Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
New release – Codename: Arbus
Diane Arbus – a photographer who was captivated by all kinds of people and tried to portray them the way they really were. Some in a very direct way, like the giant on the left, others more subtle like the woman with the poodle-shaped hair. Arbus, the Polar Rose release also focuses on highlighting the individual…
Sharing of individual photos
In our UI you will now notice a couple of clear changes. Gone are the links to “Edit tags” and “Show original” and in come clearly marked buttons to “Edit tags” and “Share this”. The latter is really the big thing. Click “Share this” and up pops a panel with five different ways of sharing the photo with other people.
First off you can share using a Facebook wallpost, a Twitter tweet or a link on Digg. These all use our new short-URL service: polarro.se – we’ve been told that sort of thing is all the rage these days! The upshot is that you get a nice short link to the photo in question, with all the face boxes, names and links that a Polar Rose enabled photo has.
Of course you can also just grab the short URL directly and share that however you like. At the bottom left of the sharing panel there is a “Email this photo to a friend” link as well, which will helpfully paste it into an email for you. Of course, if you just click the link it’ll show you the photo in question, by itself in what we call the “permalink page”.
This “permalink page” is also what you will see if you click on a Polar Rose link from Facebook, for instance when you’ve been named. Which brings us to…
Facebook messaging changes
Currently when you name, as post is made on your behalf on your wall, saying that you’ve named (for example) Aunt Tilly. That is great, but it is easily missed by Aunt Tilly. Also it might be that most of your friends have no idea who Aunt Tilly is, and therefore think the message isn’t very interesting to them. With this release we’re changing this behavior.
In line with Facebook’s latest development direction, we are now posting a message on your behalf on Aunt Tilly’s wall instead. This message can only be seen by you, Aunt Tilly and people that know the both you together. This makes sure Aunt Tilly gets to see the photos of herself that you named and at the same time makes sure that the message isn’t shown to people for whom this holds no interest.
If you are naming people without providing a Facebook contact, we’ll still post to your own wall, but no more than 3 times a day, so as to keep the volume of messages down. Also, if you name continuously, Facebook will neatly collapse these three messages in to one item on your stream for you.
Privacy Improvements
In this release we’ve made our privacy system more straight-forward. Public accounts and friends-only/private accounts continue to work as normal, with photos and names either being shown to the world, or only to friends.
However, if you name someone and they haven’t yet signed up we now show only the first name of the person. We’ve been doing this for some time – by popular request – for our Flickr photo notes, but now it is that way across the site. That way friends and family can still easily get to these photos without giving too much away.
Finally, if you name someone without providing contact details, we will treat the name as a normal tag, meaning it will be fully visible to everyone, as if it was public. This is because we of course in that case can’t ask the person in question how they want to appear, so we’re leaving it up to the person naming to decide what’s best.
We welcome any feedback on these changes over on our GetSatisfaction site (it will be easier for us to track there, so please don’t use the comments on this blog).
Getting this right is important to us – so please let us know what you think!
Finally…
Of course this release contains the usual small fixes and tweaks, including some subtle changes to the look and feel. Much more to come in the next release, including quite likely, the most commonly requested feature of all…
[...] code is accessed via the “Share this” panel – see the previous post for more information about this. Published by: Geoff Parker Category: Notes, Release Tags: [...]