All posts tagged Twitter

Introducing My Taptu 1.3: Be Your Own News DJ

Posted by on March 10, 2011

After weeks of hard work, we’re excited today to unveil the latest update to My Taptu, which now lets you mix your own streams, curating them exactly as you want them.

That’s right, with My Taptu 1.3′s new self-curation feature, you can now build your very own stream from scratch, choosing and combining feeds that you find from the My Taptu StreamStore (13,000 and counting!), through a search with Bing RSS, or from your Google Reader account. Or, you can edit the topic streams we’ve mixed up ourselves by removing and adding sources. Once the stream has been created, you can watch stories flow in from your favorite sources all in one stream.

The obvious streams to create are based on topics, such as the VC blogs stream DFJ Esprit VC Scott Sage has mixed up (search for “VC Blogs” in the StreamStore), the “Parenting Essentials” stream from Britain’s best-selling “yummy mummy” author Liz Fraser (search for Liz Fraser), and the DIY Inspiration & Tips from San Francisco-based interior designer Beryn Hamill (search for “DIY Inspiration”).

Then there are the not so obvious curated streams, random mixes of favorite blogs and sites, that mashed together, provide a serendipitous and thought-provoking line-up of stories. We first tuned into this type of stream when Jed Hallam, a London, UK-based social media strategist mixed up a bunch of feeds from business news to small creative blogs, to blogs from those working in his industry, with a few fashion and design ones thrown in and called it Jed Hallam’s “Synapse Starter.”

It’s been one of my favorite streams to follow—especially since it’s where I discovered the smart and often very funny musings of Dave Trott, a London marketing man (and learned, incidentally, how to say “stingy s**t” in the southern Chinese dialect Teochew). Another example of such a stream is the one Monica Durden has curated, namely “London femme’s escort into fashion and arts” with coverage from both the arts and the fashion world, an essential stream for whoever wants to stay up to date with the catwalk news as well the art world.

The point is, with literally thousands of sources accessible on My Taptu, any number of these streams can be created. Want to keep up on work news? Create a stream for it! Want to keep up on your passions? Mix up a stream! Or do like Jed and mash it all up. We’d love to see what streams you are coming up with—or as we say here, “How do you Taptu?” so let us know by pinging us on Twitter (@taptu), in the comments, or on our Facebook page. And yes, we are working on letting you share your streams with one another as fast as we can!

Now, just a few more cool features we’ve heard you asking for:

On the social side, you can now do more inside the app with Twitter and Facebook:

• Twitter Stream: You can now reply and retweet inside your Twitter stream without having to leave My Taptu.
• Facebook Links Only Stream: You can now add your Facebook links stream that will only show the updates when your Facebook friends share a link. The link will open as a preview in the article card, along with the update. You can also Like or Comment right in the card.

We’ve also made discovering new content streams and RSS feeds even easier:

• StreamStore Streamlined: Every time you visit the StreamStore, My Taptu remembers which streams you’ve added. The next time you visit, the StreamStore replenishes itself and displays new streams for you to choose from.
• Google Reader Front and Center: Google Reader is now front and center in the StreamStore to let you import the RSS news feeds you already follow.

Thanks again for using My Taptu! If you need help, please go to our community support or ping us on Twitter @Taptu. As always, let us know what other features you’d like to see. Our full press release is here. Happy mixing! –Konstantinos

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Add My Taptu’s “Most Shared” Stories Stream

Posted by on February 28, 2011

It’s safe to say most of us here at Taptu are news junkies. We each seem to have endless lists of favorite sites, blogs, newspapers and magazines that we love to follow. So you can imagine our fascination and delight on discovering some new sources courtesy of none other than the My Taptu community.

Since we launched in mid-November, we’ve noticed that a whole lot of sharing of stories has been going on in My Taptu as the community have posted their favorites to Twitter, Facebook, or emailed them to friends. As the number of these shared stories have steadily climbed, we’ve found ourselves whiling away the hours browsing the number of interesting articles–some from sources we already love, and some from ones we were happy to discover. For us, stumbling upon these stories added a bit of happy serendipity to the app.

Today, we’ve added a new stream in My Taptu—the aptly named, “Most Shared” one that compiles the most popular stories that the My Taptu community is sharing on Twitter, Facebook or emailing to their friends. We hope you find the articles just as interesting as we do and see the stream as a great way to keep up with what’s trending and to discover new sources of content you may not have even known about. And, if you’ve seen an interesting story, and want the wider My Taptu community to see, remember, all you have to do is share it!

The stream, called “Most Shared” can be found in our StreamStore. To add the stream:

1) Tap on the + Add sign on the iPhone, and the + sign in the right hand corner on Android devices to take you to the StreamStore.
2) In the StreamStore, tap on “Most Shared”. If you are using an iPhone, click “Done” in right hand corner. If you are using an Android phone, hit the back button. Hit the “Close” button in iPhone. Hit the back button on Android.
3) My Taptu takes you back to the home screen where you will see the Most Shared stream at the top.

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From Cave Paintings To My Taptu: An Illustrated History of Content

Posted by on January 25, 2011

From cave paintings to the town crier, to the rise of TV, Twitter, and My Taptu…the history of content seems to be accelerating at an ever-quickening pace. It’s a history that fascinates our partner Philip Sheldrake and illustrator Nic Hinton who’ve put together an illustrated history of content—now becoming very popular with Wired and Mashable readers.

While the leap from the rise of newspapers in Victorian times to the mainstream use of the Internet took a good 150 years, the leap from mass market email–a mid-late 90’s phenomenon–to Twitter took less that 20.

As Philip says, “Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it?”

At Taptu, we couldn’t agree more. And, with all the reams of information being published today, we hope you find My Taptu a useful and easy way to filter and find all the great content you’re into whether its your Facebook and Twitter streams, or the feeds of your favorite sources. And with over 13,000 searchable streams in our Stream Store, chances are we’ve got your interests covered!

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SURVEY SAYS… Taptu Needs Your Help!

Posted by on January 14, 2011

Thanks for all of your feedback after our first and second releases of My Taptu over the last 10 weeks. Based on everything you shared with us, we’ve brought you some pretty important improvements like Google Reader Import, full article views on stories when they are available from the publisher, and full article views in your Twitter and Facebook streams. We’ve also added some neat functionality on your Facebook stream by giving you the ability to ‘Like’, ‘View Comments’ and ‘Post Comments’ on your Facebook Stream from within My Taptu. We’ve added more intuitive ways to refresh your content and made some improvements for the Retina iPhone 4 display as well.

So all in all, we’ve taken some pretty big steps forward in just a few weeks, but we want to go even further and need your help and candid feedback.

Today, Taptu is launching our first customer survey for My Taptu. Please take just a few minutes to click this link and tell us what you like and what you’d like to see improved in My Taptu.

We take your feedback seriously and would love to implement your ideas and suggestions into the product to make My Taptu your indispensable and favorite app you check many times a day, every day.

So if you’re Into It, Taptu It and tell us why. We’ll even throw a few rewards into the mix. If you complete the survey by January 24, 2011, we’ll drop your name into the Taptu Towers hat for a chance to win some Amazon gift certificates. Winners will be announced on that same day (24 January) and contacted by email.

Thanks for taking our survey and thanks for your time,

Mitch

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My Taptu 1.2 Update For iPhone Is Live

Posted by on December 19, 2010

Work to improve My Taptu never stops, and a few weeks after our first update, it’s time for another. My Taptu 1.2 for iPhone is now live in the App Store. We’ve got a whole host of improvements making it one fully-baked social news aggregator app—we hope you think so too!

Here’s what’s new:

Google Reader Import: You can now insert up to 30 RSS feeds from Google Reader. To access Google Reader import in My Taptu, tap on the cog icon on the main screen and tap on the “Import from Google Reader” box. Select feeds to import. Tap the Back button. Tap the Done button to return to the main My Taptu view, where you will find your new feeds added.

Full Article View: That’s right, you get the full article–not just a summary–when you tap on an article card when it is available. (Please remember, not all publishers, web sites or blogs will publish their full story to feeds.) To see if the full article is available, scroll down the page.

Like, View Comments and Comment in Your Facebook Stream: We’ve added more functionality to your Facebook stream in My Taptu. Not only can you view the status updates of your friends, you can now Like their updates, view any comments already made, and add a comment yourself. And, any link they share with you will display in full on the article card, when available.

Twitter Stream Improvements: We’ve improved the user interface of how your Twitter stream displays. You can also now view the full article, when available, when a friend tweets you a link.

More Ways To Refresh Your Content: You now have more ways to get fresh content. To refresh all of your streams, pull down on the screen. To refresh an individual stream, pull it to the left. You can still shake the phone to refresh all streams.

Retina Display Improvement: We’ve ensured that high resolution images are optimised for the iPhone 4.

General Bug fixing and improvements

As ever, if you have any suggestions for new features, or would like to give us feedback, please visit our community page, or contact us on Twitter @Taptu or Facebook. Thanks!

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Taptu Blog Gets New Redesign; Get Featured in My Taptu

Posted by on December 6, 2010

You might have noticed here at the Taptu Blog that we’ve redesigned the page. We hope that it makes it easier to stay in touch, and to find the information you might need about us. Aside from our regular posts, we’ve included our YouTube videos, our Twitter stream, links to our apps and Facebook page.

In the middle, you’ll see a featured stream from My Taptu, our latest app, a handy social news aggregator available on the iPhone and Android devices. We’ll be showcasing different streams and featured sources every week to highlight the vast depth of content we have at My Taptu. If you have suggestions of a featured source or a stream you particularly like, let us know at [email protected]

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My Taptu for Android: Latest Version 1.1 With Updates Now Live

Posted by on November 29, 2010

Here at Taptu, we’re excited today to release the first update of the Android version of our social news aggregator app My Taptu.

My Taptu 1.1 for Android comes with the following improvements:

1. Google Reader Support: That’s right, you can now download all of your RSS feeds from Google Reader into My Taptu. The new option can be found under “Settings” and will let you add up to 30 RSS feeds from Google Reader. Please note, if you have already added a stream to My Taptu that is in your Google Reader, this duplicate will not count toward your 30 feed limit.

2. User Interface Improvements to Twitter Streams: As you know, we’ve curated the Twitter feeds of a whole host of your favorite celebrities, politicians, musicians, business gurus, models, scientist and publishers. Now when you view their stream, any article link that they share with you will be previewed in the stream itself so you can quickly see what they are tweeting about.

3. 4G Network Support: My Taptu now works for devices (lucky enough) to be on a 4G network.

4. Improved Error and Notification Handling: A few noticeable improvements on error handling and notifications are now available

5. Faster and Speedier: Speed and loading time have been improved.

6. Bug Fixes: We’ve fixed some general bugs.

We hope you like these new updates. And, stay tuned—because we have more coming along very shortly.

For our Apple users who may be wondering what is this Android icon doing on my phone, please bear with us! We’ve got some cool new features coming at you shortly. My Taptu 1.1 for the iPhone/iPod is currently under review by Apple and hopefully will get to you very shortly. To get instant notification when the update goes live, follow us on Twitter.

Thank you for trying My Taptu! As always please let us know what you think on our community page, Hani and Florian

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