Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Ta-Da: Part One!

I promised you in Monday's post that this week would be an exciting one for madKast, and I'm happy to say that I can deliver on that promise!

We have begun the process of putting up our partially-functional madKast widget on a select number of blogs including this madKast blog as well as Johann's tech-startup blog -- moonsing.com. In addition, David Cohen has been kind enough to put it on his ColoradoStartups blog, so check it out there as well. As the week wears on we will continue to add madKast to other blogs for beta testing.

What exactly is the madKast widget, you ask? You should see a small green icon (with the word share next to it) to the right of title of this blog post. Once you click on the icon, a sharing panel will pop up and the rest of the page will temporarily be grayed-out. There you will be asked to enter the contact information of the person or people you'd like to share the blog post with. The neatest thing about madKast is that you have every sharing option at your disposal: e-mail, MMS text message, or instant message.

Even cooler, once you enter a friend's contact information madKast will remember this information. That means that not only the next time you head back to the site you've just shared, but also ANY site that has the madKast widget, your friend's contact information will be saved, so all you have to do is click on their name and hit send. How sweet is that?!

In addition, the full blog post is shared with your friend no matter what sharing method you use. This is significantly different from, and much more useful than, many other sites that allow you to share their content in that madKast sends you the ENTIRETY of the blog post within the e-mail/MMS message/IM instead of just the title, a link, or the first few sentences, like many other distribution "services" do.

Basically, madKast is the easiest and most powerful way to share blog posts. Try it out on this site or moonsing.com now....and we'll let you know as we put it on more and more sites. We are still working on the distribution method, so if you want to add an icon to your blog, send an e-mail to josh AT madkast dot com and I'll email you a snippet of javascript. Remember that we are still in beta, so we'd love to get feedback!

5 comments:

Joseph Vardner said...

I just tried it and sent the post to myself (Verizon, Blackberry 8830). The message that I received was from Verizon letting me know I received a PIX message. To read it, I have to click on another link that will take me to a VZ website.

Thought you should know.

Congrats guys, this is a great it.

Johann Moonesinghe said...

Joseph,

Thanks for your feedback. We think this may be an issue with some Blackberrys, but we are working on it. Thanks for the feedback. Send me an email johann at madkast dot com, and we'd love to send you a free pro account (when we build those).
-Johann

Anonymous said...

Cool widget! I like it!

I noticed it was written in .Net. Do you have any recommendations for information about creating widgets with aspx/.net?

Just FYI -- When I played around with the widget, I sent an email and it saved my friend's information (email account and name), but when I entered another friend and sent a text message, it didn't save the second friend's information.

I think it'd also be cool if the widget could auto-detect if the address is an email address or a text message.

Anonymous said...

hey,
Its a great service. But, I think instead of using 'share' tag, you should use something else like 'easy share' or anything coz it confused your services with the other sharing services.

And, also it would be great if user can open up an account on madkast. Because at present, I think you are using I.P. to identify the user.

Best of Luck

Josh Larson said...

Anon,

Thanks for your advice. We have not completely finalized the product and still have some options on the table. I hope you'll stay tuned to madKast.