Thought the travelers (aka all of you) would enjoy the following video…
Bringing a Feed Reader to Life
I published a post over at GeekWire about what a redefined feed reader experience looks like (hint: it involves community)…to me at least.
Go read it and come back…
Waiting…
Waiting…
Ok, let’s continue.
You’ll probably agree the Internet is great at connecting people virtually, but it does not do a great job making smart connections — at the right time, with the right context — in the physical world based on your online activity. I hope you’ll also agree that bringing people together in person is exponentially more powerful than organizing people online, as strong relationships are built in person.
Now, let’s go one step further in terms of the extension of the reader experience outlined on GeekWire.
Add a social layer based on the physical world.
What do I mean?
Connect me with the nearby real people who belong to the communities where I spend my virtual time. Turn every online blog community, into a real life community. Who else reads Microfinance Gateway or AVC near me? I have no clue, and maybe those are not even interesting as standalone points – since I’m in Seattle with a fairly large microfinance community and most everyone in the tech community reads AVC. But, who reads Microfinance Gateway in Nairobi (a place I visited in 2010)? Or, who is part of the Microfinance Gateway community in Chiang Mai (where I lived in early 2012)? Even better, who reads Microfinance Gateway, AVC, Kiva Fellows Blog, and Jeff Turner’s blog — and within 25 miles of me, right now?
Now we’re talking.
Show me THOSE people. That is the future value to my feed reading habits.
PS: For those building the feed readers (Feedly, Zite, Digg, Newsblur, Frontpage, Intigi, etc), we happen to have an API that could help facilitate the location part of this…
[Photo via http://www.bigbadbulldog.com/]
A Massive Pivot – Oh HAY World
In some late breaking news, we’ve decided we need to do a MASSIVE pivot…
Turns out that travel vertical isn’t that interesting…
Oh Hey World: For Consultants and Public Speakers
As a consultant or public speaker, your incentive is to “touch” as many people as possible while you travel, right? You want to fill the room at your speaking gigs, or schedule quality in-person meetings/coffees/get-togethers if you’re a consultant.
Your followers are on Twitter, or are likely connected to you on Facebook in some ways. They might even subscribe to your email list.
These people want to see you, meet with you, and know what you are up to. They really do, they chose to connect via social media once because they are interested.
But that doesn’t mean they want to hear about your events in other parts of the country, repeatedly and via multiple channels.
So, how do you reach the right people, at the right time?
You can of course blast your email list; but then you risk alienating a large chunk of your list with information completely irrelevant to them. Though most email services have a geo-filter built in, these are unreliable because of the difficult of auto geo-location technology—unless they specifically set their location your geo-filter is likely inaccurate. Plus, beyond inaccuracies, those services do not solve dynamic travel scenarios (and never will).
I can tell you for a fact that I’ve unsubscribed to multiple lists as a result of getting irrelevant emails happening across the country (or even world). I’ve also unfollowed people on Twitter who broadcast events and travel plans too often. The point being, if you “touch” your network too often with irrelevant information or messages, they stop listening entirely.
With this situation in mind, we are building Oh Hey World as a way for your network to easily geo-locate themselves to you, follow your plans and only receive relevant information.
What’s coming to make this more useful to you:
- Email notifications when people you are following show up nearby—meaning your clients and fans will be able to automatically receive notifications via text or email when you show up in their town (or when you plan an upcoming trip).
- Using a specific tag (much like a hashtag on Twitter), your clients, readers, and network can find others nearby who share an interest in your work—this makes creating an integrated community among your followers a lot easier.
Questions? Ideas? Leave them in the comments, por favor!
[Photo via http://limpehft.blogspot.com/]
Examples of the Oh Hey World WordPress Plugin
Running 5 blogs and traveling the past 3 years, I know the pain of continually updating the current location on a blog’s about page and sidebar. My location on my various about pages and and sidebars (or headers/footers) were often wrong. I got tired of editing text widgets and footer/header/sidebar PHP code.
Hence the reason we built the Oh Hey World WordPress plugin. We now have the easiest way to update your location on your WordPress.org blog. Here are a few example of travel bloggers using the WordPress plugin…
Dani Blanchette – GoingNomadic – currently in Medellin, Colombia
Val Dawson – ThisWaytoParadise – Currently in Sorong, Indonesia
Hyacinthe Raimbault – Hyacinthe’s Notebook – currently in Boston, MA
Want to try it?
- Sign in to the BETA and check in
- Click add new plugin and search for & add “Oh Hey World” (or upload
oh-hey-world.zip to the/wp-content/plugins/` directory). - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Grab your user name from your Oh Hey World profile. If the link to your profile is http://www.ohheyworld.com/drewmeyers/profile, your profile name is “drewmeyers”
- Insert the sidebar widget into your sidebar or use one of the two short codes to insert the text into your about page (or any other post or page).
- Update your location on Oh Hey World every time you change locations by checking-in on the BETA site at your current location.
Questions? Leave them in the comments.
Feature Highlight: Private Check-Ins
During the course of building Oh Hey World, we talked to a wide, wide range of travelers across a broad range of travel profiles. Busy executives, scrappy entrepreneurs, marketing managers, travel writers, solo female wanderers, digital nomads etc. One piece of feedback we heard over and over was…
That sounds cool, but I’d never check-in because I don’t want everyone to know where I am.
We know there is a percentage of travelers who have no problem broadcasting their location publicly (I’m one of them) – but some need added privacy controls in order to share their location. Which is why we went out of your way to build “private check-ins”. Right now, you can check-in totally privately – which lets you see everyone else in the system, but no one can see you. Of course, using this private mode — you can still send text messages or emails notifying close friends and family where you are and share on Facebook and Twitter (though doubt you want to share on FB if you aren’t willing to share on OHW).
How do you check in privately?
Simple. On the check-in screen, click the “Public” icon…
It then displays as “Private”…
Click “Check In” — and you’re all set. No one can see your location except you – though you can of course still see everyone nearby and send notifications to your friends and family privately.
We hope this feature addresses the privacy concerns you may have. Let us know what questions you have, or what additional privacy controls you’d like to have.
Feature Highlight: Lists
You might be wondering – what are lists, and how should I be using them?
An excellent question indeed.
Quite simply, lists are the way to organize your network into groups. Likely, you’ll use them to segment into various industries as I have (screenshot to right). Of course, you can use them however you’d like. I shouldn’t have to scan my entire network of connections just to find the locations of the real estate or social entrepreneur contacts I truly care about.
The next evolution of lists?
Enabling you to add people to lists without following them (this is how I use lists on Twitter). If you have other ideas in terms of how we can make lists more useful to you, please do let us know – either via our feedback form or in the comments here.
Oh Hey World is In Limited BETA
We’ve been building Oh Hey World since August, and I’ve been working on the concept since last February. As any tech entrepreneur knows, that process has been a whirlwind full of ups and downs, and a bit of a scramble at the end to push version one of the product over the finish line.
Now that we’re in a public beta, I wanted to give a further details regarding exactly what features are included in version one….
We’re offering travelers four primary features to help get the most out of your network:
1. The easiest way to share your safe arrival with those who care
Our platform updates your location on Facebook, Twitter, and sends a text or email to your parents, significant other, or close friends. Heck, for those using WordPress.org, it even updates your travel blog via our WordPress plugin. Want to check-in, but not broadcast your location to the world (or anyone)? We offer “private check-ins” which allow you use all our features — without anyone knowing where you are.
2. One view with the current location of everyone you care about
You care where close friends and family are, all the time. You care where some people are – friends, loose travel connections, and business contacts – some of the time. If they are traveling nearby to the city you live in or you are both traveling to the same city at the same time, you want to know. We bring all those people into one central location.
3. A discovery engine for those who share passions and experiences
For those who share passions such as microfinance, travel experiences such as Mount Kilimanjaro, or are involved with the same non profits (Kiva) – you’d go a bit out of your way to meet, particularly in a foreign country where you’re looking for a friendly face. For instance, you can browse all the travel bloggers on the site and see those who match that tag nearby on your post check-in screen. Any passion or experience where you’d go a little bit out of your way to have a coffee, drinks or meal – is one that should be listed on your profile.
4. Traveler lists
At a high level, we want to help you spend your in person time with people who matter. Our goal is to give you as much flexibility as possible when organizing your connections around geography or interest. Add your contacts to lists to better track where your various types of contacts currently are. If you’re like me, you have contacts spread out over various industries – and want to know where they are at different times, in different scenarios. I shouldn’t have to sort through all my contacts just to find the locations of those interested in microfinance.
Summary
In its current form, Oh Hey World is the easiest way to share your safe arrival with friends and family. That said, it’s focus on connecting with friendly faces nearby makes it most useful to the budget backpacker and long term round the world traveler segments — or anyone who travels frequently with social intent. That said, the current product is step one in our larger vision to turn the moment you arrive in a new destination from the current mess it is today to a seamless experience driven from the palm of your hand.
TRY OH HEY WORLD NOW (100 registrations)
For those already using the site – what current features are useful to you? Which ones are useless? We of course have a couple ideas of our own, but we really want to know what features you want to see next — so let us know via our feedback form. As unlikely as it is you find a bug, tell us that too.
Happy traveling!
How Travel Bloggers Can Get the Most Out of Oh Hey World
For travel bloggers in particular, there’s a lot of functionality packed into the Oh Hey World platform that makes our lives a bit easier, particularly as more bloggers join and the community grows. First let’s look at a summary of the major functions travel bloggers will enjoy, then we’ll break down each component.
Biggest Benefits for Travel Bloggers
- Check into a location and update the major social platforms in one click, as well as text and email—all one seamless check-in and update process.
- Connect with any other travelers or friends who checked in somewhere nearby—the system shows you Oh Hey World users and Facebook friends who are close to you.
- See the real-time locations of any other bloggers or those with shared passions—basically anyone with matching tags.
- Auto update your location on your travel blog via a WordPress plugin—your location changes every time you publicly check in somewhere new.
What does this mean?
One-click check-in updates:
With the myriad of social media sites we’re all a part of, as well as the family wondering if we’ve safely arrived (I know my parents are always keen to know where I am!) it can be a chore to individually update each platform. So, by connecting your social accounts, saving the email addresses of your parents or family, and the phone numbers of important friends, you can update them all with one single click.
Practically, that means when you hit “check in” with your location you are geo-taged to an entire city (just like Facebook’s city location most of us have on our profiles) and you are then prompted (though not required) to update and share your safe arrival with those who matter:
- Send an email to your parents.
- Text your best friend or significant other.
- Update your Facebook page.
- Update the “where I am” widget on your travel blog (public check-ins only).
- Send a tweet with your safe arrival.
And for the privacy concerns, look, I’m a female traveler and I get the whole “I don’t want a stalker” argument, but at the same time, OHW is a lot safer than sites like FourSquare because you can 1) check in privately, which still lets you find other travelers nearby and only message the ones you want to know that you’re in town, and 2) it’s a broad-level check-in to a city, so your exact location in that city is still unknown. I liken it to updating your Facebook page with the “current city” or telling people on Twitter that you just landed in Sydney—same thing.
Find other bloggers and travelers nearby
One of the neatest parts of Oh Hey World is the ability to see which friends and bloggers are nearby where you just checked—or in the city you plan to visit next. Once you log into the system and formally check into a city (which you can do publicly or privately), a list pops up showing you all your Facebook friends and connections in the Oh Hey World Network who are nearby—you can then message anyone you may want to meetup with for coffee, drinks, and whatnot.
See locations of other travelers and friends/family
Using the lists and tags functionality, anyone who has tagged themselves as “travel bloggers” will show up in a search (check here popular tags), and you can real-time follow anyone on the lists you create. Same goes with people you are following, and many other niche tags as the base of travelers in the OHW system grows. That means that down the line you can quickly find where other bloggers are in one glance (instead of slogging through their blog archives, Facebook updates, and Twitter feeds hoping for an update), but you’ll also be able to find people with similar niche interests who tag themselves with interests like “food” “coffee” “microfinance” etc. In short, connect with people with shared interests via their location and proximity to you.
Update your travel blog the easy way
I cannot be the only person who has spent ages updating my homepage widget and tweaking my location data on my blog to keep it up to date with my current location. In fact, it was such a hassle that I stopped. But, theOHW plugin uses your public check in information to update your blog—this widget can be used on your about page, or sidebar, or really anywhere you want it.
How to get started
The site is very simple and intuitive to use, but there are a few tweaks and sections of your profile that will give you the most value if you fill them out fully. Follow the steps below to get started, and email us if you encounter any issues since we’re still in beta testing and want to make this super valuable for travelers and bloggers alike.
- Sign in.
- Edit your profile and connect to Facebook for the best experience.
- Add your interests, passions, and experiences to your profile. Ensure one of them is “travel bloggers”.
- Check into your current city and look through all your friends and OHW users nearby (public or private check-in—totally your call).
- Search by tags to find other like minded folk.
- Follow any friends and other travel bloggers you see in the OHW system, create a list for them, and then you can easily track their public check-ins.
- Update your location each time you move on to a new city and connect with nearby bloggers.
- If you’re using WordPress.org, install the Oh Hey World WordPress plugin so your current location is instantly updated on your site’s sidebar or about page.
We’re shaping this site to become the most useful tool the moment you set foot in a new city (and as bloggers we step foot in a lot of them!) and will be tweaking and expanding in the coming months to better fit the needs of the travel blogging community.
And now, let’s part with a question—what other goals do you as a travel bloggers have that we can help you with?
This is a controlled launch with a limited number of people, so as to ensure we catch any bugs we missed in our private beta and optimize the user experience before we open it to the general public.
The link below is good for 50 registrations, so act quickly …
PS: If the registration link above fails, please subscribe to the comments on this post—we’ll post additional codes here as we are ready to add more travelers to our system.
Mobile Web Startup “Oh Hey World” Streamlines the Travel Experience from the Moment of Arrival
Oh Hey World is officially out of private beta and into a limited public beta. Below is the press release that will hit the wire tomorrow morning (update: press release here)…
Mobile Web Startup “Oh Hey World” Streamlines the Travel Experience from the Moment of Arrival
March 12, 2013 – Today is the private beta launch of Oh Hey World, a mobile website solution created to be the best way to arrive in any city in the world. The site uses a centralized location sharing service to solve two pain points particularly applicable to frequent travelers: sharing their safe arrival with friends and family back home, and connecting with those who are nearby and care to meet.
The moment a traveler arrives in a new city, they can use their mobile phone to inform their loved ones of their safe arrival via email, update their status on Facebook and Twitter, and text a nearby friend to connect. Currently, that process requires several services at best, and half-a-dozen at worst.
Oh Hey World’s intuitive check-in process across multiple services simplifies the travel experience, and the site’s innovative community interface acts as a discovery tool for travelers to connect with new faces over shared interests.
“Fragmented location sharing has been a problem for a long time,” says co-founder Eric Roland. “Our team knows this problem first-hand, and so we created an easy way for travelers to update their location across all channels – both publicly and privately – and to really ensure those who care are easily notified of their safe arrival.”
The site’s other key solution is to help travelers connect with other travelers in each location. The platform allows users to view their Facebook friends who are nearby, as well as connect with community members over shared experiences, passions, values, and affiliations.
Co-founder Drew Meyers has spent five years involved within the microfinance industry building myKRO.org, and he notes,“I traveled around the world for two and a half years and my one regret was the knowledge that there were so many missed connections in each place I visited – with Oh Hey World, we created a solution to the frustration so many travelers experience on the road.” Oh Hey World partnered with Month of Microfinance so travelers interested in microfinance can connect to other like-minded travelers in each city they visit.
Travelers can check in via mobile Web, email, or with a text message; native iOS and Android applications are planned.
The private beta launch is limited to the first 2,500 registrants with a registration code, or those with an invite from a current user. Select partners will announce registration codes to their audience, and our ongoing partners can be found at blog.ohheyworld.com/private-beta/.
About Oh Hey World, Inc.
Oh Hey World was co-founded by Drew Meyers and Eric Roland in September 2012. Both founders are avid travelers and have worked extensively within the startup and technology space before pairing up to launch Oh Hey World. Roland brings more than 17 years experience in software architecture to the table, including his knowledge as a former team lead for Telepoint. Meyers worked at real estate site Zillow.com where he ran the API program and was also instrumental in the company’s social media and community-building efforts. Full public launch is expected by May 2013. Oh Hey World, Inc. is based in Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky.
For more information visit http://beta.ohheyworld.com
To sign up, get a registration code from here – blog.ohheyworld.com/private-beta/.