The enhancements in this release improve both the user experience and the value for sites that use the system. Here’s a summary:

The widget now shows basic social shopping content to all users without requiring any sign-up:

• Items recently recommended by other shoppers
• Popular items
• The number of neighbors who also shop at the store and the items those neighbors have purchased (based on zip code matches)

Users can now import their friends list without ever leaving the widget and immediately see how many of their friends are also customers of the store and what those friends bought. All the information is anonymous, but shoppers can request the store to send a connect invitation on their behalf to those friends. This new approach has a number of benefits:

• Shoppers see more first-degree friend reference information
• Shoppers have a way to connect to friends who have not yet opted in to the site’s “trusted reference system” while still preserving customers’ privacy
• The sign-up flow for shoppers is cleaner and more intuitive

We’ve made a slew of visual and usability improvements.  Please go to one of our partner sites and have a look.

Sites currently using the TurnTo system will get this upgrade without any action required.

We just rolled out Rave.  If you’ve had a particularly good experience with a product from a TurnTo network site - the sort of experience you’d normally tell your friends about - rave it.  Your TurnTo friends will see your rave in their TurnTo news feed, and you can also push it out to your Facebook friends.  (Coming soon: you’ll be able to push your raves out to other networks, Twitter, and the like…)  Other people can see your raves, too, but we don’t push it to them, and they don’t see your name as the author.

How come only “rave” and not “pan”?  The main idea behind rave is to make it easy for you to bring something to the attention of your friends that they might find valuable.  Getting warned off of a bad product is useful mainly if you were already considering it.  There’s no need to tell me not to get something I didn’t want anyway.  But getting alerted to something really special can spark a brand new idea.  Plus, we wanted to focus on the positive.  And a lot of our partner sites already have tools for collecting ratings and reviews, so we felt it was more important to focus on the communicating-with-friends aspect than on collecting scores and feedback.

We’d love to hear what you think.  Please drop us line.

Happy to announce some new features from the last few releases:

• Connect TurnTo to your Facebook friends
• See friends-of-friends and people-who-live-near-you in the widget on our partner sites
• Streamlined registration flow and Add Friends page
• Lots of things are faster

We have also added lots of enhancements that make implementation and management even easier for our partner sites.

Enjoy!

We’ve made a number of small and large fixes that improve performance and usability.  Here are some of the more visible additions.

For users:

• Upload contacts from Outlook
• AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) integration, so you can get quick advice while you’re shopping

For partner sites:

• Trackable “Join TurnTo” links you can put on your order confirmation screen, confirmation email, and marketing emails.  These also let you show a message to users when they land on the TurnTo registration page, so you can explain in your own words the benefits of signing up for TurnTo.

We get a lot of questions about whether TurnTo will work before we’ve achieved a “critical mass” of users.  We built the TurnTo model so massive scale is not a requirement for the system to deliver value to users or to our partner sites.  I thought I’d explain how that works:

1. Sites that use TurnTo suggest to their customers that they join TurnTo.  This message is delivered on the order confirmation page, the confirmation e-mail, or in on-going marketing campaigns.  The pitch is basically: be there for your friends and they’ll be there for you.  The sites may offer incentives, as well.  Not all customers join, but enough do.

2. When these customers join TurnTo, they import their friends’ e-mail addresses and authorize that their purchases be shared with those friends.  Most likely, many of the imported friends are not yet TurnTo members.  That’s OK - those friends won’t see any of the purchase information that has been shared with them until they join TurnTo.

3. A visitor - someone who is not yet a TurnTo member - comes to the TurnTo partner site.  The TurnTo widget shows a message like “See if friends can advise you about shopping here.”  The visitor clicks, is brought to the TurnTo registration form, and signs up.  TurnTo compares the visitor’s e-mail addresses to those with which TurnTo members are sharing.  Immediately - before she has done any network building of her own - the visitor sees the information that her friends are sharing with her on that site.  Instant gratification.

The power of this model is that each TurnTo partner site can make TurnTo productive without needing a massive TurnTo user network.  Individual partner sites don’t care about the size of the overall TurnTo network, they only care about whether their customers are TurnTo members.  And visitors to those sites don’t care about the size of the overall network either.  They only care if friends who shop on the particular site they are visiting are TurnTo members.

Of course, if you don’t shop at any of the TurnTo partner sites, then TurnTo won’t do anything for you.  But if you do visit a TurnTo partner site and have friends who shop there, there’s a good chance you’ll see these “trusted references” within a month or two of those sites installing the TurnTo system.

We’re on a roughly bi-weekly release cycle, but I missed the previous one, so some of these enhancements have been up for a couple weeks.

We’ve been spending a lot of time on usability items that became clear the moment people started using the live system.  You may not notice them individually, but overall, the number of times you think, “Hmm, I wish it worked just a bit differently” should be going down.  We’ve got more to do in that department.

The most visible change is our new home page.  We’re using a news item model but grouping the items by type to make them easier to digest.  We’ve also added a summary of your key statistics on the right.  The goal is to provide an at-a-glance way to keep track of all your TurnTo activity.

We’ve been working on the instructional text throughout the site as we learn what’s intuitive for users and what not.  The one you’re sure to notice is the big welcome message on the home page with advice on getting started.

And we added a Delete Account button on the profile page.  We hope this won’t get used much, but we think it’s good web citizenship to make it easy for people to leave if they want to.

We’re eager for your feedback.  Please let us know.