All Posts Tagged 'launching'

We're excited to announce today that our latest project, dooce Community has launched! We've been working closely with Heather and Jon on this new branch of the mega popular dooce empire, and we're very proud of the results.

The new site will allow members of the dooce community to get to know each other in a way their semi-anonymous commenting system never did. The site is a question/answer site ala Yahoo Answers, but members will be welcome to discuss whatever they like - from babies to cameras to politics.

Like the main dooce blog, the community is powered by Drupal. XOXCO built a bunch of new social gadgets for this site, and if you'd like to learn more about how we did it, come see Jon and I give our talk all about the site at this year's Do It With Drupal conference.

Many thanks to Jon and Heather, Ben Durbin, the support staff at LiquidWeb, and our friends at Lullabot whose help with Drupal's idiosyncrasies was invaluable.

Posted 270 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include dooce clients launching

According to TechCrunch and GigaOm, NeighborGoods has officially launched in Los Angeles! They've got lots of nice things to say about our work, and we're super proud to have worked with Micki to get this far!

NeighborGoods is built on top of PeoplePods, XOXCO's new social software toolkit. Using PeoplePods means we were able to skip all of the infrastructure building, and instead spend all of our time in product design and ideation. Throughout our alpha release, and now moving into our beta release, we've been able to quickly and easily add functionality to the site simply by creating new "pods" of content and functionality.

PeoplePods will be released under an open source license within the next few weeks! Follow PeoplePods on Twitter for the latest information.

Posted 295 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include clients neighborgoods launching

It is our pleasure to announce the launch of our latest client project, Soul of the Community.

Soul of the Community (SOTC) is three-year study conducted by Gallup of the 26 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation communities across the United States employing a fresh approach to determine the factors that attach residents to their communities and the role of community attachment in an area's economic growth and well-being. The study focuses on the emotional side of the connection between residents and their communities.

We had the help of some great folks on this project: Jesse Keyes, Courtney Patubo and Brian Oberkirch. We're pleased with the result of our combined efforts and we feel lucky to have worked with the Knight Foundation on such an important study.

Posted 302 days ago by Katie Spence. Topics include clients launching

To coincide with the Sept 1 launch of SMITH Magazine's newest book, I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure, XOXCO designed and built several new community features for the SMITHTeens site. We launched a brand new forum for the talkative teen memoirists, improved profiles, a smoother user experience for posting memoirs and comments, and an activity tracker that, for the first time in the site's history, gives it's members a way to see who is talking about their memoirs.

In the weeks ahead, we'll be expanding some of these features to include even more ways for the teens to connect with their friends and collaborate on creative projects. And, we'll be bringing some of this magic to the main SMITH site so that adult memoirists can also benefit!

Posted 319 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include smith launching

We have been having an extra busy summer here at XOXCO. Check out some of the nifty stuff we've launched in the last few weeks:

We worked with Total Immersion to create the Go Hamster Go! game to promote the KIA Soul. The game uses augmented reality head tracking software so that you can control the game with your face. We built the Facebook application portion of the game.

NeighborGoods, a platform for community-based lending and renting, has just gone into alpha! Our project with Micki Krimmel, NeighborGoods hopes to make it easier for you to save money by borrowing stuff from your friends instead of buying new stuff. NeighborGoods is built on our PeoplePods framework, and we worked with designer Mari Sheibley to implement Micki's vision.

Speaking of PeoplePods, we've been working with designer Mark Bult to get PeoplePods launched. As soon as we're doing building the new site, the community building framework will (finally) be available to developers.

Finally, we launched a new blog a few weeks ago called Must Share Hair - a place for real people with real hair to share their hair awesomeness with the world. The submissions of great hair have been pouring in, and The Wall Street Journal covered our launch. The blog has already clawed its way up the Tumblr popularity scale, where we are currently the third most popular blog about hair.

Posted 358 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include mustsharehair gohamstergo neighborgoods launching

XOXCO has been working with Micki Krimmel over the past few months on a really cool project, and we are now getting tantilizingly close to letting you play with it.

NeighborGoods is a tool that will make it easier for you to share your stuff with your friends and neighbors, and to save money by borrowing or renting stuff that you'd otherwise have to buy and then store in your closet. We can't wait to loan you our awesome (but hard to store) collapsible 16-foot ladder!

Sign up to be one of the first people to use Neighborgoods, and follow us on Twitter for tantalizing tidbits of info that Micki will be releasing over the next few months.

Posted 388 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include clients neighborgoods launching

We just helped our pals at SMITH Magazine to launch a new branch of their ever expanding network of personal storytelling sites. The newest addition is a print and online collaboration between SMITH and AARP Magazine, collecting six-word memoirs from seniors about life, death, and most importantly, food.

We're always happy to work with the folks at SMITH. They were doing the wordcount thing way before Twitter made it hip.

Posted 401 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include smith sixwords launching

Earlier this year, we helped Stephen launch his awesome magazine, The Rumpus. In an interview with the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy, Stephen talks about the aggressive way we got started.

If I were giving a seminar on how to start a website, which would be ridiculous, I would talk about the importance of launching a site this way. We were gathering content as we worked out our design. Because of that the content pushed the design, not the other way around. The Rumpus is a content-driven magazine. We will never have more people working on technology or design than we will writers and editors.

Anyway, the worst thing you could do, I now realize, would be to launch a site without content. You would have to completely redesign it, which would have been out of our budget.

It was actually Ben Brown's idea. He's at XOXCO and is responsible for the design and back end of the site and he's kind of a genius. He was the one who told me to start gathering content right away rather than waiting for the site to launch.

Stephen is right. We absolutely believe that the best way to launch a website - any website - is to start posting content online, even if the "final" design and functionality is weeks away. Like any activity, it takes a while to build up the muscle memory of actually doing before you can get good at something. The "beta" period we had with The Rumpus allowed the magazine to gather an early audience while it was still learning how to be a magazine, and we were able to "launch" with a site filled to the brim with good stuff to read.

Read the full interview here

Posted 473 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include press launching stephenelliot therumpus