posted08/02/10
As Twitter becomes more popular and pervasive, it has become an essential tool for start-ups to engage with their customers. Here at Creately, we actively engage our users, supporters and even the occasional detractor on Twitter.
Recently, we wanted to understand what our customers say to us on Twitter so @Indu went through our Twitter archives and put together this simple connections map of our @Creately Twitter account to capture some of our more active users and what they’re been talking to us about.
Who’s Talking to Creately & What are they Saying.
As @Indu worked on the diagram, she decided to pull together some recent Tweets about Creately to share with the team and you - our customers.
- b3nw: saved by a javascript app creately - http://creately.com after MS Visio just refused to link things, whew. Best $5 i’ve spent in along time.
- UrbanHaiku: learning how to use creately.com to make a flowchart for my blog. I like it.
- JasonStoddard: Highly recommend @creately & checking out their mindmapping/diagram solution. Hosted. Elegant. Stupid-simple. #FF
- megormi: I made some interesting graphic organizers today using creately.com thanks to the suggestion by@socratech
- nocash: Been looking for something like this for a while: Create and Collaborate on Online Diagrams - Creately -http://creately.com/
- Rohlund: I highly recommend checking out creately.com if Microsoft Visio is not your friend. #ittools
Thank you for all your tweets. We try to respond to each and everyone of them - so if you’ve enjoyed using Creately - tell us - we’re always listening on Twitter.
If you’re not following Creately on Twitter - now’s the time.
posted20/10/09
On Thursday night I went to Ideapitch ‘09 with was run by Student Entrepreneurs | Agents of Change. This was the finals of the IdeaPitch ‘09 events. There were 8 student groups pitching in two categories. The first being for plain ideas, and second for established ideas or businesses.
There were some fantastic ideas, my favourites being Heart Park (compassionate car parking) and iWannaTutor (social tutor and student network). Special mention to Green Wall Garden, this is very much what apartment dwellers need to grow their own fresh fruit and veg - although its pretty expensive. Finally 37tweets (you might be able to guess where they get their inspiration from) have an interesting idea, and if they work very hard they could well be on the right track to achieving their dream. Take a look at the final results.
Beside the pitching there was also a chance to network with the other attendees. I met some interesting people, all of whom have great ideas. These events always remind me that there are so many great ideas around.
The nicest surprise of the evening was to run into an enthusiastic Creately user. As you know Creately appeals to everyone and it is no surprise that we meet Creately users in all sorts of locations and situations. This user is a student at Monash University where he and his friends had used Creately to collaborate on a piece of course work for their university degree. He said he found it quick to use and it made it much easier for him to finish his coursework and get it handed in on time. It is always fantastic to meet Creately users in person and get that first hand feedback. After all, this is part of why we made Creately and why we want to make it even better. Hearing how much people love it and how it helps them provides us with the impetus to carry on and strive to be the best diagramming tool and number one visual collaboration business.
We would now like to reach out to all our current and future Creately users and invite you to meet up with us to discuss your Creately usage and to get your ideas for future development and usage. We would especially like to meet those individuals and organisations that are using Creately to help with software development or web development. So if you are based in Melbourne, London, Colombo or Jakarta or the surrounding cities please email us and we can arrange a meet up in the coming weeks (or perhaps even a short chat on the phone). If you’re not based in these cities please email us or leave a comment, we’d love to know how you use Creately.
@nick_foster
posted11/05/09
History
URL shortening has been around for ages. For example tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which while not that long is ages on Internet. With the recent popularity of Twitter and its artificial limit of 140 characters for the tweets has really moved URL shortening from a specialty to a mainstream activity with a very useful purpose.
Traditionally URL shortening services have generated a random and unique code which is placed after their own short domain name to create the short URL. Recently they have started to allow users to add their own unique code although this is a little used feature because of the need to maintain a short URL. Take a look at bit.ly to see this in action.
Advantages & Disadvantages
URL shortening has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Internet user, URL shortening provides a mechanism to easily include short yet useful links in a message without using up all the available characters. For the website provider URL shortening can remove or even damage their beautifully laid SEO plans. It removes the easily readable and meaningful URLs that make search better and help users understand what they are going to be viewing.
So we have two forces here pulling in different directions. Well this got me thinking about what we should be providing at Creately to really enable our users to publish their diagrams for the public to view in a manner that makes sense and allows the most flexibility.
Our Solution
It should be stated at this point that basic URL shortening is not technically difficult, a point proven by the explosion of URL shortening services that have sprung up. You can do basic URL shortening - which is really URL redirection using the HTTP header - in about 10 lines of code in PHP (I’m sure it can be done in less if your really smart :-))
After much internal discussion we’ve decided to keep our new short URL service short and sweet with a new short domain
See are some sample URLs we’ve published from Creately:
http://create.ly/fub9l2671
http://create.ly/fuk35unh1
Our URL shortening has been achieved with a mixture of Apache configuration changes and PHP code to enable the URL shortening. The flexibility and function that this provides to our users is huge. Any Creately user can now simply copy and paste this link into their email, IM, or Twitter post to share their diagram or design with the world at large.
In the future we have plans to allow Creately users to specify their own custom URL for published diagrams. This means that each diagram can have an SEO friendly link and it lets the links to be more descriptive.
If you have any ideas for improvements to our published diagram service please head over to our Community Support Site or email support@creately.com
@nick_foster
posted19/04/09
Just a quick blog post to tell you that you can now join us on Facebook to keep up to date with everything that we have going on here at Creately. Visit facebook.creately.com and become a Creately fan - to get the latest Creately updates in your newsfeed - just like you get all your friend’s status updates.
The Creately Facebook page contains feeds from this blog, our Community Support Site and other snippets of Creately news. We regularly update it with details of the most recent developments here at Creately.
@nick_foster
Image courtesy: www.facebook.com/facebook
