boxedup.com blog

So the seasonal festivities are now a distant memory, and we’re all well and truly immersed in 2008! We hope that boxedup.com made life a bit easier at Christmas, and thanks to everybody who told us their stories about how it worked for them.

But boxedup isn’t just for Christmas! We’re here for you year-round providing a tool to bring together your online shopping activity, helping you to keep track of what you want, like the look of or are thinking about getting, from any site or store on the web. On top of that we make it easy to share your lists, whether that’s about sharing finds with friends and letting them know what you’re into (on boxedup or on your social network, blog, etc) or making sure that when somebody wants to give you something that you actually get something you want. And we’ll be working on making it easy to find, follow and interact with other boxedup members who are into the same stuff as you, so you can benefit from each other’s finds. And plenty of other things that’ll make boxedup more and more useful to you!

And in the spirit of welcoming in the new year we decided to freshen the site up, so you’ll find a new colour scheme, a bit of homepage make-over, various design tweaks to existing pages, and we’ve introduced a brand new type of page - the product hub page! The product hub page is all about bringing together information from across the site and the community of users in relation to specific products, i.e. who’s added it recently, who’s got it, what else people who want or have that thing have on their lists, etc (if your lists are private or friends only, then if you’ve added a product then you won’t appear). It’s all part of the effort to make connections, both in terms of people who are into similar things as well as in relation to other products and things that might be of interest. So when you click on a product link you’ll be taken to the hub-page, but there’s also a direct link (the arrow icon after the link) to take you off to the external web page if that’s where you want to go.

And if you missed it at the end of last year, we’ve now got the ability to prioritise and sort lists using some cool drag and drop functionality. We’ve also been working on improving the basics such as image grabbing, and we’ve got some good improvements there (as well as the ability to manually add images if we can’t grab them automatically, both by uploading files and based on the URL of the image). And as well as wanting to make boxedup a good social experience, we know that people need to be comfortable with the privacy settings, and we’ll be looking to add to the existing privacy options to give you more control over your account.

So that’s it for now. Here’s to a fulfilling and prosperous year all round, and keep on using boxedup.com! And keep sending that feedback through!

The boxedup team

PS With the 14th Feb looming large, make sure that your loved one doesn’t have to shoot in the dark this year as far as getting you something that your heart desires! Get that list updated, and make sure that they know about it (leave the pc on, open on that page, or something like that; or just make sure that they’re connected as a boxedup friend and can see what you’ve added)!!

This one’s been too long in coming (and has probably been the most requested feature - thanks for all the feedback!), but better late than never!

So after a fair bit of deliberating about the best way to do ordering/sorting/prioritising of the things on your lists, we’ve settled on drag & drop so that you can just put things in priority order.

So when you’re on the list that you want to shuffle the order of you’ll see a new link in the ‘Things to do’ box (which is to the right of the list, at the top) called ‘Re-order this list’. So just click on that and the re-order page will open up (see screenshot below). Then all you need to do is left-click on ‘drag’ next to the item that you want to move, and then just drag it to the position that you want it to be in on the list.

Here’s what the re-order page looks like, and the link to open this page has the red arrow pointing at it:

So drag and drop away, and get those lists in order!

We’ve also added a few other links to the ‘Things to do’ box to make various things easier and more obvious. These include links to edit the list name and to create a new list. And we’ve added a link to this blog so that you can easily check on what’s new at any time when you come to the site.

We’re always working to improve the site, so if you have any thoughts or comments just drop us a message through the message box on the help & info form, or through the messaging system on the site (we’re at the top of your address list!).

That’s all for now!

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and all that jazz! So we thought that we’d better give a few last-minute tips about how to get the most out of boxedup.com during this festive period.

A lot of those carefully compiled boxedup lists of the things that you want to get, from anywhere on the web, are now swinging into action as gift lists, and we hope you get all the things that you’ve been yearning for! So if you need to let people know about the existence of your list then make sure that you send them a boxedup friend invite, and they can then go through it and reserve the thing that they want to get you (we don’t want you getting two of those things that you’ve always wanted, and only your friends can reserve things on your lists!).

And if you’ve been slacking a bit with your boxedup lists then freshen them up and share them out to avoid disappointment. It’s not too late - last minute shopping is a habit of many, and they’ll only thank you if you can lay out on a plate what it is that you’d love to get (and they won’t waste any money on getting you something that will find its way straight into a cupboard or onto ebay!).

Now, we know that the whole element of surprise is really important to a lot of people, and if you’re one of them we’ve recently built a feature into the boxedup lists that you’ll like. In Settings (the link is at the top of the page on the right, when you’re logged in), you’ll find a section called ‘Surprises’ - just check that box and then when somebody reserves something on your list you won’t see the ‘reserved’ message appear (but people visiting your lists will be able to see what has and hasn’t been reserved). OK, so it won’t be a total surprise, but it maintains some of the suspense!

So we hope you have a great festive season, and that you get all those things you really want!

And it just remains to say thanks for using boxedup - we hope you’ve been enjoying it! We’re always working hard to make it better, so if you have any feedback then we’d love to hear it. Please either send it through the help & info form or by emailing us at feedback@boxedup.com.

All at boxedup.com

OK. We know we’ve neglected the blog since boxedup launched (sorry), but it’s been for good reasons, we promise!

We’ve been working continuously on enhancing existing functionality and adding new useful features and tools. So here’s a quick summary.

When you click through to your account you’ll see that you’ve now got a new homepage so you can easily see who’s finding and adding what in your network, and there’s a refined profile page so that people visiting your boxedup account can get a quick view of what you’re into. There’s a new messaging system so you can easily send messages to your boxedup friends when you’re on the site (and want to talk product stuff). And you can also now leave your funny or helpful comments on your friends lists. Lists now have three settings as far as privacy levels are concerned: public, friends only, fully private; so you control who sees what. And there’s also a new tool that allows you to easily send out boxedup invites by pulling in contacts directly from your address book.

We’ve extended the shops functionality to the user level, so on your pages you’ll see a shops tab which shows all the shops that you have things from on your lists. We’ll be working to build this out further; ultimately we want it to be a place where you can keep track of all your favourite stores and sites, be able to see when good stuff from those sites has been added to boxedup by others, and to be able to see who else is enjoying using the same sites and stores as you.

And we’ve been working to make it easy to embed your boxedup lists into the places that you use and love most on the web, whether that’s your blog, your social network profile or somewhere else. So we’ve now got  a boxedup Facebook app (see pic below) and a new set of Flash widgets to plug into your blog or MySpace profile, or any other open social network or site that accepts Flash (see the skinny version over on the left and the fat version below). There are a load of announcements in the pipeline about other social networks opening up and following the Facebook lead, so as that happens we’ll be looking at what the best way is to integrate boxedup into these platforms.

boxedup Facebook app (profile view)      boxedup Flash widget

So whether you’re using boxedup as your online shopping list, to help you keep tabs on stuff as you’re window shopping on the web, to track stuff you want to get for others, as your gift/wish list, or to just share cool things that you’ve found with friends, we hope you like the latest changes!

There’s plenty more to come, including a new form for adding products to your list which will have new standard options to allow you to grab images when we haven’t been able to grab them automatically (and we’ll be working on the automatic image grab too) - we know it’s annoying when you can’t get the image that you want.

We’ve been getting a great flow of feedback from lots of people, and it’s really appreciated. So if you’ve got any thoughts or comments about the site, or if you just want to get in touch, then please do! You can use the feedback form on the help and info page or you can email us on feedback [at] boxedup dot com.

And we’ll definitely be making more frequent posts about developments and changes as we make them!

So thanks for using the site. And if this is your first time coming to boxedup please sign-up!

Leading up to the launch of boxedup we wanted to make sure that as people found about what we were doing they could register their interest to find out more and be told when we were live. So we created a splash page that sat on the boxedup.com URL where people could leave us their contact details.

We also managed to get some promo through the new blognation site (definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in developments in the internet startup space), and we used a mysterious looking bit of creative to get people curious.

Well, it all seemed to work, and we got a good number of people registering to find out more. We were also excited to get a nice bit of comment on the creative itself on Fred Destin’s blog (of Atlas Ventures). Thanks Fred!

So once the initial launch-related frenzy was over we let everybody who’d left their details know, and we sent them an email giving them a bit of a heads-up on what boxedup is all about (and encouraging them to sign-up, of course!).

As we’ve been getting quite a few people asking for a bit more boxedup background info, and since we haven’t got round to an ‘about’ page on the site yet, we thought we’d post the email here.

So here it is!

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Thanks for registering to find out more about boxedup.com – the lights are now on, and we’re ready to rock and roll!

So what is boxedup.com then?

Well, it’s essentially a place where you can keep track of all the things that you want to get. It can be anything from anywhere (any website or online store), whether you’re into music, books, gadgets, clothes, tin robots (!) or anything else!

It’s something you can just use yourself or that you can share with other people. We think its fun and interesting to share the experience, so we’re making it easy to keep track of what your friends are finding and adding. We’ll also be building out groups, so that you can find people who are into the same stuff as you, and they can do the leg work in finding cool and
interesting things!

Why?

Well, we got bored of:

• finding great stuff that we wanted to get and then losing track of these things in a sea of bookmarks, desktop links and scrawled notes
• having lists scattered all over the place at different sites/stores
• using a generic social bookmarking tool which meant that all the stuff that we wanted was jumbled up with all our other bookmarks
• being bought stuff that we really didn’t want to (and boxedup should help to put an end to that experience!)
• not having an easy way to get ideas and inspiration about things to get, and also not having a place to chat about the stuff that we wanted, and were into, with our friends and people with the same interests
• generally not having a useful tool to keep track of what we wanted and where we found it

So we wanted to transform the way in which people track what it is that they want to get, as well as the things that they like the look of and think are cool. And we wanted to turn it into a fun and social experience. We wanted to create something that hooked tightly into the way that you use the web, allowing you to easily add things to your lists as you’re searching, surfing and shopping. And we also wanted to make it easy to share what you’ve found with your immediate community and with other
people who are into the same stuff as you. Enter boxedup.com! We want boxedup to be the hub for all your activity relating to things that you want.

What’s next?

For us, we’ve got lots more to do and loads of ideas about how to make the site even more useful and fun. And it’s not just about the site. Like a lot of people these days, we’re big social networking fans, so we’re going to make it possible to integrate boxedup into your social network using our widgets. And we’ll be looking to integrate into other environments where our users spend their time.

For you, we hope that we’ve caught your interest and that you’ll sign up! You can do that by joining here. We’d love to welcome you on board.

And if you have any ideas, comments or suggestions about the boxedup site, or want to get in contact with us or find out more, then drop us an email!

Thanks for your interest.

Chris & Jeremy – co-founders

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