Today started out as a normal, first launch to production day. A flurry of activity and problems not found in production. We had one problem we investigated most of the day related to duplicate feeds showing up when added. The other part of our team focused on some visual cleanups, bugs and improvements suggested by a number of people. Here’s a list of what we fixed / improved and pushed tonight:

We added a hyperlink for comments on the front page and tag page that takes you to the article:

We cleanup up the avatar for profile’s that don’t yet have a custom picture. Thanks for Timothy Moenk for this suggesting “the avatar placeholder image needs to be better defined and more iconic” with “.. main idea though is that grey and boring with an implied person acts as incentive to change the pic”.

On the bottom of the front page, we now have a simple members activity area that shows the latest new members and members that are currently online. We are going to expand this a good bit over the next week to give more ways of discovering friends and finding people to connect with.

A minor visual improvement on the front page (thanks Nolan). The sidebar items now don’t repeat each icon and instead the icon is next to the main subtitle for the section.

On each member’s profile page, we now show small text related to their status.

On the profile page, we now show not only friends, but also followers. A “follower” is a person that has friended you, but you have not yet reciprocated.

The last big feature was essentially a use case that was not anticipated. Raghu Kakarala is one of many authors for the Spunlogic corporate blog. He wanted to add this blog, but we were aggregating posts by other authors under his profile and attributed to his name. So, we added the ability to allow a mapping of blogs which contain multiple authors automatically at registration. If you add a feed and we detect more than one author, we will display the following:

In this use case, we’ll ask that you specify the author that should be filtered for your profile. From then on, we will only aggregate those articles under your profile and skip the articles that aren’t authored by you.

And that’s about it on the feature side. A nice set of improvements for the first solid day of Southern Fried Tech.

We also received a good number of suggestions and we thank everyone who signed up, tried it out and contributed. We look forward to making something you find valuable.

technorati tags: southernfriedtech

Today, we released Southern Fried Tech.

Southern Fried Tech is a place for people interested technology and media to congregate in the Southeast U.S. This is a micro social network based on a specific set of content produced by people in a specific region. The idea is that you’ll be more interested in your peers in a specific region that you connect with online and offline. Our first most important feature is content aggregation of people in the network. However, we have a long list of ideas on what we’re going to add next.

However, this is a social network and social content for you. We intend to develop features that the community wants – and expand the site with features that help you get more relevant information to what you’re looking for. Let me know what you’d like to see next.

Some of the current targeted features:

• More detail local events (currently, we’re pulling from upcoming.org based on your zipcode)
• Job postings
• New postings for regional companies
• Ability to push new content (outside of blog) into the system
• Discussion forums
• Integrated comments from blog-to-site and back
• Expanded social networking features and ability to find others that have similar interests based on what you blog about and take interest in.
• Expanded filtering and search of content and people
• Company directory

Of course, this list will change based on what we see and hear from people interested in the network.

As far as the video podcast, we’re going to continue to produce the video blog (most likely quarterly) and will introduce a more frequent podcast show soon.

We’ve worked hard to pull it all together. We’ve also worked hard on cross-browser support so you should be able to use the site on IE6/7, Firefox 1.5/2, Opera and Safari. As well, check it out on your mobile phone to get a more optimized version for your hand held device.

Like all fun in technology, there are many things we’ve missed and things that don’t work perfectly. If you run into an issue (either functional or visual), please please please let us know. We want to make it as perfect as we can. We’ve already had a slew of new user signups and suggestions for enhancements. Thanks to everyone who’s helped make this possible.

technorati tags: southernfriedtech, atlanta, georgia, socialnetwork

I posted the pilot of a new video project that Nolan and I have been working on called Southern Fried Tech. The purpose of the video series is to illuminate all the great technologies, technology culture and innovation happening in the Southeastern U.S. While our community is by far akin to Silicon Valley, it’s not that bad either. It’s all in the way you view it and how you can leverage what exists here in terms of resources and capital.

We have a lot of work to do on the format and the content. We’re amateurs in every respect. However, thanks for the Grayson Daughters for her help, prodding and expertise. Grayson is helping us as the producer and has been wonderful to work with on this project. Also, thanks to Fat Milk for the post-production work.

If you’re interested in getting involved in some way in the project or if you have something you think would be cool for the show – please let me know. However, we’re only interested in people, places and businesses in the Southeast so keep that in mind. If you have a cool startup outside of this area, we’re still interested … but the show priority will be about our region.

technorati tags: atlanta, technology, innovation, video, socon07