This is SuprBlog.

Hope everyone’s had a happy new year and pleasant holidays! Things have been busy in the SuprGlu camp. We’ve taken time out to address a major issue, and that is to improve the refresh rate of the feeds for our users. SuprGlu graduated to new servers over the holidays and we’re happy to announce that our users’ feeds are now refreshed quicker and more consistently than ever before.

With plenty of behind-the-scenes work out of the way, we’re turning our attention back to improving and expanding our platform. Thanks to all the users who have sent in feedback, we’ve taken a look at every one of them and will start making some more feature related announcements soon.

A last minute note, we will be making an appearance (and contributing a presentation on SuprGlu) in this weekend’s BarCamp in New York City. If you’ll be attending, please come by and say hello!

Quite a few things have been happening behind the scenes here at SuprGlu. Here are some highlights:

1. We launched the Glu Factory. You may have noticed the factory illustration on the top of SuprGlu pages. We wanted to give our users some insight to the people behind SuprGlu, the service’s origins, and the current situation. At the heart of it, we are three individuals focused on creating a socially interesting service, and we could use your help!
2. If you’re curious to read more about us, check out the interview with us over at Emily Chang’s eHub.
3. Some very good news: We have secured a much more powerful server situation and will be migrating everything over within the next 24 hours. If you encounter a “Factory is temporarily closed” page within the next few hours, it just means the migration is happening and you should check back in a couple hours! Once the dust has settled from the move, we hope we’ll have a much improved refresh rate for everyone.

Thanks for all the feedback people have been sending in, and please do keep them coming!

Thanks to contributions from our users, we now have a few more styles for your choosing! Just log in to your account and find these user-created templates under “Pick new template.” Your SuprGlu page is the home for your collected self, so make it a place that suits your taste. We hope these templates offer alternative starting points for your own customization. More fun features are in the works and in just a few days, we’ll be making an announcement about the Glu Factory, where we’ll talk about SuprGlu’s origins, the state of current affairs, and the future of Gluing!

Lots have been happening behind the scenes here at the SuprGlu factory. Today, we give you SuprTags! For those of you that already use services that support tagging, such as del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, etc., you’ll be glad to know that we’ve been keeping track of your tags! Along the side-column of your page, you will notice a new section called SuprTags. These are comprised of your twenty most popular tags displayed with varying scale based on usage across your sources. For example, if I clicked on my “nyc” tag, I can expect to see photos, bookmarks, and blog entries I’ve created and tagged “nyc.” It’s an easy way for me to explore my own information as it’s organized across mutiple communities. Moreover, it’s interesting for others to look through my tags and see what is important to me. We hope this will bring you another dimension of fun and exploration with SuprGlu. Please let us know what you think.

We’ve also improved support for our “Links for the day” display so that your links from sources like digg, shadows, furl, and blinklist will be wrapped up in a tidy list format similarly to how del.icio.us links have been presented.

We’re not the only ones hard at work for SuprGlu though. Our users have been a big help, and today we want to give a big thanks to kosmar for creating a SuprGlu button! Please feel free to grab it for inclusion on your site and help spread the goodness. And more user-created buttons for the community are always welcomed!

Lastly, we want to touch upon the never ending question of “How long does it take my SuprGlu page to refresh?!” We are a tiny company trying to accomplish some big things. Some users may experience long delays between their page refreshs, and we are sincerely sorry about that and wish this wasn’t the case. Quite simply, we have limited resources and the site has grown considerably in scale. Our one server is constantly busy tracking thousands of feeds from our users right now, and it can only work so fast. We’re not Google, and we don’t have server farms to muscle through all the feeds out there. If anyone wants to explore the possibility of partnering with us in providing hosting/servers/etc., please get in touch. While we are sorting that out, please rest assured that we are also working on other ways to improve your page refresh experience and will have an announcement on that soon!

For all you web aggregatin’ people out there, we’re excited to announce a new feature today. Visit any SuprGlu page and you will notice that there’s a little “SUPRSS” button at the bottom of the side bar. It points to the user’s Supr RSS feed, a RSS 2.0 feed of their glu’d up content! Just point your favorite newsreader to the SuprGlu page or the feed to subscribe, and you’ll have an easy way to keep up-to-date with your friends’ activities and interests on the web. Hands down, this has been the most requested feature since our launch last week, and we hope you will enjoy this addition as much as we do!

With the addition of an RSS out, SuprGlu comes full circle with its use of RSS. Please bear in mind that users should not be syndicating content that they either did not create or do not have permission to syndicate as outlined in the
Terms of Service. If you have any doubts about the content you are adding to your SuprGlu page, you can always contact us to ask.

SuprTrivia: The title of this blog post actually refers to a semi-popular song released within the last 5 years. Any guesses?

Thanks to all our users and people who have spread the word about us. The first 6 days have been quite a ride. We’re smitten that SuprGlu managed to rear its infant head onto del.icio.us/popular in its first couple of days. And we’re further flattered to be featured in Emily Chang’s eHub and the Social Software Weblog. And much love goes out to other many bloggers who have talked about us in the last few days.

We’re now actively making and pushing small changes behind the scenes. Two questions we’ve been hearing a lot from our users and which we want share with everyone:

1. Where’s the RSS feed? This has always been part of the plan and is in the works. Rest assured it’s coming real soon!

2. Why is my page taking so long to refresh? Due to the number of feeds we’re now tracking, we had to upgrade our server and change how we’re checking those feeds. We are doing our best to be sensitive to the services which provides those feeds, and at the same time make changes to improve our ability to keep up with these feeds efficiently. Currently, you can expect your page to be refreshed with the latest bits once every four hours. We’ll continue to improve this and come up with other ways for our users to refresh their pages…

It’s worth stressing that while SuprGlu is able to fetch just about any RSS feed, it isn’t an aggregation feed reader. Readers like Bloglines or
Google Reader offer a more appropriate interface for individuals to keep up with the news. SuprGlu is about you, your digital self as represented by your interactions around other web communities. It’s about the things you’ve been reading, the music you’ve been listening to, the things you want to do or that thought you jot down last night. More on all this soon…

For now, we leave you with a few fresh lookin’ SuprGlu pages. Any user can customize their look-and-feel by editing their stylesheet (under Settings). Users can also download our handy CSS package to make edits locally before “pasting” the new stylesheet in their account. If you come up with a style which you’d like to share with others, let us know and we’ll link to include it in our default templates area and credit your name with a link!

http://trovster.suprglu.com/

http://emilychang.suprglu.com/

http://jen.suprglu.com/

happy gluing,

-SuprGlu team

We’ve noticed that many people have tagged us with “Web 2.0”. Ahem. Just to make it official: SuprGlu is all about Web 2.5.

For anyone that’s experiencing problems adding a source, but believe that the information entered is correct, please just wait a minute and give it another try. We’re experiencing bottlenecks at the network level, so as a result we’re experiencing timeouts when we’re trying to get that content for you.

Thanks for playing, we’ll get this figured out yet!

A big thanks to everyone visiting us during these first hours of launch. We publicly announced SuprGlu through an email to our friends and family late afternoon yesterday and posted it on del.icio.us and digg. We are feeling warm and fuzzy from user responses and feedback. Everyone has been very helpful in making suggestions and uncovering bugs which we are actively tending to.

Some of the things people have been actively asking for, and which are on the top of our list include:

• More template styles! (Are you a designer? Want to help?)
• RSS feeds for your SuprGlu page (we’re on it!)

We’re happy to see everyone finding the service useful. Please keep the feedback coming and keep on gluing.

Here are a few of our user pages from the first few hours of launch and making us feel like people are getting it just fine!

A great example of using SuprGlu to pick up the pieces from a day’s activities… from photos to links to blog posts:

http://caroline.suprglu.com

And we are pleasantly surprised by the number of international users that have found us! Here are a few:

http://fuutott.suprglu.com – Poland!

http://hereortogo.suprglu.com – Africa!

http://scavin.suprglu.com – China!

Thanks, have fun, and share the love!