We’ve just pushed a major update to iusethis, adding several social features and updating the commenting system with support for replies. To improve performance, we’ve also added a new caching system, to allow us to cache more data for logged-in users.
Find your friends
Looking up your contacts in GMail is a feature that we’ve wanted for a long time, but we did not want to compromise users by asking for their passwords. Now that Google supports OAuth we were able to implement it the way we wanted. In order to use it, go to your profile and click the ‘more’ link on the ‘friends’ sidebar:
Once There, click on this sidebar:
The system asks you to grant iusethis permission to access your address book data, choose the google account you use:
Then we will present you with a list of contacts who have accounts on iusethis. Just press the ‘follow’ link to add them.
Messaging
You can now contact users on iusethis directly. To do this, go to the user’s profile, and click the contact link:
Then just write your message and click ‘Send’. Just like everywhere else on iusethis, you can use textile formatting in your message. The message will be delivered to the user as a normal email, with your registered email address as the ‘From’ address, so that he can easily respond to your message.
If you do not want to accept messages from users, you can disable it from preference.
We also added app owners to the app page, in case you want to contact them:
Replies
@username replies has been a defacto convention on iusethis for a long time, and we’ve already been doing things like linking to users automatically, but now we actually support links back to the comment you’re responding to. This also means that each comment has it’s own permanent page:
For consistency we are now using relative timestamps for dates everywhere, and the dates act as permalinks. By default, we will assume you are responding to the latest comment by this user on the app you’re commenting on, but if you want to reply to a specific comment, you can use the ‘reply to comment’ link on the comment permalink page. We also took the opportunity to streamline the user comments page to be more like the main recent comments list:
Hope these changes are useful to you. If you have feedback, please respond to out twitter account, @iut.