Happy times. After yesterday’s introduction of Jalbum as our initial partner we’re very exited bringing on another two great partners today.

23

23 is the visual sharing company. Its products help individuals, groups, businesses and institutions to act visually in more than 200 countries across the globe on a daily basis.

Twitxr

Twitxr is a mobile photosharing service that lets users easily share pictures and status updates from any mobile phone with their friends on Twitxr, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. Twitxr has a great iPhone app with automatic geotagging of pictures, plus Windows Mobile and Java applications for most cameraphones around. Additionally users can send pictures and text updates using any mobile device via email and mobile web.

We really look forward working with these fantastic sites, their users, and the people behind.

Much of the team in our Malmö office was away last Thursday and Friday for the reboot10 conference across the Öresund bridge in Copenhagen. And what an event. The sheer amount of fantastic sessions, conversations, and new friends of Polar Rose, is staggering and is still being digested.

This post is really just meant as a quick shout of thanks from us at Polar Rose to Thomas, Pernille, and the big crew of volunteers. No one puts it better than Nick Black from CloudMade:

Reboot is one of the few conferences I’ve been to which is genuinely engaging, stimulating, well planned and well executed.

ps. Polar Rose was a reboot10 supporter. Some might call this a sponsorship, but our real contribution was not what we might have chipped in with, but the after- after- party that Mikkel managed to get off the ground outside Vega on Friday night. Needless to say, no party is really good unless busted by the police. ;-)

Only a few days after moving from private to public beta we’ve now opened up for partners as well by releasing the Polar Rose Widget.

This first release is initially for partners to test the functionality on their websites. Over the next few weeks will be getting to feedback and making updates and improvements. We will announce when the widget is fully open to all.

Our first partner – Jalbum

Jalbum is one of the fastest growing photo sharing communities in the world. Jalbum photo albums can have any look, functionality and can be published to any site. Millions of photo albums are distributed over 100’s of thousands of web servers globally, with a current rate of 90 million monthly page views.

Our friends at Jalbum are currently finalizing the remaining tasks to have the widget available to all their users as an opt-in feature. You can get a sneak preview of the widget in action at http://davidekholm.jalbum.net/faces/.

We’re very happy to have Jalbum as our first partner and welcome the Jalbum team and users to Polar Rose.

PS. Read more about the partner widget here http://info.polarrose.com/partners/ where you’ll find a presentation, technical specifications and everything else needed to get started. Remember that we’re some days off from the public release so changes can still occur and please use for testing only.

Well, its been 6 weeks since the release of the new site, and therefore it’s time for a big update!

Many changes and improvements have been made. Here’s a list covering most of them:

• A special “seen-with” tab, that can be accessed from within a stack.


• All of the tabs now have proper URLs, like http://www.polarrose.com/found/paris+hilton/stack1/seen-with/#60. These can be accessed directly and will even remember how many results were displayed, when you browse back to them.


• New front-page, with more explanation of what Polar Rose is and does.


• A screencast of Polar Rose in action!


• Your collections (found, favorites, me) are now shown as stacks on your homepage, which is now located directly at www.polarrose.com! The old URL for your homepage will redirect you automatically.


• The top bar has been simplified, with prominent “home”, “downloads” and “help” buttons

There is also a minor update to the Firefox plugin (to version 0.55.9). The changelog is as follows:

• Fixes roses not appearing on certain sites, like people.com.


• Updated status bar icons for Firefox 3 Mac.

The server-side of the plugin has also seen several performance enhancements.

Oh yeah… we’re also going public beta! No more invites. No more waiting around. Just sign up and get an account immediately!

We are of course not sitting still. There is much more to come over the next couple of weeks!

We’ll be experiencing some smaller outages to both the Polar Rose website and plugin over the next three days as we do some upgrades. Thanks for your patience.

Update: First stage is done. We have a new plugin out for all beta-users. Tell your Firefox to search for updates or restart your IE to get it. Hope you like it! More to come in the next few days…