The Fluther Blog

We’re excited to announce the new, live community feed — we’ve been playing around with it for the last week and it’s proven to be really exciting to show us where the action is happening on the site — from celebrating great questions to showing us who has entered the fabled 10K mansion, we hope you enjoy it as much as we are.

There also may or may not be tie-ins with the awards system, as well, so keep tuned as we release a new batch of them…

Hola! It’s that time of the month again. Unfortunately due to time constraints, I will not be able to interview as often as I would like. But the exciting news is that Fluther’s community manager - augustlan will be taking over. Please be sure to show her as much lurve and support as you have given me! Now help her out by using the comments section below to play interviewer and suggest questions that you would like to see in the next Fluther interview.

The next Fluther interviewee is the charming six year old mailman - AstroChuck

Please have your questions submitted by a week - 25th October, 2009.

We’re constantly amazed by how much goodness is in the Fluther collective. So we thought it was high time to up the ante on our communal lurve. Thus, we proudly present: Fluther awards!! Here’s what ubersiren’s awards look like:

The idea is simple: do all the wonderful stuff you’re already doing (asking great questions, writing great answers, etc.) and you’ll start to get Fluther awards! There are neat and strange awards for all sorts of things–of course, we slipped in some secret ones to keep you on your toes, as well.

We apologize if this was confusing at first (we’re still working out some kinks). We have many more awards in store; this is just the beginning. Plus, there are more exciting new features coming soon! Goodies for everyone!

We’re working up a storm in here.

Let us know what you think.

First, we’d all like to share with you our big news.

We started Fluther a few years ago: two guys who had never done a lick of web coding in their life, with a vision to create a space on the internet with heart and intelligence.

Now, we’ve raised some money from some very, very special people in the Valley. You can see the story here. Please welcome the new jellies that ride in from the swell!

What does this mean for Fluther? Only good things.

First, I’m moving up to San Francisco in a few weeks to join Ben and the rest of the team. Rest of the team, you ask? Yes, we’ve finally added to our Fluther family: please welcome Tim Trueman, our newest developer. You may have recognized him from his excellent posts here or here.

Before joining us, Tim worked for Yahoo Groups and then spent time building his own unmanned flying drones. He fits in really, really, well. Please give him your lurve!

You might know him as the moderator who doesn’t sleep, the one with the sexy Brit accent or even as the energetic and successful Designer/Software Developer. This is because richardhenry wears many hats.

He has played an integral role in Fluther for almost two years now. As an ex-community manager and moderator, he has put in countless hours into helping maintain the Jelly community. As a 19 year old computer genius, he has been interviewed several times for his popular projects, including Cursebird. It’s safe to say that we are very proud to have him as part of our community and this interview sheds some more light into his personal and professional life.
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We’ve added a few small features in the last week or so.

First, we’ve added sub-tabs when browsing all the topics, so you can see questions sorted by date, activity, and whether or not they’ve had any answers (poor little orphan questions).

We also have added the first steps in integrating your Facebook account with your Fluther account — you can now choose (per question) whether to post your question to your facebook friends as well — it’s already been quite useful for me (though I usually get better answers on Fluther).

Let us know what you think.

Hey guys! I know it has been some time since the last interview and so hopefully you are looking forward to a new one. Based on the thoughtful suggestions given by all of you in this thread, I have decided it is time to add a new component to the interviews.

Since the whole point of Fluther interviews is to let the community learn more about one of their very own, it makes sense for you to have a more active role in the process. Use the comments section below to play interviewer and suggest questions that you would like to see asked in the next Fluther interview. Since we are trying this for the first time, we will be incorporating only a few questions into the interview so please don’t be offended if yours isn’t one of them! The questions selected will be based on creativity and how well they relate to the interviewee.

The next Fluther interviewee is our favorite British ex-Fluther community manager (see what I did there) richardhenry.

Please have your questions submitted by 11th September, 2009. Ready set go.

Who won?
Watch to find out (the video cuts out but you can hear the winner):

And what is the grand prize gift (which we customized for our grand prize winner)… After looking at the user’s profile, we’ve decided to get:

• A copy of Helvetica, the movie
• a $50 gift certificate to Amazon
• a Fluther T-Shirt

Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone who put badges up on their site!

We’ve been testing this feature for a while, and we’re pleased to unveil the new ask process to everyone on the site.

Overall, we’ve seen fewer first questions pushed to moderation and the ask process run more smoothly for users.

The new data we’re collecting will give us a lot of room to play with how we can filter the questions on the site, as well as allowing us to add more features to continue to give you the highest quality, most accessible way to get your questions answered.

In other news, we’ve been eaten by a PR monster.

Hello Flutherites!

We have good news. We’ve just built a new way for you show your Fluther Lurve on your own website: the Lurve Badge! This is what it looks like:

My profile on Fluther

And to kick off the launching the Lurve Badge, we’ve decided to have a little contest. Oh, what fun!

Here’s what we’re giving away:

• Runner-up gets a free Fluther T-Shirt
• Grand Prize winner gets a secret, custom gift chosen personally for you by the Fluther Founders based on your profile. It’s going to be awesome.

Here’s how to enter:

• If you don’t already have a blog or website, create one. (I recommend tumblr for something super easy.)
• Paste the widget code into your blog directly as HTML.

UPDATE: Check out this great tumblr how-to screencast from JohnPowell. http://www.pillowpersuasion.com/fluther/vids/wid.mov