Pikchur.Dev.Blog

Showing Some FourSquare Love.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:37:00 -0500

We here @ Pikchur have been working really hard on a few things lately. The first is our joint venture with 39llc to develop a Foursquare application that allows you to check-in with multimedia.

It’s called SquarePik.

The application allows people to check-in with a photo or video. In addition, the app will show users all photos and videos dropped at a particular venue. Along with some of the expected features such as, the ability to add locations, search for locations, and view your friend’s last checkins, we hope to provide a supplementary application to the already popular Foursquare iPhone app.

The app is built on top of our new “GeoSocial” API (more on that later) and is available in the iTunes store for just $1.99

Now, our new Geo-Social API is aimed at providing developers of geo social apps such as Foursquare the ability to quickly integrate the following features:

- Multimedia check-ins (Photos & Videos)

- Pull feed of Media Dropped @ a venue

- Pull feed of Thumbnails for a list of venues.

- Allow for multimedia tips (coming soon)

Documentation for our API can be found here : http://groups.google.com/group/pikchur-api/web/geosocial-api-documentation

We also added the following to Pikchur.com:

- Landing pages with Foursquare venue badges: http://pikchur.com/Muq

- Geo social venue specific timelines: http://pikchur.com/timeline/foursquare*368848

- Nifty venue RSS feeds: http://pikchur.com/rss/geosocial/foursquare/368848

Well that’s it for now, stay tuned as we improve SquarePik and our Geo social API.

As always, feel free to reach us with your comments, concerns and feed back @ info at pikchur dot com

Thanks,

The Pikchur Crew.

Holiday Cheer Contest

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:14:00 -0500

Wether you guys have been naughty or nice this year, doesn’t really matter to us! As thanks for all the support you have given us, we decided to throw a short but sweet holiday contest.

Head over to the contest page, check out the prizes, and start sending in those holiday photos for your chance to win.

To enter this holiday cheer contest all you have to do is send in a photo or video that is holiday related to your Pikchur account with the hashtag #holidays09

We will select a winner based on a few attributes

1. Number of Re-tweets

2. Number of “UNIQUE” views (not view counter on landing page)

3. How creative the photo or video is.

4. Your entry must be dated after our contest has started (Don’t tag one of your popular photos or videos :-])

Happy holidays :-)

Pikchur

Sorry for the down time

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:42:29 -0500

Sorry for the down time, will be right back!

~The Pikchur Team

Posting from Tweetie to Pikchur

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:51:49 -0400

Hey, you can now post images to Pikchur from Tweetie, how sweet is that!? Here is how you do it:

1. Open Tweetie and go to settings, should be under account.

2. Click on Image service and then go down and click on custom.

3. Enter http://api.pikchur.com/tweetie as the posting url.

That’s it you’re set to use Pikchur in Tweetie for photos :-) If they add a custom url for video posting then you will also be able to post videos to Pikchur via Tweetie.

Happy Friday

-Pikchur

Picnik Anyone?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:44:00 -0400

Good evening ladies and gentelman, on this edition of what’s new on Pikchur, we bring you Picnik editing and Retweeting of photos and videos!

We don’t know about you but we have grown to love Picnik’s service, it really makes editing photos a snap. Well, we are proud to announce that we now support full photo editing via picnik. All you have to do is edit any of your images and a nice little “Edit With Picnik” section will appear on the bottom right of the page. Click on it, and edit away! Once you are done, our busy rendering bots will grab your edits and spit out your image to reflect the changes you’ve made.

While doing this update we also decided to jump on the tweetmeme bandwagon and add a Retweet button to all image and video landing pages (Just like the one on the top right of this post). So if you see a nifty image of a kick ass Leprechaun, or a crafty video of a nifty pigeon exercising, you can quickly and easily surface it to your Twitter stream.

Below is a short screen cast of the photo editing features in action. Enjoy

-Pikchur

Motion Pikchur!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:46:00 -0400

Hey guys,

As you may or may not know, we moved our servers to a new home today! This means we are going to be a lot more responsive and overall better!

As for the more interesting stuff, we pushed a slew of sweet new updates for you guys. By far the biggest item on the list .. drumb roll… Motion Pikchures! You can now use your mobile device or our website to upload videos! Yeah, you heard us, we now support video in addition to photos! So give it a try, you don’t even to change anything, just send in videos as if you were sending in photos.

As for the complete change log, here it is:

-Video support

-Find friends on facebook and twitter that are also on pikchur

-Completely revamped profile pages.

Ex: http://pikchur.com/people/jewgonewild or http://pikchur.com/people/Orical

-API upgrades and fixes

-API modified to support videos

-API feed functions revamped

Happy Piking!

Some Nokia Love

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:24:00 -0400

Hey again! Another day, another update..This time we are showing Nokia some love and welcoming them to our family of supported services. If you haven’t noticed Nokia Ovi Share is pretty nifty and has very cool media management, so we decided it would be a great addition.

If you don’t have an account you can sign up, it’s quick and easy, once you’re done, head over to Pikchur, log in and sync in your Ovi account!

Important: In order for us to post photos to your Ovi Share page you must add an album called “Pikchur” to your Ovi account. (Excuse my quick ‘photoshopping’)

These are just minor updates for now, but stay tuned, we have a big one coming out reallllly soon.

Hope you guys enjoy!

The Pikchur Crew

Poster this!

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:49:00 -0400

Hey guys, hope everyone’s having a good Tuesday. We pushed a small update and added Posterous as a posting service. Now you can add your primary Posterous blog to Pikchur, snap away and your shots will cross post to your Posterous blog!

I leave you with a video of bunliu for inspiration. Happy Piking!

Twitter Issues

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:45:00 -0400

Updated: We are back up and running with Twitter posting, any photos sent in via MMS,mobile,web and 3rd party apps should now be posting to Twitter, happy days ;-)

Hey guys,

We are aware that none of you can log in to Pikchur via twitter basic authentication or OAUTH (Please note that Twitter OAUTH is completly down). It seems that the basic Twitter API is up and running, however our servers seem to have been mistakenly blacklisted from using it.

This is most likely do to the Twitter DDOS attack that occured yesterday. They are probably blacklisting a lot of people in order to get the situation under control.We have contacted Twitter and are waiting for a response back. Hopefullywe can get back up and running ASAP.

These issues also effect posting your photos via the web, MMS, and certain Twitter clients that use our API. Please be patient as we are trying our best to get Twitter authorization and posting back to normal.

Thanks,

The Pikchur Crew.

Speed anyone?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:09:00 -0400

Hey guys!

Hope everyone is doing great! We wanted to let you know that we just enabled a Content Distribution Network (CDN), which will make everything on the site load a little faster, well a lot faster ;-)

The CDN has various access points, so no matter where you load up Pikchur from you’ll notice an instant boost in speed, and overall responsiveness. The following edge locations are enabled:

United States
•    Ashburn, VA
•    Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
•    Los Angeles, CA
•    Miami, FL
•    Newark, NJ
•    Palo Alto, CA
•    Seattle, WA
•    St. Louis, MO

Europe
•    Amsterdam
•    Dublin
•    Frankfurt
•    London

Asia
• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

This is one more step we are taking to ensure you enjoy your experience with us. Feel free to drop us a line with any questions/suggestions you have.

Happy Piking!

~The Pikchur Crew

Pikchur gets a facelift .. and a slight tummy tuck ;-)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:06:00 -0400

As you may or may not have noticed, last night we pushed a new version of Pikchur with an enchanced UI and revamped homepage. Of course this is just some of what we’ve been working on so here is the full feature list for anyone who cares to read on ;-)

Design/UI

Homepage (http://pikchur.com)

This page has been completely re-designed to give us a more simplistic to the point look. Our previous page had to much going on and we didn’t want to overwhelm newcomers ;-)

All pages (e.g http://pikchur.com/timeline)

A side menu can be found on all pages, this improves overall site navigation.

Dashboard (http://pikchur.com/dashboard)

We scrapped the tab based navigation and moved to a side menu. It’s a lot nicer and also allows you to find stuff you need quicker. We also consolidated the

We also removed the constant upload section that appeared on top of the dashboard pages and moved it to it’s own page. This allows us to display a lot more content on the page and push everything up a bit so you guys gain a lot more real estate.

Pikchur landing Page (e.g http://pikchur.com/CYG)

This page also has a side navigation menu and streamline views for sharing,feeds,and trackbacks. You will also notice two additional menu items if you are a Pikchur pro member. Statistics, and Original Size. More on these two later in the post.

Header and Footer

These are pretty minor and probably not worth noting, but the header on all pages changed as well as the footer. The header is significantly smaller than what we had before, and again allows for more info to be displayed on the page.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Functionality

Pro Accounts

We added the ability to purchase a Pikchur pro account. A full list of features can be found here: http://pikchur.com/upgrade

Twitter Oauth and Facebook Connect

This update was really overdue, but basically it makes connecting your Twitter and facebook accounts a breeze. For Twitter it also means a more secure experience, you never have to share your password with us ever again ;-)

Backend Tweaks

This might be boring stuff to you, but it gets us really excited anytime we optimize our image propogation, mail, MMS and backend processes. We won’t go in to to much detail here but lets just say our services are purring like a fine fed kitteh cat!

We hope you enjoy the cha cha changes and as always your feedback is welcomed!

~The Pikchur Crew

Sorry 4 The Down Time, Updates In Progress...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:17:00 -0400

Hey guys,

Sorry for the down time, but we assure you it’ll be worth it. We are very excited to anounce our next release of Pikchur.

You should notice alot of cool new features as well as a completely redesigned user experience.

It should only take a few minutes, so bare with us.

We’ll post a full list of features and updates later on, but we are pretty sure you’ll figure everything out.

For now, please take the time to view this “very” important public service anouncment from He-man & Shira.

Thanks and Happy Pikking!

The Pikchur Crew

Adding Sprinkulz to your Pikchur Caek

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:46:00 -0400

So I bet you guys are wondering what we actually do here @ Pikchur besides drink beer and watch Diggnation? Well, we eat cake, oh and release features from time to time.

Some of these delightful treats include

Friends / Followers
Edit Pik Data
Activity Stream, a stream of activities of you and the people you follow (Piks, Follows, Comments). The Activity Stream can be found in your dashboard. :)
Upgraded comment system.
Optimized API
Optimized Pikchur Message Queueing System
And much more (you’ll just have to look closely)

….

Here is a more detailed look at some of the features from the list:

Friends / Followers / Activity Streams

You can now follow and have people follow you back on Pikchur.

Follow your friends Public Pikchur activity, Piks, comments, and new followings.

We also made our comments a lot smarter! Now when you leave a comment on a Pikchur, a link back is included as well as the option of embedded @’s to services that don’t support threaded conversations (or have limited support for them). This eliminates out of context status updates.

So for example , I send a pik, (@Orical) and you leave a comment of “Nice pik”, we will, if enabled add the @Orical Nice Pik to your outgoing comment. This pretty much eliminates all out of context conversations.

….

There are a bunch of more features we just added, so come join us!

~The Pikchur Crew

Peter & Emmanuel

Pikchur, Powered by Humans

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:34:00 -0500

Hey guys, we made this snazzy little vid on Seesmic. Come say hi! :)

Link to Seesmic landing page: http://seesmic.com/videos/H61MuQ12rx

~Peter & Emmanuel

jQuery UI 1.7 Released!

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:00:00 -0500

We here at Pikchur love jQuery and we figured we’d write a short summary of the new features included in jQuery UI 1.7. It’s full of updates, upgrades and ~~uptomization~~ optomizations.

So what’s new?

Backward compatability! : Well one of the biggest things is the backwards compatability with jQuery 1.3, yes thats right you can upgrade to 1.7 and benifit from all the goodness and speed boosting gremlins, quickly and easily.

Revamped and optimized plugins : In addition to making all sorts of bug fixes, the jQuery team optimized all of there plugins. With the promise of cleaner code, faster proccess, and more options.

ThemeRoller V2 + CSS Framework : These two updates have to be my favorite, as a developer I love to geek out over these sorts of things, and well the new openness of the CSS framework and the cool things you can do with the ThemeRoller, make me feel all tingley inside. Err what I mean is that the new CSS framwork update not only supports the standard jQuery UI plugins, but also custom made ones. Opening up a door of possibilities that makes even the most reserved developer dance with joy. Oh and of course ThemeRoller, which has been built to work in conjunction with the new CSS Framework.

Along with a a buch of other updates such as offline documentation, new demos, a revamped website ( http://ui.jquery.com/ ), and a dedicated blog, (http://blog.jqueryui.com/) its no wonder jQuery is always ahead of the game.

~Peter

SXSW Web Awards Finals? Yes please

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:19:00 -0500

So we clawed, and scrapped our way to the finals in one of the categories for the SXSW web awards! Isn’t that great? We are super psyched, and truly honored to have been nominated for an award of this caliber.

Check out the complete list: http://sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/finalists

You’ll find us under the “mobile” category, along with some other really cool sites, including one name you guys might have heard a little bit about .. :-)

Thanks to everyone who has helped support us, we really appreciate it. Thanks to our users for providing feedback and enabling us to make a better service. Wow, this sounds like an acceptance speech, so we’ll stop right here..

We hope to see a bunch of you at SXSW! Keep bringing the awesomeness!

~The Pikchur Crew

Twitter is down.

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:28:00 -0500

Hey guys sorry for the inconvenience, but it seems that Twitter is having some DNS issues. This means that for the time being we cannot send Piks or authenticate with Twitter.

We will notify you as soon as everything is resolved :)

~The Pikchur Crew

15 minutes of fame?!

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:39:18 -0500

Although the weather wasn’t great, the interview with Luckystartups went really well. Yeah, there are things we could have improved on, but overall it wasn’t bad for our first live interview.

We have are seat-belts fastened, and are ready to move on with the next major update to the site. In addition we will have a nice little surprise coming shortly for those of you who have iPhones. Thanks to all who gave us feedback and suggestions, we are definitely taking them in to account as we move along.

Of course if anyone has any other suggestions,comments, or just wants to say hi, we are on getsatisfaction and twitter. Feel free to drop us a line :-)

Happy Piking!

Pikchur Live on LuckyStartups TV

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:35:00 -0500

Come join @JewGoneWild and my self (@Orical) tonight @ 6pm EST while we do a Live interview with LuckyStartups.

About

How do you describe a show like lucky…

It’s like spring after a long winter, flowers in bloom.. errr wait I digress..

Luckystartups is a show that interviews any and all startups as well as people who are in the industry. It allows for users to communicate and ask questions live.

If that wasn’t enough LuckyStartups is hosted by two extremely charismatic people, (Aronado Placencia and Dennis Lankes) whose on screen chemestry bring the show up from a 10 out of 10 to a cool 20 on the Pikchur Startup Interview Show Scale (PSISS, for short).

Now that you know what LuckyStartups is, and we are assuming you know what Pikchur is, please feel free to join us tonight with your questions, ideas, and feedback we will be glad to answer any and all questions (well as long as you don’t ask why the goat is in our office we’re good).

Hope to see you there!

~The Pikchur Crew

Make it Snappy... ( Update complete )

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:12:00 -0500

These updates are complete ….

As you can see we are down for a few minutes while we do some critical updates.

The majority of these fixes have to do with the styling of the site ( CSS ) and some inconsistencies that were occuring on certain browsers and platforms.

All in all this will be a nice little patch, and we will continue burning the 2am oil for our next release, which will be way cooler than this Zzzzzing one.

Following up on a new tradition, we will now drop some knowledge: