I’ve decided to start writing week notes as a way to keep track of progress on Bleepie. The first line of code was committed on January 15th 2010, so that makes this week 13. We’ll kick things off by introducing some new features on the site.

Sign in with Facebook, or a password

You can now create an account and sign in on Bleepie with your Facebook profile. When you do, we’ll automatically import your social network and connect you with the people you already know on Bleepie, just like we do with the people you’re following on Twitter. If you’re already signed in with Twitter and want to link your Facebook friends too, you can set that up on the account management page.

Also on that page, you can change your registered email address, manage the profiles used for importing your game lists and now you can also choose to set a password. This gives you a safety net if you deactivate or disconnect your Twitter or Facebook account, and has the added advantage of letting you continue to log in if either of those sites are unavailable.

Replies

Another new feature I’m excited to announce is the ability to reply to game reviews. This is ideal for challenging a friend who disagrees with your opinion of a game, or chiming in with a followup that might not warrant a full review. It’s also a handy way to politely ask your friends to back their ideas up if they couldn’t be bothered to write anything in a review.

Email notifications

When someone replies to one of your reviews and you’ve confirmed your email address, we’ll send you a note to let you know. At the moment you’ll also get an email when someone starts following you, when you’re @mentioned by name in a review or a reply, and when one of your friends from Twitter or Facebook sign up. You can manage your notification settings to control these individually, and each email will also come with a link to immediately unsubscribe from that type of notification.

Lists

Another bonus feature that’s actually been live for a while is the ability to create lists. These are really simple and I’m curious to see what people use them for. A few lists I’ve made include wish lists broken out by platform; games I’m currently playing; games I really should have played but haven’t; etc etc… There’s potential for some interesting uses here, so have a play.

One important thing I’m using lists for is to clean up my recommendations. There’s a lot of games in there that I know about and want to acknowledge, but I’m not ready to review them yet, and I don’t want to just ignore them outright. Adding a game to a list is a way to tell the system “OK, thanks for the rec, I’ll look at it later, you can stop bugging me now.” I’m hoping that lists will make recommendations much more useful and interesting; they already have for me.

What’s next?

The next big feature I’m working on is Facebook feed cross-posting for reviews. It’s mostly done, I’m just making sure the experience is tightly integrated, unobtrusive, and obvious. You’ll always know when a review is being posted to Facebook, and you’ll be able to disable it completely, or force a prompt for every review. I’m looking forward to seeing Bleepie posts show up on my news feed.

I’ve also been working with Fred Stidston to design a fancier logo for the site, so keep your eyes peeled for something gorgeous soon.

Phew that was a long one, let’s try to keep it more concise in future, eh?