April 2008 Archives
As the WorthPoint Product Development Manager I get to work on all aspects of our site. One of the more enjoyable projects is the design and development of our widget. You can see it over here in my right rail ------->
Our widget development team is led by Jeremy Ancog who has a deep background in graphic design and Flash development. Being a social network junkie like myself, he utilizes such services as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. (Speaking of Facebook, look for the WorthPoint page there soon and become a fan. We'll announce it here when available.) He also has experience as a Second Life developer, skills I hope to take advantage of in the future. All of this experience and interest come to bear on this effort. We look forward to where he and his team takes our widget in the coming months.
Our plans for the widget in the coming weeks include deployment to MySpace and Facebook, and a widget configuration page where you can choose the type of feed you want displayed. Future enhancements will include more choices in data feeds, increased designs to choose from, and calendaring functionality to display upcoming events.The code to deploy the widget using our standard feed is currently available. Last night I embeded the widget here and it fit quite nicely. If you would like to use it on your own site the code is listed below. Let me know if you employ it so we can promote your site.
I am interested in what you think could be improved both in the widget and with WorthPoint in general. Please let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Marc...
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Embed this line in your sites HTML templates for the WorthPoint widget:
<div id="flashcontent_xmlwidget"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.worthpoint.com/sites/all/modules/xmlwidget/xmlwidget.swf" style="" id="xmlwidget" name="xmlwidget" quality="high" wmode="transparent" flashvars="env=http://www.worthpoint.com" height="300" width="200"></div>
At my last organization I was almost completely focused on CMS implementations, ignoring most of the other aspects of website development. CMS work is nice, its the backbone of the internet, but I was missing the application engagements that precipitates true user interaction. After leaving there one of my first adventures was attending the New New Internet conference in my hometown of Reston, VA. I was introduced to (or should I say immersed in) social media and the reality of Web 2.0. My next few months entailed my engagement in the Facebooks and Twitters of the web, more usage of my LinkedIn account, and a presence at multiple local tech activities. I've met and interacted both in person and over the internet with many great people, too many to list here.
My challenge became finding a position that leveraged the two. Most social media positions today are in the marketing and PR domain. Unless I wanted to start my career over from the ground up I did not see those domains as options. Weeks became months which became quarters while I looked for that job. I then stumbled across a local startup named WorthPoint.
WorthPoint is a social media site that catalogues and tracks the sales history and current value of antiques and collectibles from around the world, and makes this information available to everyone. Anne Zeiger stated "The company is gaining significant visitor traction and is well poised to capture the lion's share of this untapped market."
Thats the company's story. For me it's the perfect match I was looking for.
We utilize Drupal as our CMS. Well utilize is the wrong word, we actually push Drupal up to and beyond its intended limits. We provide a plethora of tools and features for collectors of every domain. Communities that include user abilities to list items in their collections, videos of them, mixing of professional knowledge along with wisdom of crowd knowledge, blogging, buying and selling, along with a deep database of historic data on auction items called the Worthopedia. Thats just the short list of features, there's more in the works (whoops, I almost said worx. old habits huh?).
Whats my role in this you may ask? They've asked me to manage the product development and implement an Agile process using the tool Rally Dev. Our first sprint started today. I'm happy with the team so far as they've taken to the change in the way they work and the new tool. Rally Dev is an interesting application that I plan to cover in another post but I will say now that they have a great sales and support staff.
So for now I'm deep in the midst of a CMS driven social community application utilizing an Agile process with distributed teams all over the world. To quote some of my older relations back in Arkansas....I'm like a pig in shit!
Have you changed jobs recently?
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