Derek Ball speaking at CCAT Breakfast

For anyone in the Calgary area interested in hearing some of our thoughts on the evolution of social media, I’m speaking at the CCAT breakfast on Oct 15th.  TechVibes discusses the event here. Details on the event and cost are on the CCAT Website.

Tynt and IVAC connect

TechVibes posted this link yesterday of the IVAC AGM.  Tynt was there as IVAC is participating in Tynt’s current financing round (stay tuned for details on this in this blog in the near future!).

Marketing Finger Story: Help I’ve Been Tynted!

Marketing Finger did a nice write up on Tynt this week, saying that Tynt:

“…  could also be a great way to communicate feedback on web page usability or content.”

Good little story, still a bit of urban myth in the community about Tynt and scraping, which Derek Ball nicely clarifies and Tynts.

Tynt Reviewed on TechnoSpot

Ashish Mohta did a review of Tynt with some nice screen shot examples of Tynt in action.

“Over all Tynt has made a nice approach to sharing the web page. Integrating appls like twitter will be rocking for them.”

Techvibes story: Ready? Set. Tynt!

Stephen King of Techvibes had breakfast with Derek Ball, our CEO and wrote this story about us.  A nice plug for Tynt, and a nice plug for Eat Eat!(a great restaurant if you’re ever in Inglewood btw).

Tynt Responds to SEO Community

Hi Everyone,

Last night there was quite a bit of chatter about Tynt’s new Beta release, particularly among the SEO and webmaster community who expressed legitimate concerns about how Tynt may impact their interests negatively.

I want to jump in and say that we take the concerns of all of our users (and future users) and the sites they frequent seriously and want to be good corporate citizens on the net. I am very pleased and grateful to Scott Polk (@scottpolk for Twitter users) who stepped forward to initiate a conversation with us directly. Scott has really helped Tynt understand the issues.

The purpose of our Beta release is to learn and discover whether Tynt works the way the community thinks it should. I want to assure all of you that we are taking both immediate and long term action to resolve the concerns you have raised. I will attempt to address those now.

First, we understand that Tynt has the potential to impact the major search engines in ways that were detrimental to the sites being Tynted. Our community recommended blocking spiders from crawling Tynts through the use of a Global Robots Exclusion file (robots.txt) as well as other techniques to minimize the problem. We have already implemented the ROBOTS.TXT file and are working on additional solutions.

Second, site owners have requested the ability to opt-out of having their sites publicly Tynted. We’ve given this a great deal of thought and agree that this is a necessary function of Tynt. In order to do this we need to think through the workflow of how this should function. My commitment to all of you in our community is that we will listen to your suggestions (feedback[at]tynt.com), learn what we need to do to implement them, and make changes as fast as possible and certainly before we come out of Beta.

The third concern was about handling of the misuse of Tynt by Tynters. It is our deep desire to create useful, in-context conversations, but we are not naive enough to think that we won’t have abuse of the tool as well. We are implementing abuse handling policies and definitely welcome feedback on the best way to manage this. We hope that with proper management Tynt can become an asset to the sites being Tynted. In one Tynt that was twittered yesterday, Tynt directly increased the traffic to the underlying site by 50%.

On one final note, we have been very publicly accused of being ‘content-thieves’ and scraping content from other sites, storing it in our own systems, and serving it up for our own benefit and revenue. When the Tynt plug-in is used, we only ever visit the original site and all Tynt content is simply layered on top of the existing site. In the case where the viewer is accessing a Tynt through our gateway (no plug-in installed in the browser) the gateway does not access a stored version of the underlying site, but rather loads the original site (including all images, media, advertising, and so on) and displays it to the user. The original site gets the ‘hit’, the ad view and so on. The reason for the gateway (and the different looking URL) is to allow us to insert the JavaScript which loads the Tynt engine for the in-context comments and conversations (and hey, if everyone installs the plug in, then there is no need for our gateway and we can save ourselves the bandwidth and effort there too!). We hope that Tynt can prove valuable to the underlying site by creating more page views and more ad views by encouraging people to share the sites that they feel a desire to comment on. We are very receptive to your feedback on how to make this experience good for the both the user and the site being Tynted, so if you have suggestions, please send them on!

The team here at Tynt, I am proud to say, are some of the best people I have ever been fortunate enough to work with. We all want to be proud of the work we do and make a positive impact in the world. We welcome your input and look forward to working with you as we develop Tynt.

Sincerely,

Derek Ball

CEO

New website, new version, twitter: a new Tynt.

The elves have been busy at Tynt!

We now have a new Plug-in-free version, a new website, and mega new features.  All prior Tynt user accounts will be activated and ready for use with this new version.  Tynts can now be viewed through an open public gateway so they can be seen without having an account.  Tynt now has embed codes for you to share your Tynts as links anywhere.  And most exciting of all Tynt now Tweets!

Summary of changes:

• Gateway Access: Browser Plug-In now optional for making Tynts
• Public Viewing: No Browser Plug-In or account Login required for anyone to view tynts
• Link URL:  Links are now available for publishing Tynts
• Short URL: We shorten URL’s now, for those of you who count characters
• New Site: Tynt login and new account registration can all be done through our new website

Technically we’re still in a private Beta, but for a limited time we’re handing out a bunch of new accounts so Get It while you can!  Having an account let you make Tynts, accounts are not required for anyone to view them.

Well enjoy all the new stuff, be seeing you!