Bango Button Development now in the Bango Forums

We have decided to move this blog to the Bango Forums. http://forums.bango.com

Thats because there are a lot of active button developers / users in the forums and a big overlap with other forum activities.

See you there! 

Bango Button release to the wild!

Just made the first “official” release of the Bango Button.  Along with several UI improvements, it adds simple (single-click) button publication/sharing to 18 of the most popular community sites for both the button maker (at button create-time) and the user (at button-click time). 
With the new “Tell a Friend” feature added to the button UI, this should really accelerate button spreading.

We also added 6 new button styles, with many more to come.We also made some changes to the WAP.com page to make button pressing faster and easier.

 

GETTING READY FOR PRIME-TIME

A team of developers has been working over the weekend to upload the latest Bango Button code and it should be going live in the next few minutes.

This is the penultimate version before we go officially “live” on Thursday 15th November.

 It will enable us to make some YouTube videos etc. and preview to some VIP’s

Some new cool features include adding “QR codes” to the pop-up to enable fast pairing,

and really easy integration with many social networks / blogging tools.

What to do about Verizon users?

With increasing usage of Bango Buttons in the USA over the last few days, we have started to hear grumblings from a number of Verizon users.  They are un-happy that their Verizon phone will not let them download images on the mobile web.  The opening up of the web that the Bango Button is driving is going to raise customer expectations like never before.

 We can detect at the time the user visits wap.com / their favourite buttons that they are using Verizon, and the model type.  So, what should we do?   Warn? Block? Encourage carrier switch? ….

Early feedback

Had a long session speaking with early Button users and monitoring usage last night, and came back with some good initial feedback…

1. How do I get my own button – its not clear from PC popup dialog. People want to take away a copy the button they just clicked.
2. On the last step of the make button wizard people are unclear what to do next.
3. Why not add a QR code to teh pop up so that “pairing with the PC becomes even easier for those with a QR reader.
4. People seem to really love the idea of clicking lots of Bango Buttons, then collecting the items on the handset later via WAP.com
5. There was a lot of feedback and ideas for optimizing the ”flow” on the WAP.com page.  Making it as close as possible to single click to get to the site you just “buttoned” on your PC screen is the desire.

 Many of these things had been forseen and are in development for release in the next few days.At this stage we seem to be getting more end user feedback – probably becuase the early adopters of Bango buttons on their myspace and facebook sites “get” the idea and find integration really easy.Keep that feedback coming into support@bango.com or by commenting on this Blog

Cool Bango Button Sites ….

Some of the first Bango Button enabled sites:

http://00party.blogspot.com/  (map, photos)

http://www.myspace.com/moonlife  (ringtones)

http://myspace.com/charlottesummer (cellphone wallpapers)

Bango button goes into the wild!

Dah tah! The first public release of teh Bango Button, Bango Media backend and the tweaks to wap.com were just uploaded to the Bango servers for all to use.

There are a few known quirks we will fix over the weekend, but we want to enable people outside the initial Bango early access program to play with buttons and we want to learn what they think!

We also want to start briefing selected analysts and business partners about what we are up to, and that means we need the button to work everywhere.