Thursday, February 26th, 2009
We’ve recently upgrade our Fire Eagle support to enable full sycronisation with Yahoo Fire Eagles recently released XMPP Location Stream. In layman’s terms, this means that your location is now updated automatically in Rummble whenever you update your location in any other service you have also connected to your Fire Eagle account. Before, you would have to manually poll Fire Eagle to update the location, although Rummble location updates have always syndicated automatically out-bound to Fire Eagle.
Rummble Releases Open Source Java Location-consumer for Fire Eagle
If you’re writing an app to support Fire Eagle, Rummble has released the Java location consumer library for Yahoo’s Fire Eagle’s XMPP location stream as open source. This allow services who have Fire Eagle users, to subscribe (and unsubscribe) their users to Fireeagle’s location stream and receive instant location updates.
When a user updates their location on Fire Eagle the XMPP location stream pushes out their new location to all listening XMPP clients. The library is already being used at Rummble to update our users’ locations if they have a Fire Eagle account.
How do I use the Fire Eagle Java location-consumer library?
To use the library you will need to have a Fire Eagle application and access to an XMPP server for which you have a user that has fireeagle.com added to its roster. You will then be able to subscribe to location updates for users of your Fire Eagle application.
Written by Rummble’s CTO, Clive Cox, the Java Fire Eagle XMPP location stream library is published under the Apache open source license, to share the Java Fire Eagle XMPP love.
Posted in Functionality, News, Rummble Announcements, Rummble Developer Blog | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
The keen-eyed among you will have noticed a few changes on rummble.com over the last week or so – we’ve been working on improving a few key features to make the site more useful (and nice to look at!). Here’s a quick rundown, in case you want to go and play with all the new toys we’ve added.
Find Rummbles anywhere!
We added search. Yes, finally. To many people, this seems like such a no-brainer – but for us it was a really hard decision to make. There are a million search engines out there – dedicated to places, experiences, venues – and we’re not trying to compete with these huge directories at all. One of the nicest things about Rummble is that you very often don’t need to search – you just tell Rummble where you are, and it gives you a seemingly hand-picked list of things you’ll like nearby. There doesn’t need to be a hundred results in the list, because the things that aren’t there are the things you’re not going to be interested in anyway.
Admittedly, this philosophy started on, and works best with, our mobile platforms. It’s different on the web – you’re much more likely to be looking for stuff somewhere other than the spot you’re sitting; if you’re planning a trip or a night out, or you’re hunting for spots to share with your mates in another town. For this sort of thing, ‘Find xxx near yyy‘ is indispensible.
So, we built it, and it’s working really well. The new search has two key parts:
1. What are you looking for?
The tag search includes some clever interpretation behind the scenes – so you can search for ‘restaurant’ without missing out on things tagged with ‘bistro’ or ‘bar and grill’. Tags are grouped together by theme, which matches what most people expect when they start searching.
2. Where are you looking?
The location search is where it gets really clever – it searches a variety of sources, from country and region names, through cities and towns, right down to databases of local businesses. Depending on what you enter, the search results are filtered intelligently – if you enter the name of a country, you’re unlikely to want local business results included in your results.
When your search could match more than one location, you’re given the choice to pick the one you want. If your search only matches one place, we center the map directly on that spot, and start showing you what’s nearby immediately.
Testing this was tricky – the search is so good that whenever I typed ’svshbsa’ to try to trigger the ‘we couldn’t find this place‘ response, I discovered tiny towns in Iceland and Mongolia!
Sexy new masthead and navigation:
We’ve replaced the old masthead with a streamlined new version. Much of the functionality remains the same – we know a lot of Rummble users really like the quick access to all the parts of the site – but the new design keeps visual clutter down, and stops those big yellow buttons screaming at you from the top of the page.
Bigger Rummble Explore view
The ‘Explore’ page now has a big Rummble map and the new ‘find’ box, and that’s it. Great for browsing around to discover new stuff.
What’s next?
As ever, we’ve got a whole lot of stuff in the works – the next big thing is the launch of our new mobile site. Those of you who frequent m.rummble.com are in for a real treat! More on that in a couple of days!
We’re all ears for your reactions to the new changes – either hit the comments form, or drop me an email at ben [dot] hull [at] rummble [dot] com.
Posted in Functionality, Rummble Developer Blog | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
You can now view your Rummble-internal trust network. This is a portion of your extended friends network showing how much you trust the opinions of other members. Rummble calculates your personal trust network so it can decide which Rummbles it thinks fit your present opinions. For a particular Rummble, say a restaurant review, an aggregated trust for the Rummble can be derived by combining your trust in the users who made reviews for the restaurant. This data can be used effectively in constrained environments such as mobile to provide a filtered list of Rummbles for a geo-location.
On the display (activated from the “Network” menu) you can see how much you trust the opinions of people in your network and click through to their profile page if you want to find out more. Your personal trust network is cached and rebuilt every 6 hours.
Posted in Functionality | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
We’ve amended the Travel Blogs location set to be consistent with the regular location setting.
When you add a Blog entry, just click the Change blog location button. If you don’t set the blog location, it will default to be your current location.
And you can also change the location once set, simply click the location name again.
Posted in Functionality | 1 Comment »
