What’s New: The Big Things

• A new Mento Box
• Channels 2.0
• Mento Points
• Discover
• Feedback Everywhere

The Small Things

• Easy Re-Sharing
• Navigating Your Links
• Displaying Your Name
• Search is faster
• Twitter Shortcut
• Firefox Extension update

What’s New: The Big Things

A new Mento Box for Sharing Links

It’s really important to us that posting links to Mento is as straight-forward and simple as possible. For that reason, we replaced the current popup with a new slide-in box that loads more quickly and has fewer distractions.

What’s cool about it:

• Fewer clicks and better use of channels
• Easier image selection
• Customize your interface with the features you use

Start using the new Mento Box
with the updated Firefox extension or the new bookmarklet!

Channels 2.0

Channels are social categories: they let you send a link to the people you associate with that category. But if you were confused by Mento’s distinction between groups, tags and channels, you were not alone. It was a forest of previous design iterations that needed some uncluttering.

What’s new with Channels:

• The new organization of channels makes them more prominent, easier to navigate and easier to post to.
• A link can now be associated with 1 main channel and up to 4 additional channels.
• Tags and Channels are now separate things.
  Unlike tags, channels are fairly broad and they’re shared among many people — think of them as sections in a newspaper or magazine. When you want to be more specific, use tags to further categorize your links in any way you want.

Points

A big part of Mento is getting feedback for the links you post — it’s one of our main distinctions to most other link sharing sites out there. That’s why we’re excited about introducing Mento Points! They summarize all the feedback you get into a quick glance and a good feeling.

When others click, reply, plus or re-share a link, Mento now adds up points. Each of those actions gets a different number of points — for example, re-sharing a link gives the highest number of points (compared to clicks, pluses and replies) because it’s a really good indicator that a link is worth spreading. The specific point values get adjusted over time because we calculate them dynamically based on the overall activity on Mento.

Why Points? Mento uses all of this information to find the most interesting links and people in each channel. That’s in part how Mento determines what links are popular and how Mento makes recommendations to you when discovering new things…

Discover

While we focused on sending, receiving and feedbacking on links until now, Mento didn’t support browsing and discovering all that well.

Say hello to the new Discover section then — your starting point for exploring Mento! And when we say “Discover”, we don’t just mean links. Discovering people is just as interesting and discovering new channels (plus the links you’ll find there) is fun, too.

Location, Location, Location. Maps are the ultimate discovery playground — and if you ever wondered why Mento asked for your location when you signed up, now you know: Discover Mento members around the World using our special map interface. Besides location, you can explore them by channel - such as Design or Technology - and also by website - such as Flickr, YouTube or nytimes.com.

Feedback Everywhere

Underneath every link on Mento, we now summarize all of the activity elsewhere on Mento. It lets you see more easily who shared the same link and gave feedback. When you’re looking at a channel or your Mento Mix, we’ll display all of the pluses and all of the replies — previously, you had to go to each person’s Mento page and the feedback there. Here’s an example of what a such an entry look like:

The Small Things

Easy Re-Sharing
Every link now has 3 actions underneath that are always consistent: Plus, Share, Reply.

Share is your new 1-click way to copy the link to your Mento page and share it with your network — we copy all of link’s information (channels, images, tags) and also point back to the user where you found it (shown as via Boaz Gurdin, as seen here for example).

Navigating Your Links
Now cleaner and easier to navigate: Your Links and the links of others. We summarize the information about favorites sites, tags and channels on the new Explore page for each user. It gives you a quicker overview of the different interests and lets you jump to specific links more quickly.

You should also try the simple filters that you’ll find on the left of every link list (Videos, Images, Top Links).

Displaying Your Name
If you want to change how your name is shown on Mento, we replaced the First Name / Last Name distinction with a single “Full Name” field. If you prefer to use your favorite nickname to represent your Mento account, we now make that easier — and if your “Full Name” is the same as your username, we won’t show them twice on your Mento page (dotdean on the image above is an example).

Search is faster
That pretty much sums it up. Searching for links got a speed boost
(all muscle, no drugs — we swear!)

Twitter Shortcut
Do you share links on Twitter? The new Mento Box now makes that easier: from the Extras menu, you can select a convenient, 1-click Twitter shortcut. When sending links to Twitter, we also display a brevity counter now.

A similar shortcut for posting to Facebook will be coming later this month.

The Firefox Extension
Along with the new Mento Box for sharing, we also updated and uncluttered the Mento Firefox extension. If you didn’t like the second big button, it’s now turned off by default. If you liked it, you can select it in the Settings menu — where there’s also a dedicated Screenshot button now.

What’s Ahead

Organize Your Links
We updated the Mento Box, we updated Channels — it’s time that Mento has a proper way to help you manage and organize your growing number of links. That time will come later this month too, when we’ll release a first version of the “Organize Your Links” tab.

FriendFeed Comment Import
Many, many Mento links get re-shared on FriendFeed these days and as a result, a good amount of feedback gathers there. Later this month, Mento will turn on the automatic import of feedback from FriendFeed, which will include both Likes and Comments.

Internet Explorer extension update
We’re still working on updating the Internet Explorer extension so that it also uses the new Mento Box for posting links. You can already use the Mento Bookmarklet while the extension will follow soon.

Needless to say…

We’d love to hear from you! Many of the things we worked on came directly from your feedback. So please leave your comments below or visit our forum at GetSatisfaction to share your thoughts on the update and new ideas.

So, next time when you’re on the subway, waiting endlessly for your easyJet flight to announce the gate, or simply enjoying the summer sun in your back yard: you can now call up Mento on your cell phone anytime and anywhere with our mobile-optimized interface at http://m.mento.info/

This version is still in testing and we’d love to get your feedback as always. Right now, you can access:

• Your Mento Mix
• Your Inbox
• Your Network’s Recent Updates (summary)
• and any user’s links, including your own of course

You’ll notice that all outgoing links are re-formatted for mobile viewing. This currently happens by default (for the convenience of the majority of mobile users), but we’ll make this is an optional setting in the near future. Until then, You can also scroll to the bottom of any external page and select “View in HTML” to see the original page.

Happy Subway Surfing!

That said, we’re especially happy to announce a new Mento feature that was first suggested by Sascha, one of our earliest and most loyal users. Visit Sascha on Mento.

Today, we’re adding support for Skitch, the popular and awesome screenshot annotation tool for the Mac made by the folks at Plasq.

Adding screenshots to your Mento links has long been possible with our Firefox extension but since many of our Mac users prefer using Safari, we thought we could do better.

Get Started

1. You’ll need to download Skitch (it’s free) if you don’t have it already
2. Next, activate the Mento + Skitch feature and follow the short instructions to set-up your Mento account in Skitch

How does it work?

1. Take a screenshot with Skitch (even add annotations if you’d like)
2. Webpost it to the Mento account you created in Skitch
3. Open the Mento Box as usual and we’ll add your screenshot to that link

The super-awesome Sascha, who suggested the idea, made a short video to show you what that looks like:

We hope you’ll like this new feature! And remember: your great ideas could soon be part of Mento, too. Share them with us today and please keep the feedback coming!

Thanks Sascha!

First of all, a big thanks goes to Jason Kincaid and Mike Arrington for being the first to give Mento the stage at TechCrunch and allowing so many of you to find out about our young endeavor with the extended review that Jason put together. We’ll soon respond to Jason’s points in another post right here — but today, something else is more important to me:

Most of all, I’d like to thank our new users for joining so enthusiastically this week, for twittering so adamantly about it and for sharing your experience by inviting more friends. An encore round of thanks goes especially to the 58 of you who took time out of your busy and connected lives to send us your feedback. You told us about your first impressions, the problems you encountered and the ideas that we’ll take to heart to improve your future Mento experience! Thanks Boaz (922 links already!), Dietmar (833), Rouven (250), Sascha (231), Sven (164), Pierro (115), Stefan (97), Lindsey (77), Heinrich (62), Lars (51), Sridhar (43), Markus (41), Reiner (35), Ole (33), Ute (32), Bastian (29), Michael (27), Tye (20), Min (20), Achim (19), Doug (18), Mini (18), Alexis (18), Ellen Petry (18), Mike (17), James (17), Chris (15), Nathan (15), Evan (13), Michael (12), Daynah (11), Nasar (11), Jimmy (10), BJ (6), Steve (6), Brian (6), Becky (5), Jesse (4), Jonathon (4), Moritz (3), Richard (3), Larry (2), Charles (2), Guilherme (1), Hiro (1), Oliver, Rowan, Stephen, Todd, Alex, Brady, Alexandar, Lloyd, Stephane, Brian, Attila, Lindsay and Kevin. You rock! And if you got in touch and haven’t heard from us just yet, hang tight - we’ll surely get back to you in the next day!

For your convenience, we want to keep these blog posts short and snappy in the future. That said: Until next time!

Today, I’d like to present you with Mento and invite you to play with it! Use it to share links with friends, family and co-workers — in a way that’s more fun, less overwhelming and makes it easier to stay in touch.

Why Mento? We all send and receive emails about great videos and interesting links. But because email is being used for everything from travel confirmations to birthday greetings, it’s a big bag of everything and not a good filter. Only the very most important links get sent by email and everything else stays in our browsers, unshared and lonely. You might surely use services like del.icio.us, which are handy for saving links, but they’re not made for sending links to someone, let alone adding a personal message or continuing the conversation.

Sharing links should work better: it should be smarter than receiving too many emails, more personal and focused on the people who matter to you, take far less effort and connect to everything else you already use to stay in touch. Those are the goals of Mento and we now made our first step towards them with the public release of its first version:

Mento is leaving its private beta this week and opening its doors after months of development and improvements. New toys are indeed exciting!

Sign-ups are by invitation-only because that creates the most meaningful networks — that means you can be invited by a friend or sign up to a receive a personal invitation from the Mento team. Check our Facebook page to connect with friends who are already using Mento or request an invitation on Mento’s homepage.

We’ll be listening closely to your feedback and improving the service so that it comes closer to what you expect from it — and continues to feel as exciting as it did on your first day.

Have fun!
Greg
– find me at mento.info/grex

Where to go from here:

• Request an Invitation or Find friends who are already using Mento (via Facebook)
• Check out the links that our awesome and earliest users are sharing: Boaz, Dietmar, Sascha, Ute, Lars, Artis, Ole, Bastian, Michael, … we’ll be featuring them and many others regularly over the coming weeks right here.