We here at Merecal just wanted to take a quick timeout to wish everyone happy holidays.
Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing this holiday season, we hope you are full of holiday cheer and as anxious as we are to see what’s coming in the year ahead (and we’re not just talking about new releases!).
Happy holidays, everyone!
Snow Magic courtesy of Flickr user katmere.
Back in August when we summarized our first month, we included a bit of a teaser about a few of the things we’ve been working on:
We want to make sure you are able to benefit from your favorites at Merecal on other sites, and vice versa. We also want to make sure you have the opportunity to share information about new releases with your friends…
Although we aren’t quite finished with all of the new features we had in mind, we have reached a point where we’re ready to unleash at least a few of them.
As of tonight, you can now import your most-listened-to artists from Last.fm. Given that Last.fm claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries, we figure this is as good an option as any to make adding your favorite artists to Merecal a piece of cake.
Furthermore, Goodreads users can now import your favorite authors from your Goodreads shelves. For those not familiar with Goodreads, it’s a place for sharing book recommendations with your friends, and was voted one of the Top 10 Websites by Time Magazine back in 2007.
To take advantage of these new import features (I already have), just head on over to the Manage Favorites page and look for the Goodreads and Last.fm icons in the sidebar.
Making adding your favorite authors and artists simpler is not all we’ve been up to. The feedback we received the most consistently when originally testing the site with friends and family was that the outgoing links to Amazon were a bit disruptive to the Merecal experience. We agreed, and though our first attempt (making sure all outgoing links opened in a new window or tab) softened the blow a bit, we’ve now gone the full mile and have added unique pages for every release on the site. You can take a look at releases like Fight Club on Blu-ray and The Host: A Novel to get a feel for what the release pages look like.
In addition to providing descriptions of each release, we also provide a larger image of the release’s cover, details on the release’s popularity, a link to browse similar releases, and other useful information specific to whether the release is a book, a movie, a video game, etc. Finally, going back to the earlier point about making it easier to share new releases with your friends, every release page gives you the option of sharing the new release on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and StumbleUpon.
In addition to these more obvious new features, we’ve made a bunch of changes “under the hood” to make the site work better for you. As with any changes, we’re open to any and all feedback you might have. Is there another site out there that you’d love to be able to import favorites from? Is there additional information you’d like to see on the release pages? Let us know! We’re all ears via email and Twitter.
Well, Merecal’s first month is in the books. As you know, we launched on July 23rd. About a week later, we gave an update on how things were going. I figured it would be a good idea to post another update after our first month to talk a bit about what we’ve been up to.
First off, we’d be remiss not to mention that we picked a great time to launch. Since we officially opened our doors on July 23rd, we’ve seen plenty of great new books, movies, music and video games come and go on the home page. If you know how the home page works, that means you know that there have been a lot of great releases showing up each week. To name only a couple, Braveheart, which just so happens to be my favorite movie ever, showed up as an upcoming Blu-ray release to come out on September 1st. Furthermore, if you were like Matt and had Gran Turismo added as a search result favorite, you found out immediately that Gran Turismo 5 was announced to be released on December 29, 2009.
Probably our biggest claim to fame in our first month, though, was finding out that Whitney Port, seen at right, is such a staunch supporter of Merecal. Okay, maybe not quite, but the former star of The Hills and current star of her own show The City, took kindly to our promoting her Season One DVD on Twitter and was nice enough to retweet. That brought quite a few more followers our way who hopefully have benefitted from our subsequent tweets (and our website) since then.
All the while, Matt and I have been putting a lot of thought into the next steps we want to take with the site. We don’t want to unleash all the details right away, but we can say that we’ve been thinking about how to expand the social aspect of the site. We want to make sure you are able to benefit from your favorites at Merecal on other sites, and vice versa. We also want to make sure you have the opportunity to share information about new releases with your friends and even leave feedback on the many new releases that come through the site on a daily basis.
In other words, we’re still hard at work trying to make Merecal better and more useful. Stay tuned, and thanks for joining us on this journey!
It’s been an exciting first week for us here at Merecal. We launched the site on July 23rd, and since then have seen a lot of support from both people we know and people we don’t. Given that the former crowd may be a bit biased, we were especially excited to see the support from the latter group.
If you didn’t catch our tweet last Friday, we were almost immediately featured on Killer Startups in an article titled “Merecal.com – Stay Abreast Of The Latest Releases.” That, in turn, led to us showing up on other sites including, but not limited to, Most Built, Gabbr and a visual search engine called Ziipa.
Probably our biggest boost in the arm, though, came from someone who submitted our site on StumbleUpon. We saw a pretty big uptick in visitors after that, and so we are very grateful to whoever sparked that flame.
One of the other things that has happened in the first week is that our site has started to move its way up in search results at the main search engines. Obviously we’ve got a long way to go, and there’s a whole lot of content for those engines’ relentless crawlers to index (and it’s changing all the time), but we think that returning relevant search results when people are looking for specific new releases in books, Blu-ray, DVDs, music and video games is one of the keys to our success and, more importantly, to our users’ satisfaction.
Just as any proud parents would do, Matt and I have been watching over our baby attentively, making sure the site is running smoothly and not giving you any problems. We did encounter a few minor bugs, as predicted, and those have since been fixed. In addition to paying close attention to how the site is working, we’ve also been trying to pay close attention to how you are using it. Given that, here are a couple interesting tidbits from our first week:
It’s obviously still very early, but it’s been fun to see some people putting Merecal through the paces this week. We’re hoping that those of you who registered have already or will very soon begin to see just how useful Merecal’s favorite-based notifications can be. We hope those of you who subscribed to any one of our numerous feeds this week are already seeing how nice it is to get fresh lists of new releases in your feed reader each day. And finally, we hope that those of you who browsed through the new and upcoming releases this week found something interesting in the process.
Either way, we’d love to hear about it, so hit us up in the comments below, or tweet at us on Twitter. And thanks for helping make Merecal’s first week as exciting as it was. We can’t wait to see what the coming weeks have in store.
It’s been a long time coming, but Merecal has officially launched today.
Matt Jackson and I originally started discussing the need for people to be able to keep up with their favorite artists, actors, authors, directors and video game publishers last summer. Like most people, we are very into music, movies, books and video games and would absolutely love it if we could get notified when new releases come out, rather than having to hunt for them online or in stores.
We did some intial research and found that there were sites that do a fairly decent job of keeping you in-the-know, but only for one of the media types mentioned above. There didn’t seem to be a central place for tracking new releases across the popular types of media and using your own likes and dislikes to help shape how you get notified about those new and upcoming releases.
That’s where Merecal comes in.
In late summer/early fall of last year, we put the rubber to the road and started coding away. First we built the pieces that go out and fetch all the thousands of releases that come out each night. Next, we started putting together mock-ups of the home page, which needed to showcase all of the best releases coming out that week as well as in the weeks to come. We then started to build out the concept of subcategories, enabling chill dudes like myself to track all the latest releases in Ambient music, for example. Then we added in the ability to “favorite” releases and the people or publishers associated with them, which enables registered users to really tailor Merecal’s release notifications to their own personal interests.
Because both Matt and I are lucky enough to have day jobs, getting to this point took us until this past Spring. I’d be remiss not to point out that, after putting in so much time into a site we really believe in, we were able to then depend on family and friends to take an early look at the site and give us the brutal, honest feedback we needed. Through their willingness to try the site out and send us feedback big and small, we were able to make a whole lot of adjustments in a relatively short period of time. We feel and hope that these adjustments will make the site easy for you to use, and most importantly, your go-to source for information on new and upcoming releases in books, DVDs, Blu-ray, music and video games. So thank you to all of you who helped us out (you know who you are).
One of the final touches we wanted to get in place before launching was a screencast demonstrating the various features that Merecal has to offer. Matt was kind enough to put the following screencast together, so take a look at what Merecal can do for you:
If we were previously in a “quiet open beta,” we’re now in a loud open beta. We’re hoping to see you and your friends and family joining the site, so if you like what you see, please spread the word. We also want all of our users to know that we are open to any and all feedback on the service and its features, either via comments here at our blog, in email, or on Twitter.
Most importantly, though, we want you to know when the new releases you care about are coming out, and want to continue to ensure that you are kept in-the-know from here on forward.
Welcome to Merecal’s blog. Bernie and I will be commenting on progress, new functionality, bugs (they do happen), the weather and whatever else might be on our mind regarding the site.
The site is in a quiet open beta currently. If you happen upon the site please don’t tread lightly and let us know if you find something that is not as you think it should be.
Cheers,
Matt