It took Jonathan until we hired Jeremiah to write my welcome post, so it seems only fitting that I waited until we hired somebody else to finally write this post officially announcing Jeremiah to team awe.sm.
How Jeremiah and I know each other is a pretty odd story. Back in 2002, he appeared in one of Apple’s ’switcher’ commercials. I emailed him at the time, then we kept very intermittently in touch until 2007, when I moved to California. We found we have a lot in common, and started talking (mostly via his Twitter stream) about webdev, politics, and more. We finally met in person in 2009 when I visited L.A., where he lived until last month.
Since 2002 JC has been busy writing, coding, founding his own app company — oh, and surviving a helicopter crash into San Francisco Bay (really! You can read about it on his Wikipedia page). I was always very impressed with his combination of design talent and coding skill, as well as his entrepreneurial drive, and Jonathan felt similarly when they met at BarCamp LA last year. So when the time came to hire a front-end developer for awe.sm, he was one of the first people we thought of.
Now he’s been on the team more than 3 months already (yikes! Time flies when you’re having fun) and we couldn’t be happier. He’s built our beautiful new front-end (still in beta!), so perfectly that Jonathan once mistook the working site for the photoshop mock-up — what better compliment could a web developer receive?
Jeremiah’s blogged about his own feelings about the job and the move to San Francisco a while back, so all that remains is to say, finally: welcome on board 
This is a bit belated, but I’m very pleased to officially announce that Laurie Voss (@seldo) has joined the Snowball team as our technical lead.
I first met Laurie when we hired him to join the Yahoo! Widgets team in early 2007. While I’m not sure he always felt the same way, I liked Laurie from the start: he’s extremely intelligent and hard-working, yet he’d be the last person to acknowledge either. And most importantly to me, he loves what he does and takes great pride in it. I know that if I can convince Laurie to get excited about something, it’s a genuinely good idea.
When I decided to start down this road, Laurie was my first choice as technical co-founder. I remember taking him to dinner and telling him the idea and being greatly relieved when he thought I might be on to something . Unfortunately, U.S. immigration law prohibited Laurie, a UK citizen who was at the time on an L-1 visa with Yahoo!, from joining right away. So, after going it alone (with much help from our friends at Cloudspace) for over a year and more hoop-jumping than I care to think about right now, I can’t express how pleased I am to finally be working side-by-side with the partner I wanted.
Laurie brings to the team the technical expertise to turn our early efforts into scalable platforms, the passion for the web to help us deliver truly compelling products, and the patience to deal with me 
. We’re both very excited about what we’re building and how we think it will be valuable to others.
You can read Laurie’s much more eloquent account of how we got here and where we’re going on his blog. And if you find the challenges we faced in teaming up as ridiculous as we do, please support the Startup Visa movement (Laurie will be blogging a fuller account of his immigration odyssey just as soon as we ship a couple new things ). Finally, we’re also looking for a kick-ass Back-End Engineer to join our growing team. So, please spread the word.
I am flattered to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics 
bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I honestly don’t know what I’m going to talk about, but the other folks on the panel (Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of WebTrends, Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, and Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics) are really impressive .
It looks like the bootcamp is sold out, so I’ll see you there if you’ve already booked. Otherwise, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet up at the show or in the city: I’m @jhstrauss on Twitter or jonathan [at] snowballfactory.com.
It’s been a little over a month since we first launched our sharecount button for Facebook and what a month it’s been. With very little promotion, our weekend coding project was quickly being served on over 5M pageviews per day. And now, Facebook has released an official version of their own.
As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:
- Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
- Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
- Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
- When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface
We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:
- Support color customization in plugin
- Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
- Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript
At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:
Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.
We hadn’t really planned to announce this yet, but the cat is now out of the bag.
A few weeks back I decided to build a button for my blog that would give me the same functionality of ‘retweet’ buttons, like the ones from TweetMeme and Backtype (both of which support awe.sm by the way ), for sharing on Facebook.
I built it in a weekend on top of our powerful Aggregate Data API, and then we decided some other folks might like it too. So, we put up a little splash page and started quietly asking people to test it. Mashable was the first major blog to launch it this past weekend, and were very helpful in providing feedback. You can now also find it live on The Next Web, and grab it for your own site at fbShare.me.
What it does:
- Displays the number of shares and on hover the total number of clicks for those shares (displays Facebook logo when 0 shares)
- Gives you a choice between a large or small button
- Tracks the shares from the button using your awe.sm API Key or fbShare.me links
- Allows you to add Google Analytics parameters to fbShare.me links
Please note, this is NOT an officially endorsed Facebook tool. It doesn’t have special access to secret Facebook APIs that tell you how many times a link has been shared on Facebook. The count and click numbers are only for share actions that happen via awe.sm. In addition to the shares that occur through the fbShare.me button, any that happen through other awe.sm-enabled sharing or syndication tools, like Sociable, AddToAny, and TweetPo.st, will also be counted.
We put this out there because we thought it was cool and hoped others would find it useful. It is also a great reference implementation for the kinds of valuable sharing tools that can be built on top of the awe.sm APIs. awe.sm is a social media campaign tracking platform for publishers, and we want to offer them the broadest selection of syndication and sharing tools possible. Our real value isn’t in building our own tools, it’s in helping the developers of the thousands of great tools out there offer publishers a way to connect those individual solutions together to form a cohesive system.
Our hope for fbShare.me is that it will inspire more great tools developers to incorporate awe.sm-powered functionality into what they’re building. So if you’re working on a social media syndication or sharing tool for publishers, please check out our APIs and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.
First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has expressed interest in joining the awe.sm private beta, especially those of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. We’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the response and sincerely apologize to anyone we haven’t been able to contact yet.
Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue to limit access to the beta for the foreseeable future. We’re a small team with a new product and our primary focus continues to be on delivering the best possible experience to our existing users. We currently communicate very closely with all of our customers to understand their needs and how we can improve the product to best serve them. Obviously this is quite a labor-intensive process, but we firmly believe it is the quickest route to delivering a great product to everyone else.
We truly appreciate your patience and are seriously bummed not to be able to give more folks access yet. If you’ve already filled out the survey, there’s no need to do so again. And if you want to discuss anything with us, drop a line to support[at]awe.sm (though please allow a couple days for a response). Please note if you’re a developer interested in exploring our APIs, we’re being a bit more liberal about granting access to http://developers.awe.sm so go ahead and apply.
I’m very happy to announce we have begun private beta testing the new version of TweetPo.st. I’ll include the full back-story below, but I personally apologize for the lack of communication on TweetPo.st the last few months and for any frustration it may have caused. We’re really excited about the new version because, in addition to being able to take on new users again, we have added support for Facebook Pages, our 
