Tupalo.com Stuff

Hi all! It’s been awhile and we’re sorry for all of the stealthiness going on around here lately, we’re working on improving our blogging routine and will soon have regular updates, posts and other goodies for all of you to enjoy.

On to the juicy stuff! We’re testing out the first run of our Facebook “application” and inviting you to give it a go! For now, we’re focusing on registered Tupalo users, thus you have to have a Tupalo account to get usage out of it. Upon installing over at Facebook, you’ll be prompted for your Tupalo login, if you aren’t a member of Tupalo (for shame!) you can easily click through and signup in all of about 15 seconds.

After verifying your Tupalo credentials, you will see your friend’s recent activity in news feed form, which you can use to keep up with your Tupalo pals via Facebook! In addition, when you make a discovery, review a location or add a location as a favorite via Tupalo, we will push that update to your Facebook mini-feed, keeping your Facebook friends in the loop.

The Tupalo App is very much a work in progress and we plan on adding many new features over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Hi all! Sorry for the massive delays in postings going on around here, but, needless to say, things have been very hectic in the land of Tupalo. We have some exciting news coming in the near future, so, please bear with us and of course keep your eyes on Tupalo for some of the exciting changes we’re starting to roll out.

As many of you may have noticed over the past few weeks, we’ve been rolling out a few new features for Tupalo, namely on the directory side. Our biggest so far, we’ve expanded Tupalo to support all of the United States, Canada, Austria, Germany, Spain and Belgium. At the moment, we’re now supporting everything from the largest cities to the smallest towns in these countries and you can guarantee we’ll be expanding the list of supported countries in the coming months. You can search for your town by visiting our handy Places page, then start by adding your favorite stuff in those neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Hi all! We’ve been busy improving Tupalo with some exciting new changes, so, please accept our apologies for being so behind on writing new updates! We hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive us!

Before we can announce some of the exciting news and improvements at Tupalo though, we want to tell some of you about the formation of the OpenCoffee Vienna chapter! Together with Stefan over at I5 we are co-ordinating the local OpenCoffee meetups here in lovely Wien.

The first official OpenCoffee Vienna meetup is taking place Thursday, September 20th at 1000am in the 7th district, at Ronahi (Schottenfeldgasse 18, 1070). If you are interested in web 2.0 and would like to attend, please do, it’s open to the public, free WIFI is available as is wireless printing and iBook rental (2 EUR an hour). We’d love to hear about what you are working on, or thinking of working on! Head over to Upcoming.org if you’d like to RSVP and join the OpenCoffee Club Vienna usergroup.

What is OpenCoffee you ask? Good question! OpenCoffee was originally created by Saul Klein back in February to encourage internet startup entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organize real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. All over a cup of coffee. Way to go Saul! The idea worked and OpenCoffee has boomed to over 70 chapters world-wide, with more being added weekly. Head over to the official OpenCoffee Club information page if you’d like to know more!

Hi all! It’s been a hot past few weeks here in Vienna, with some days being so warm that our development servers (and developers) randomly decided to turn themselves off in order to get some rest. We whipped them back into gear and got them going again, so do not be alarmed.

Though it’s been quiet lately with the live version of Tupalo, we’ve been working heavily in the backend, doing some tweaks and improvements to our search functions and extending Tupalo beyond its prototype, among many other small improvements. The major addition to the site so far is user-generated groups, including discussion forums, for now.

User-generated Groups

We’ve rolled out the first version of our user-generated discussion groups. What does this mean? This means that you can create a themed group, say, Vegans and Vegan Friendlies, for you, your friends and other Tupalo users to drop by and discuss, share knowledge or argue (in a polite sort of way) over whatever topic your heart desires. Since this is the first version of our groups, all groups are automatically public, but, we’ll be adding invitation-only and private groups soon.

Some more upcoming improvements to the groups

Public, Public + Invite-only & Private (invite-only) groups

Recommend spots to groups. Member of a group searching for the best French cuisine in Vienna, Austria and you just stumbled upon a wonderful little French bistro you want to recommend? Easy! Soon you’ll just be able to click a handy “send-to” link from our spot pages and easily forward a link to that business to the French food group.

Group tagging (making it easier for users to search within, classify and describe groups)

Quickly and easily invite friends to a group. We’re implementing this as quickly as possible, because, who wouldn’t want their friends involved in a discussion?

Quickly link to spots within discussions. Allowing users to quickly link to a spot within Tupalo simply by typing its name and address into a field and clicking the go button.

We’ve got a handful more updates we’re working on for the groups, as well as other new features we want to roll-out before we officially launch the Tupalo er….beta, alpha, omega or whatever version, so keep your eyes on the Tupalo blog. If you’ve got questions, feedback or comments, feel free to join us in the Tupalo group.