure, you’ll be able to see who is following you, but there’s no need to know how many people follow you, hence the latter won’t be displayed. The number of someone’s followers shouldn’t be a reason for anyone else to follow them.
We’re trying to reduce the awkward moments of social networks to a minimum, to lessen its pace and to build something you don’t feel annoyed by. You should use QUOTE.fm when you feel that there’s time for it, when you want to find something good to read, a text worth your time, read leaning back, without any hassle.
Besides that, we’re updating some design-related things and I’m happy to announce that we don’t know when QUOTE.fm will be available to the public and its reading recommendations open for everyone to see. What we do know, though, is that it’ll be in the not too remote future.
