funpiper.com

This has been a long wait until the current release went live few days back. We were very busy adding value to the event planning tool. The current launch is aligned with our vision
of being a platform where user logs on to plan any fun event in their city based on the intelligent system which assists users in planning.

In current release, users has to choose venues type for any particular plan. Going forward, this would be removed. All users would choose is an event and their current city of residence. Rest will be taken by the system which provides step-by-step process to
select appropriate venues for the event, invite friends or family members and have fun. We shall be coming up with an out-of-box feature which will be the enabler of the intelligent system.

Its been one year now since our launch in July 2007 and we have moved aggresively on beieng a portal on a theme such as “How was your weekend?” to an intelligent event planning tool which assists users in event planning in their city of residence. Still, the feature of publishing “How did they have fun” exists in terms of FunLog. We shall be integrating it in the whole system in the near future.

Funpiper.com recently came up with city based localization feature. With this feature, the users shall be able to find out how people in their cities are having fun in the weekends. With upcoming features, people shall be able to find out and plan their weekends based on the information based in their city. Their shall also be a feature which would provide a list of upcoming events in your city which one could use to plan. Stay tuned for more in near future.

These are following few portals which covered Funpiper.com on one of their pages. Thanks to them for bringing Funpiper.com to their readers. As these our initial days, these kind of coverages is giving us useful traffic and we truely appreciate it.

WatBlog.com

IndiBizCast.com

I wrote earlier about localization in one of my earlier blogs. And, we came up with localization of weekend funposts based on the country of residence for each user. We are going further deep to address the localization issue.

Next release for localization would enable user to find out how are people in their city having fun in the weekends. With this, a user would be having relevant information for his city and therefore, could plan his weekends accordingly in his current city.  Future releases would see a user contacting and planning his weekends with his friends, fans, funpipers in his city. Stay tuned for more.

And, yes, we do request each one of our blog reader to please help us spread the word around for Funpiper.com.

Today, we launched the feature, Become a Fan, which allows a user to be a fan of any user. By becoming a fan, one gets an access to his funpipers’ weekend fun post from a dedicated area, called, My Funpipers. In the same way, others could as well become your fan. This means, that you could have an access to all those who are following your weekend activities from “My Fans” area.

This two features, “My funpipers” and “My fans” are accessible only when ones login into his account at Funpiper.com. Both this feature are launched in order to provide an opportunity of collaboration between various users. In addition, there are fun features targeted on these two features which would be released in near future.

Stay tuned for more on that front. And, by the way, we are coming up with newer look and feel of our portal, Funpiper.com, very soon.

We have been getting lot of feedback to come up with a feature where every user should be able to get the feed of their weekend funposts on their personal blog. This way, a user shall be able to inform about “How was their weekend?” to all of their blog readers by displaying their weekend funposts’ feed on their blog. Thus, we postponed release of other features to come up personal feeds to form part of weekend widget.
Weekend widget is a standalone blog widget which could be embedded in one’s personal blog. This is basically a mini RSS Feed reader which could be used to read rss feeds, but it has an advantage that it could be embedded in any html page. The widget creation toolkit is provided by companies such as MineKey.com OR Grazr.com. There are other players also who provides widget creation kit. I personally preferred MineKey.com as they are very easy to create. However, they do require users to register with themselves before creating a widget.

So, while creating a weekend widget, user is asked to give the rss feed url. Here, any registered user should be able to write their URL as http://www.funpiper.com/rss/rss.php?login=<FunPiper_Login_ID>. For example, a registered user Alex(Funpiper ID : alex2005@yahoo.com ) would have his personal feed url as http://www.funpiper.com/rss/rss.php?login=alex2005@yahoo.com.

One of our users created the weekend widget(MineKey) for her personal blog, which looked like following:

Why one would want to use it?

This serves two purpose. One, user shares “How was their weekend?” by posting online on FunPiper.com and letting everybody know about it. Two, user also enables their personal blog readers to be updated with “How was his weekend?” using weekend widget.

Please note that we are no where related with MineKey or Grazr. We are only advising-encouraging users to use these or any other free rss feed widget tool to embed their weekend funposts on their personal blogs.

We have been getting some press coverages in last 15 days that I thought to include in this blog post. Here they are:

FunPiper - An Indian Weekend Twitter? - Trak.in

FunPiper asks - ‘How was your weekend?’ - Startupdunia.com

FunPiper.com - ‘All about your weekend’ -Killerstartups.com

FunPiper - Simplespark.com

Stay tuned for “Planner” and “Fun-o-meter” very soon.

I have been getting feedbacks on localizing the funposts as in, user should be able to see how folks are having fun in their city/country. We have decided to take on this feature and come up with the same very soon. With this feature, user would be able to filter the weekend funposts based on the choice of his country/city to start with, only country). This would be useful for user to take a look at “How was the weekend” of folks in their city/country and help them plan accordingly.

We are in private beta testing of “My Friends” and should be up any time. Be the first ones to start building your community to enjoy 29% of your life, i.e., weekends, fully.

Stay tuned for more.

This has been demand from so many users to improve the look and feel of FunPiper.com. We got it done quickly to get a better look and feel than last one. We are working to have a better one in near future. Thanks to everybody to provide their honest feedback on FunPiper.com. I am sure, with this support, FunPiper.com is going to become a fun place for weekends. We are very soon, in this week, uploading the “My Friends” feature. Stay tuned!

I am happy to say that our portal is catching up slowly.

Well, this weekend we are working full time on coming up feature,  My friends. With this feature, one should be able to track how their friends are having weekend.

I have been receiving feedbacks on how funpiper.com is different from social networking portals such as Facebook.com or twitter.com. Funpiper.com is definitely not going to a yet another SN portal or twitter portal. Social networking and twitts are of coarse going to be acting as enablers of the main vision.

Stay tuned!