Mashpedia Blog

Social Answers, why? where? how?

2010-10-13T17:19:00.005-04:00

Continuing our ongoing efforts of adding useful features to Mashpedia, now you can enjoy the newest module: Social Answers. Powered by Yahoo Answers, it pulls questions and their respective answers, relevant to the topic being viewed.

Yahoo Answers is by far the clear leader of its category, which is often an overlooked layer of the social web. It's a good tool to get facts, opinions and personal experiences about something.

Beware: As the Yahoo Answers service does not have a system that filters the correct answers from the incorrect answers. It only allows the user community to choose the best answer from a line-up of answers. This is why my suggestion is to take the information as non factual, but as a way to survey personal, trivial opinions and biased testimonials about a subject.

Mashpedia 2.0 is here!

2010-09-08T12:26:00.003-04:00

We're happy to announce the deployment of version 2 of Mashpedia is now complete. This was the major overhaul applied to Mashpedia since its launch earlier this year.

Why version 2?
Almost every day we're tweaking, adjusting, improving and testing features, but this time around, we redesigned the architecture of the site from the ground up, making major updates to almost every component, changing the interface for the current 2-columns layout and a brand new logo.

New features

2-column interface, with left menu fixed. This is the biggest improvement in the design side, which we think will improve user experience by allowing to browse around the contents easily, having always the options at sight on the left column.
Facebook module. Real-time information is one of our top priorities, thus making Facebook conversations a must have for our application. Now you can see what the 500+ million users are talking (or not) about your topic of interest.
Youtube views: Now you can choose between relevancy, date and number of views for your the videos related to any topic. The tabbed box makes it easy to explore videos and view them directly without leaving Mashpedia.
Wikipedia Full Article is collapsed by default. And you can expand it easily by clicking the Wikipedia title at the left menu or just below the module's title when you reach down the page.
Overall optimization. We've work hard to make every page load faster.

Here's the Blog

2010-08-05T18:18:00.003-04:00

In the last several months, here at Mashpedia we have been very busy and focused extrictly in product development, which for the curious of you this process involves:

Thinking
Researching
Coding / Programming
Designing
Debugging
Testing
Learning
Optimizing
and once again and again...

I know it sounds a little bit boring but it's not! (~~for us nerds~~). We are truly enthusiastic about Mashpedia, we feel we're doing an interesting job in a innovative product that improves the way people learn, thus giving a very special meaning to our work. We're enjoying this ride!

We were always aware that we needed to start writing a Blog as a way to communicate what and how we're doing, share resources, tips, links, updates, news and many more things that might be useful for all of you interested in Mashpedia.

A blog is also a great tool to receive valuable feedback from our users so please feel free to write comments, We'll make sure to answer to them as soon as we can.

Note that we are already on Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow us there too.