Introducing maps for your groups

We launched some new features on Tuesday. One of my favorites is maps for groups. Each on of your callers can add location to their stories (or you can).

For Isabel's birthday party, this results in a map with calls from the east and west coast.

On a more local level, one group is using this feature to map the location of mushrooms which they describe on the phone and augment with photos and GPS coordinates.

Other features launched included upgraded group invitations/sharing, upgrade group owner controls, story play in search results, tag cloud on the home page and numerous others. Let us know what you think.

Using Groups for a birthday - Part 2

This past Saturday, my daughter celebrated her birthday. Because so many of our friends live in distance places, my wife decided to use earfl to collect stories for my daughter from these friends. (I talked about setting up the group in this post.)

The results were amazing. The first story was from her friend Amira. She simply sang Happy Birthday.





Her friend Luke from Seattle called in a story as well.



You can view the whole group at http://www.earfl.com/groups/show/123.

Trust and storytelling

We've had the good fortune of learning from many storytellers who have advised us over the last nine months. Here in San Francisco, Mauree Perry told us to make sure we understood the idea of trust : if the contributor trusts the interviewer, you will get a better story. While earfl doesn't have the exact notion of an interview, we do have the ability to request stories in our group feature .

You can assign a story that you've recorded to be the message a caller hears when they call the group number. We've heard some great feedback from you all about how this personalizes the experiences by having a familiar voice requesting stories.

We think this ties nicely with the idea of trust. We will be pursuing more of this over the next several releases.

Family Traditions

You may have noticed we've been starting to collect stories about the special traditions that you remember growing up.

We heard some funny and touching stories about Christmas, and thought that we should extend beyond to general family traditions. There one some about a great hunting tradition, the Super Bowl, and even, blueberry picking!

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is around the corner. If you have a wonderful moment to share, call it in! And if you have a lonely story, that's okay as well. Seems like this one holiday can be uplifting for some, and downright depressing for others.

Tell us your story :)

If you want to hear other contributor's valentine day experiences, do a search on valentine'sday, or just click here http://www.earfl.com/search?query=valentine'sday