Sorry it's been so long since my last post. We've been working hard building a new version of the EarthLink personal start page, which is currently in Preview mode. Give it a try here or learn more about it in the new Portal Product Blog.

Recently, we've received a few e-mails asking how to delete items from myFavorites, so I took a few minutes to create the image below to help answer these questions.

In the current iteration of the myFavorites application you can only delete one item at a time, so for now this is a one-by-one process.

We've talked about adding multi-item edit functionality to the application as one of our future features. Is this something you would be interested in? We'd love to hear your comments.

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 1:43 PM | Permalink

We've unveiled a couple of new enhancements: RSS capabilities for recent, popular, and each aggregated tag page. You could always visit those pages through a web browser, but now you can subscribe to their feeds in anything that accepts RSS (including myEarthLink Reader). If there's a particular topic you'd like to follow, add it as a word to the end of this URL: http://myfavorites.earthlink.net/rss/tag/

So if you want to keep up with things that everyone saves under the term "ipod", copy and paste this address into your RSS reader:

http://myfavorites.earthlink.net/rss/tag/ipod

If you're a Reader user you can add these to your Reader application using the handy Toolbar button.

Additional changes that just came out include some font and text modifications to make things easier to read, and a behind-the-scenes interface to smooth out the way you can add favorites from other EarthLink sites and applications.

Let us know what you think.

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 7:10 AM | Permalink

Check out what you can do with the WordPress plug-in called Sociable. Take a look at the bottom of this post on my personal blog (an experimental area for me). See the EarthLink logo? If you click on that logo it'll add whatever post it's contained within to the myFavorites application. Pretty nifty!

This plug-in allows you to add many other social bookmarking icons to your blog posts, but I'd recommend going easy on the number you add - just to avoid looking tacky.

Brief instructions after the jump...

Continue reading "myFavorites icon for your blog" »

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 10:19 AM | Permalink

Last week, we rolled out a widget that allows you to display your favorites on your myEarthLink page.

Add the myFavorite module to your Personal Start Page.

The edit page allows you to customize what content gets populated into your widget(s). You can actually add more than one myFavorites widget to your Start Page if you want.

If you need assistance making sense of the terminology we’ve written some Help documentation.

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 4:14 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, we launched three significant new features to myFavorites.

The new release included:
The ability to import your Personal Start Page Favorites can be found in the setting menu. We've some addition Personal Start Page integration on the way but it isn't ready for prime time just yet.

The ability to change your display name can also be found in the settings menu pictured above. For example, see how I changed my display name to: "Tag-o-matic".

The improved popular page now calculates what's popular based on an algorithm Tom the myFavorites lead engineer developed. Per Tom, "We look at recently-added count, total count, and date. Those three, in order, determine popularity."

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What are the latest things people have saved to myFavorites? If you want the freshest water, take a drink directly from the tap.

The Everyone's Most Recent page shows the latest finds by all users of the myFavorites application (disclaimer: except those entries people make private).

I like to check this page a few times a day, just to see what other people have saved. Sometimes I find interesting stuff I had no idea was available online. Couple of examples from today:

The Price of a Gallon
LyricWiki.org
How to make a solar power generator

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 4:29 PM | Permalink

Glad you found us!

My name is Travis Metcalf and I'm the product manager for myFavorites. We have spent months developing it and are very happy to add it to the existing line up of EarthLink products and services. We hope you enjoy using it.

This blog is the place where we'd like to host conversations about the myFavorites application. It’s our sincere hope that you talk back to us (via comments on this blog) and tell us what you'd like to see in the product moving forward, what you think is broken, and last but not least, what you like about the application.

Currently, myFavorites is in 'beta', which means we are still making significant changes to the application to improve its’ features and functionality.

That's all I've got for now. As we ready our next myFavorites release, I’ll update you with what changes and improvements it includes.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions we’d be glad to entertain the idea of adding them to the product at some point. We already have lots on the product roadmap but we’ll consider incorporating any great ideas.

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)