Wakoopa blog

We’ve just made some changes to the software page, which will make Wakoopa even more useful for you. It’s now possible to share whether the application is free, has a demo or can only be bought. If the software isn’t free, we’ll show the price and if there are limitations to the demo or trial you can specify those as well.

We’re hoping on your contributions so we’ll be able to make Wakoopa even better in the future. Other features to add more data to software are on the way, like a download button and screenshots.

Another thing you’re going to see from us is a personal weekly update. We’ll email you a summary of what’s new for you on Wakoopa every week.

If you don’t want this weekly summary by mail, you can disable it in your settings.

Let us know what you think!

So how is it going? Do you still love us? No/Yes? What do you want us to do next? That’s some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves lately. To get a good structured response to this we’ve decided to do a little survey. If you want, fill it in and let us know what we can help you guys with.

Take the survey >>

We of course already know a lot about you guys from the great forum threads and the e-mails you’ve been sending us. But the more info we have, the better we can plan accordingly. Thanks in advance!

Oh and if you want to keep in touch with us some more, we’re also on Twitter nowadays. Hip huh?

We won another award, yay! It’s the one for Best Onstage Startup at The Next Web 2008. Thanks everybody who voted for us. Don’t we look happy slash kind of overwhelmed in this shot? (taken by Anne)

Other happy faces can be found here at The Next Web blog.

Oh and are you a Diggnation fan? If you look really closely in the last episode you might see a familiar logo somewhere ;)

This weekend has been pretty fun. First we got to release a new feature. Then a friend told us we where in the paper. A Dutch newspaper called Het Parool to be exact. There’s a whole piece in there about our incubator homies Boris and Patrick, and about The Next Web and some of the startups presenting at this conference.

Are you in Amsterdam coming thursday to saturday? Let us know! We’ll happily arrange a Wakoopa get-together or something. Or just swing by our booth at The Next Web and we’ll hook you up with some Wakoopa schwag.

Later today we where also featured on national Italian television. Check out this episode (starting at 10:30) of “Buongiorno Europa”, or “Hello Europe”. It’s about the difference in entrepreneurship between Italy and Europe and how you start a business as a young dude living in Holland. Actually, that’s what we’re guessing since none of us speaks a word of Italian. But they did make some cool shots at my birthday party and even gave me a cool Italian voice to lip-sync to. It’s all good!

With all the new features we launched the last few months, one part of Wakoopa got a little left behind. I’m talking of course about that little icon on your desktop that basically makes Wakoopa so different from all the other software websites: the Wakoopa tracker.

We gathered all the feedback we got from you guys and basically rebuilt large parts of the tracker to fix bugs, add extra functionality and make the experience go even smoother.

You’ll be automatically notified for this update, but if you don’t want to wait, you can also get the new tracker right now!

• Download Wakoopa Tracker 1.0.5 (Windows)
• Download Wakoopa Tracker 1.0.5 (Mac OS X)

Below are some of the things we added:

• Alerts integration
  Wakoopa is all about discovering new software. One of our recently launched functionalities, the alerts, is a good example of how you can do this. So this is why we thought it would be cool to integrate the alerts in the Wakoopa tracker. This way, you’ll always be on top of what’s happening in your software world:
  

  

  The icon in your system tray will change color when there’s an alert for you. After that, the alerts is only a mouse click away. You can of course always disable the alerts in the tracker settings if you don’t want them.

  The more friends you have added on Wakoopa, the more interesting alerts you’ll get. So invite your friends and find out what they’re up to!

• Improved tracking
  Half-Life-based games and Java applications are just two examples of software that now will be tracked correctly on Wakoopa. We now also track versions a lot better, so we can offer some cool stuff for that in the future.
• Pause button
  As much requested, it’s now possible to pause the Wakoopa tracker if you don’t want your boss to see that you are playing Solitaire instead of working on those TPS-reports!
• Numerous small updates
  A sharper menubar icon (Mac), better feedback for incorrect passwords, lowered data-sending interval when idle, support for 64-bits Windows systems, improved auto-updater (Windows), the fixing of a rare memory leak (Windows) and much more…

That’s it! If you have any suggestions or feedback, please let us know in the comments or in our support forums.

If you’ve visited your explore page today you may notice a big change. We’ve made the whole think a little easier on the eyes, mostly by using the current alert system.

The whole left side of the explore page is now dedicated to telling you what’s new on Wakoopa. Quite handy when you log-in or need to stay up to date about what’s happening for you on the site. Things like what software or games your friends have started using, what they’ve written, who contacted you, etc. This replaces our old “what you’re friends are using”-list which wasn’t all that handy on a day-to-day basis. This new explore page will give you an instant look inside all the cool stuff. Kind of like the Facebook News Feed, but Wakoopa-ish.

Since releasing the alerts functionality we’ve quickly been getting more and more fond of it. There’s a big update coming in a few days which will deliver the alerts through more channels then just the site or RSS. Stay tuned!

Gotta love them developers folks, they’re pretty awesome. Especially when they make cool widgets for all ‘koopians to use.

Dominiek has done exactly that with our JSON API. He’s made a little widget you can put on your blog, which tells your visitors what you’re doing at that moment on your computer by looking at your Wakoopa profile. Just copy and paste his code in your blog or site and you’re ready to go. Pretty cool!

He announced it to us by e-mail as my birthday present because I’ve just turned 23 today. So now whenever somebody asks me what I got for my birthday, I simply answer: a widget! I bet not many people get to say that in their lifetime.

Show Dominiek some love by digging his widget here. We did, and we’ll happily host his widget in the future!

We’re happy that with the launch of the Wakoopa API, we’ve opened the doors for some creative and skilled people. For example, Olivier Duprez publishes his data on his Life 2 Front project and recently Sameer Ahuja experimented with connecting the Google Chart API to our XML to make some nice custom graphs.

As promised at the launch of the API, we’ve now extended our API to support the JSON-format. This should make it a lot easier to make nice widgets with only Javascript & HTML. The API documentation has been updated with an example implementation. But we’re all looking forward to your own creations. Be sure to leave a comment or e-mail us when you’ve made something awesome.

Not that skilled in developing widgets? No problem, we’re working on a ‘widget creator’ to build a custom chart or signature and place it in your favourite social service:

We’ve run Wakoopa for over a year now totally ad free. That means that we’re not raking in any big bucks, yet we’ve continued to add new exciting stuff over the last months for you guys to enjoy. I mean, just look at what we’ve announced on the blog. It’s been some ride.

After some deliberation we felt the time is right to start some subtle tests with advertising. Just to test one of the ways we can continue building Wakoopa into an even bigger platform with a solid model backing it up. We’ve added a few banners throughout the site, mostly just Google Adsense banners. These positions are now also for sale for other advertisers, who can contact us for more info on a sweet deal. Don’t worry, we won’t bother you with huge overlay flash ads or something. Mostly because we hate those as much as you do. With the current banners we feel we’ve got a pretty good balance between trying to keep Wakoopa online and not bothering our users and visitors too much (because well, we love you).

So that being said, we need your feedback. Tell us if you absolutely hate the ads or if you can think of ways we can position them better or more effectively. If you think something sucks, we’ll promise to act accordingly and not blow you off. You can send us your comments through info at wakoopa.com or visit our forums. Thanks!

Oh and by the way, expect a new feature in a few weeks. It’ll be fun :)

Update: we’re up and running again, thanks for bearing with us

Due to connection problems at our hosting provider, the main Wakoopa site is currently not reachable. When we know more, we’ll post about it here.

Thanks for understanding!