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!

Customer Service

Tynt now has a discussion forum powered by Get Satisfaction to: Answer, Share, Solve and Talk about Tynt. We think this addition will allow us to better support our amazing beta testers and open up some great discussions.

Here’s the link: http://getsatisfaction.com/tynt.

Have fun!

How to get the most from the Tynt Beta

Firstly to all Tynt Beta testers we send out a big “thank you” for helping us develop and evolve Tynt for you!

We work hard at Tynt to develop our product to be a user driven experience.  There’s many ways to use Tynt and a broad range of different ages and lifestyles creating Tynts with our beta.  We’d like to share with you some of the popular ways of Tynting on the web:

1) Jokes and fun
Oh, yes people, Tynt can be some seriously fun stuff! The more imaginative you are, the funnier things can get. People often share Internet jokes with Tynt, and more importantly make jokes using Tynt with the web as a canvas! People have also mentioned that it’s nice to be able to share silly fun things with “privacy” and to certain friends.

We see a lot of amazing speech bubble jokes, and imaginative use of our Stickers. There’s really no limit to all the laughs that Tynt can offer. Oh and I really enjoy seeing Tynt used for laughs, so if you got “a good one” I’d love to check it out! I’m ian[at]tynt[dot]com.

2) Sharing discussions of web sites and stories
One of the most popular ways of using Tynt has been to have conversations about something on a website. We’ve heard everything from shopping and celebrity gossip, to article discussions and stock evaluations between friends and co-workers. At Tynt we all use the Notes and Speech tools multiple times a day to keep each other informed of web happenings!

3) Research and marking websites
Tynt’s a great way to store websites for researching something. With the use of Notes your thoughts can be put into context right on the website. It’s also nice to have something for jogging the ‘ol memory for later reference and scanning!

You can also go back to any prior Tynt you had made and share or re-share it with someone! Tynt offers friends, classmates and colleagues a lot more than just bookmarks when following your cookie crumb trail!

4) Tell us what you want!
Remember Tynt is still in beta. That means the future of our product relies on the beta testers to tell us what they want.

The most important of my job is to listen to users. Although I can’t promise everything that people request will get developed, I can and will promise that each and every one of you will be heard.

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Well I hope some of this is useful, thanks again for your interest and happy Tynting!

BBQ at Blair’s

Diep and Blair hosted a BBQ in their nice new home in the Scarboro area with a decent showing of Tynt crew.

The hamburger spread was killer! Nearly everything you could imagine was available, especially for those “custom” burger touches like: sautéed mushrooms, cooked AND raw onions, mayonnaise, pineapple slices, etc. Diep made a lovely salad (and home made dressing). Simply delicious.

Oh, and on a trivial observation note, I never realized that 3 of our (Caucasian) developers had Asian counterparts. So take these “Asian partners”, add some cousins from Diep’s family, Mike Wong (our Prod Mgr) and myself, suddenly the ratio of Asians being a minority was in serious question. A less informed guest may have expected fried rice and spring rolls… With a Technology hardware or distribution company an Asian stereotype would surprise no one, but a 2.0 Internet Start Up BBQ, really? I love it.

Flock Crop: Happy B-Day Canada, Calgary Stampede and updates!

Hi hi Tynters!

So Canada’s another year older and so is Tynt (well, we’re a year old anyway), hoo rah.

Since Tynt has both U.S. and Canada ties, it may be worth mentioning something about our friends in Calgary. Starting this week is the infamous Calgary Stampede, and for your info, it’s kind of a big deal. Really, it’s an excuse for a good portion of the white collar community (typically marketing and sales) to slack off and drink for 10 days, and for a good portion of the (partying) city to be 1/2 cut by noon. No really, I’m serious! I suppose a fair amount of networking and schmoozing also happens during this time, along with waking up with a ridiculous hang overs. Plus there’s invasions of tourists and carnies (Ian shivers) carnies… Well, maybe some of us will get invited to a stamped party then crawl into work to tell about it? Or are we all passed that point? Hmm, well I’ll be sure to keep you posted. Luckily we’re not really white collar here at Tynt (our CEO came to work today in shorts and a golf tee, and looks like he rode his bike in). And we’re also not really of the “schmoozing” culture variety. However, our bocce ball lunches are border line legendary, and really another story… So if you’re planning a trip to Calgary, we’d love to see your pictures in ‘ol cow town, and perhaps even some cow-Tynts?

WordPress Blog:
- New tynt weblog on wordpress! We’re trying out this for now, that painlessly let us add some fancy new features. (That’s NOT an official wordpress plug btw.)
- New meebo me chat! You can say “hi” any time you like from typing in the tynt chat box! All of our old IM accounts are still active, this is just another way to reach us!
- Also new are: RSS link, Search, Blog Calendar and personalized authoring.

Well that’s all for now folks. Have fun!

Flock Crop: updates, links, and feedback wanted!

Hi hi Tynters!

What news from The Shire? Well, we’ve “officially” launched our beta with accounts available for those of you interested go here and get it.

First, we’re gaining momentum on Tynt beta account requests every week. So our community is growing, sweet.

Second, we’ve had a lot of uber nice compliments from Tynt users lately, THANK YOU all very much! We’re working hard on a ton of new features and will try to deliver you updates as frequently as possible.

This brings me to the third area, f_e_e_d_b_a_c_k_! C’mon out people, please don’t be shy. This is our beta stage, and the more we hear from our community, the closer we get to give you want you want! Feel free to: email, message, IM and (especially) tynt me anytime, after all, it’s my job! No matter how busy we get, we will ALWAYS get back to each and every one of you.

Okay, so here’s some handy Tynt community links:

Tynt tweets: tynt’s twitter

We also have online IM chat accounts for support/discussion.

For those of you that use Social Networking sites we have profiles on: Mashable, Imeem, MySpace & Nexopa.

Well that’s all for now, lots of neat stuff coming up, stay tuned!

Your friendly flock choreographer,
ian[at]tynt[dot]com

Tynt lifts the curtain!

It has been an amazing year here at Tynt. We’ve been in ’stealth mode’ and not talking about what we are up to, so it is extremely exciting to finally be able to start telling you all about what we are up to!

Today we put our new site live. We won’t be doing any kind of a publicity push…yet. We are going to do this closer to the launch with one of our social network partners that we are deploying Tynt with. Chances are if you are reading this, you already know who one of them is because you’ve heard about us on their site.

Very soon we expect we will be able to give you a lot more detail about our launch partners with Tynt, but in the meantime, we invite you to sign up for the Beta using our feedback form, and give it a try! Feel free to share your Tynts with me at derek (at) tynt.com!

Happy Tynting!

Derek