All change!!
You’re probably wondering what’s going on if you’ve gone online expecting to visit the gifttagging site. Well, it’s evolved, and its now boxedup.com!
Gifttagging was launched last year as a bit of an experiment, and the good news is that it’s been a successful one. It showed us that people want a tool to help them track the things that they want to get, and to be able to share this with other people. What we also realised is that it goes way beyond being about gifts – it’s about shopping, it’s about adding all those things that you like the look of to your list as you come across them, and it’s about using it as a tool for yourself as well as being about being able to share it with other people. And it can also be about being part of the community and seeing what others are adding and are interested in.
The boxedup site takes the concept to the next level, and is a faster and functionally better site. We’ll be making regular improvements and upgrades to the boxedup site to provide you with something that does all the things that you want to be able to do. As part of that we’d love to hear from you if you’ve got a comment, idea or suggestion. Just send us an email at feedback [at] boxedup [dot] com, or use the comment form that we’ve now got on our help page.
If you’re an existing user you’ll find all of your lists as they were. The name of the default list is now ‘Things I want’, and, as before, if you want to create new lists for specific types of things then you can do that.
So here are some of the other key changes:
- We’ve turned it into a more social experience – you’ll find an automatically generated mini profile when you click through to your lists; and further down the same page you’ll see a couple of streams of activity showing all the things that you’ve done recently, and showing what the people in your network have done recently
- As well as being able to search for things that other people have added to their lists by individual item, we’ve added a shop search facility to help you find sites and shops that have got the types of things that you’re interested in; this is something that we’ll be looking to build out further (and is currently work in progress), including giving you the ability to build out your own directory of the shops and sites that you like to use, so that they’re easy to find time and again from your boxedup account
And a couple of things to note:
- You no longer need to remember your username when logging in, just use your email address and password
- Update the toolbar buttons that you have – just go to one of your lists and you’ll see a box called ‘Things to do’ and in that there’ll be a link through to the right buttons for you based on the browser you’re using
And we’ve been getting the obligatory questions about when there will be a Facebook application! Well, we’re almost there and we’ll post a message here when it’s available! And there’ll also be a super cool flash widget coming out shortly.
We’re really excited about the new site, and we hope that you like it and enjoy using it! And if you have any feedback or thoughts, then please do send them through.
The boxedup team
Posting your comment
Spoof | July 20, 2007 @ 1:17 am
While you’re in a “changes” mood, why not try to build some widgets for homepage applications like netvibes, igoogle … ? It would be interesting to have some.
Chris | July 22, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
Hey Spoof
We’re keen to plug boxedup into all the environments where our users are, and start pages are definitely part of that thinking.
I guess the interesting thing on start pages is whether they’ll become social environments that the owner shares with others (making start pages their social hub on the web), or if they’ll remain as information tools for the user personally. That will, in part, define the type of widget that we’d create. We’ve got a few irons in the fire on this one, and as soon as we’ve got somewhere we’ll be sure to let everybody know!
For the time-being there is a way to integrate your lists into your preferred start page site, and that’s using the RSS feeds that exist for each of your lists (just go to a specific list and your browser should auto-detect the feed).
If you’ve got some ideas on what would work and be useful as far as a start page widget is concerned then drop us an email at feedback@boxedup.com or use the comment form on the help & info page.
Thanks!
Chris
boxedup.com
neil | July 23, 2007 @ 8:35 am
hey! great web app! i found it on simple spark and love it.
a couple things i wish i had…
1) the ability to embed my lists into my own website or so net page ie myspace, facebook) page.
allot like how i can take a flickr slideshow and embed it with an iframe.
2) or maybe even just an rss feed so i can work with my lists in my own pages formating…
3) on the site itself, if i create new lists, say ‘books’ and ‘gadgets’ i cant have an item in both ‘gadgets’ AND ‘things I want’
it seems to me that ‘things i want’ should be the superclass, you could say, and it would contain every item that you want regardless of what other list it is also under…
4) also maybe you should have an automatic tab that says ‘things i dont want’ im sure lots of people would list ties, sweaters, cheap dvds and mixed nuts in decorative tins under this category!
just some thoughts from a user. i must say great stuff tho, this is something i have been waiting for, for a while!
keep up the good work!
neil | July 23, 2007 @ 8:37 am
oh hahaha, maybe i should read your post before responding. ’super cool flash widget’ sounds very exciting. i cant wait!!!
cheers
Chris | July 23, 2007 @ 1:56 pm
Hey Neil
Thanks for the comments - and glad you like boxedup!
As you say, 1) & 2) are covered off in the original post and in my response above. But we’ll always be looking for cool ways that we can integrate into different environments (infact what you’ve said has given me another idea in this respect - so thanks for that!).
On how the lists are structured - this has obviously been something that we’ve talked about quite a lot. For the situation that you’ve described you could just use the main ‘Things I want’ list, and then tag items according to what it is, rather than having them in separate lists (and when you click on the tag link on the right-hand side of the list you’ll see all the items corresponding with that tag). If you want to have separate lists for specific things (we like being able to have separate lists for different types of things too), but also want those things on separate lists to appear on a superclass/aggregated list then (as you say) we can’t do that right now. We’ll definitely keep working on the best way to structure the lists up. So thanks for your thoughts on this.
On ‘Things I don’t want’, it’s a great idea! We’ve been thinking about how you can add a bit more information to your profile, and an extended profile could contain this type of information, rather than making people surf to pages containing stuff that they really don’t want!
As per my comments to Spoof, always feel free to email us at feedback@boxedup.com or use the comment form on the help & info page. Or just post them here (maybe we’ll get some forum software to make that easier)! We really are keen that the people who are using the site are involved in how it evolves, so all thoughts are welcome!
Thanks
Chris
boxedup.com
PS And thanks for the heads-up on Simple Spark - hadn’t seen it before and it looks like a great resource (obviously, if they mentioned us!)