Mosuki blog

We’ve just released a Facebook application for Mosuki. With it, you can put Mosuki events that you’ve posted, and events from your scenes, onto you Facebook profile. Check it out.

This month sees one big improvement: Mosuki now only shows you events in your area. As we get new users outside of San Francisco, it’s become more important to limit the events we show you to just events in your area.

What do you need to do to take advantage of this? Just make sure your zip code on your profile is correct, and when you enter a new event, make sure you use a place with an address, zip code, or city and state.

Do you want to know what’s going on in a new city when you’re traveling? Just change your zip code on your profile (and remember to change it back when you get home.)

As you might expect, this new feature required more under-the-hood changes than most updates, and the release has its share of bug fixes and minor improvements. But we won’t bore you with the details — why don’t you find a cool event and go to it instead?

Now you can put your Mosuki events, or events from your favorite Mosuki scene, on your blog or your MySpace profile. Just go to your profile, or your favorite scene, and click on Export: to blog/MySpace, and follow the directions. For example, here’s my published Mosuki events badge:

And here’s the same badge on my MySpace profile.

This release sees just one big change. You can now control who joins your scenes. This means that scenes can be private event discussion groups as well as open-membership communities.

There are some other nifty small changes. You can now cancel and delete scenes, and remove an event that you have posted to a scene, if you didn’t intend to post it. You can now make unpublished scenes that won’t show up in the scene list, if you want your scene to flow through Mosuki by word-of-mouth only. We show ongoing events at the top of the event lists now. And you can now see the emails of people you’ve invited to Mosuki who have never joined, on your groups page. Maybe you could send them an email and tell them to sign up already.

As always, keep the feedback coming, and enjoy!

This month’s Mosuki update includes some very exciting new features that we’ve been fine-tuning for a while.

Email replies

You now can reply to Mosuki messages directly from your email program. When you get a Mosuki message from a friend, or a message posted to an event, in email, you can reply right from your email program. There are a few important caveats to this feature:

• You must reply using the email address that you log in to Mosuki with. For most people, this won’t be a problem. However, if you have your email forwarded, or if you use “dash” addresses, you have to be careful to change your “from” address before sending the message.
• You must reply using the “Reply-to” address in the email message. Again, this won’t be a problem for most people, since most email programs do this automatically.
• This feature doesn’t work for Hotmail users yet. Hotmail sends very badly formatted email, and it’s going to be a lot of work for us to correct it, but we’ll fix it eventually.

We’ve been using this feature ourselves for a while now, and it’s super useful. Try it.

Scenes

The real exciting new feature is something we’re calling scenes. Scenes are a whole new way to find out about, and share, events. A scene is a community where people who like a certain type of event can keep track of those events. A scene has:

• A collection of similar events.
• Members who are interested in those events, who can add events.
• A discussion forum for talking about and planning events.
• A public calendar, and public RSS and iCalendar feeds of those events.

If you join a scene, you will find out about new events and messages in that scene, in email and in the new & upcoming event lists, and meet people who are into the same kind of events as you.

Any group of people and events can be a scene: a film festival, a sports team or season, your burning man camp, your favorite genre of music, really anything at all. And you can share your scene calendar with anyone — they don’t have to be Mosuki users.

You can find scenes, or create new scenes, by clicking on the scenes icon at the top of every page. Once you join a scene, you can add an event into that scene simply by selecting the scene name on the event page. New events in your scenes will go out in the daily email, just like new events that your friends have added.

Before you get too excited about scenes, just wait! We’ve got a whole lot more improvements to scenes on the way, so stay tuned.

Miscellaneous changes

Besides all this, this release includes the regular dose of bug fixes and speed enhancements. As always, let us know what you think, and enjoy!

Our second update for July has some nifty new features:

iCalendar feed import now supports feeds that are password protected. Imported feeds with just a few events in them will now place those events on your calendar, and into the word of mouth system. Large feeds still behave as collections of events.

We now have a way to export your Mosuki calendar to Google. Google has improved their calendar’s security somewhat, and people still want this feature. You should still understand the implications for your privacy carefully before exporting your Mosuki calendar to Google.

You can now access your Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL address books in Mosuki. You can invite your contacts to events, or to join the site, thanks to Plaxo’s address book widget.

We’ve improved the way Flickr photos are collected and displayed. Most places will now have a few Flickr photos on them.

There are also some little bug fixes, including fixes to make the site work better in Safari 3. That’s it!

You might have noticed that Mosuki was upgraded this afternoon. The new version has some major changes under the hood, but we won’t bore you with those.

The most exciting new thing is the ability to put Flickr photos onto Mosuki events and places. Every Mosuki event and place has a little section that says “Tag events with “mosuki:e=~a1b2″ and they will appear here.” All you need to do is copy that tag (Flickr calls them “machine tags”) and then tag your photos with it, and they will show up on Mosuki.

We’ve also created some quick little search plug-ins. You know the search box in the upper right in Firefox? Well, you can now search Mosuki events, places, and people from that box. Just go to any Mosuki page, and click the menu to the left of the search box, and add Mosuki search to Firefox.

That’s all for now. More new features coming soon!

Nobody protects your privacy as carefully as Mosuki does… not even Google.