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Glassboard team wants your feedback. Vote for features on UserVoice

We’ve heard lots of very interesting feedback from our users so far. We’ve kept track of everything in a big list, but we wanted to really see what is most popular. There is now a UserVoice forum for Glassboard, where you can submit ideas and vote them up.

Another great thing about UserVoice is that it gives us a way to show everyone what we’ve decided on moving forward with or what we’ll have to pass up on for now.

Glassboard on UserVoice: http://glassboard.uservoice.com/forums/132970-glassboard

All users get 10 votes. As we mark things as complete your votes will free up. Have at it!

And as always, if you have any questions about Glassboard, visit our support page.

Launch coverage

Its been a week since we launched Glassboard, and what a week it was! In case you missed them, here are a few of the articles written about the Glassboard launch. We couldn’t be more excited. If you happened to see something we didn’t, please let us know!

And of course Twitter was chock full of some great mentions. Here were a few of our favorites:

Glassboard in the “New and Noteworthy” section in iTunes

Just found out that we’re in the “New and Noteworthy” section in iTunes.

Fantastic!

Push notifications

Just a quick note – we’re having an issue with push notifications, we’ve turned them off for now. Thanks for your patience! (New service you know… still working the kinks out)

Thank you so much, Steve Jobs

Without Steve Jobs, without Apple’s thrilling re-invention of cell phones and tablets, there would be no Sepia Labs and no Glassboard. This company is just one of so very many that owes its existence to his work and his vision.

And, also like so many other companies, like so many people, we’ve done our best to adopt that same vision, the idea that we can change the world with technology, make it a better place, and have a ton of fun while working hard.

It’s serious work to turn work into play — and it’s playful work, and we love it.

We’re not worried for Apple’s future. To imagine that Steve Jobs is great at so many things but not great at picking people and developing a culture that would survive changes of leadership is ridiculous. We know enough people at Apple to be confident that Apple will continue to be insanely great.

We wish him the very best, and thank him. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Glassboard, Facebook & Google+ privacy

We’ve been asked a few times about how we differ from services like Facebook and Google+, so I thought I would take a minute to discuss the differences. Glassboard has a very different perspective on privacy than the other, more open, social networks. These differences can bee seen in the ways people come together and share in each system.

Glassboard

• you create a “board” with anyone who has an email address
• you invite people into each board you create
• people you invite to the board can see each other
• when you share messages, comments, photos, videos, location – everyone in the board sees everything.
• People who aren’t part of the board have no way to discover other boards. The only way in is to be invited.

Facebook

• you add friends – but only those who are also on Facebook
• people you friend can see each other
• everyone sees everything you share, unless you study their privacy settings and make changes to your account. (including the new photo – workflow announced today to approve tags on photos)

Google+

• you create ‘circles’ of people you may or may not know (personally) who are in Google+ (or via email)
• only you know who is in the circle.
• You can limit sharing to just specific circles, or to the ‘public’
• If you respond to something someone else has shared, you have no idea who else will see your response
• people who see what you share can easily share with others (unless you’ve specified in a configuration setting)

Or if you’re averse to bullet points (like I am), here are the differences side by side.

So from a privacy perspective, we see Glassboard at the other end of the spectrum from an open social network. Our goal is to provide a place for people to share without having to worry about who will see it. As we’ve said before, there are no privacy settings in Glassboard. Its just private.

From a ‘sharing’ perspective – we want to be lock step with Facebook and Google+ in terms of providing the features and functions that people are familiar with in these other systems. You, as a Glassboard user, do not need to learn anything new. Using Glassboard is easy and intuitive.

We see ourselves as a complimentary service to the Google+s and Facebooks of the world. They help you keep tabs with lots of people you know on a largely casual basis. When you want to connect and share with just a few who you know well? Use Glassboard.

A big thank you to Glassboard users. We’re listening!

The Sepia Labs team would love to thank everyone who has downloaded Glassboard so far, the feedback has been tremendous! We’ve had a lot of positive comments, great feature requests, and helpful bug reports. Thank you! We can’t wait to see Glassboard get even bigger.

Speaking of feedback, now is a great time to let you know that we actually do read it. All of it. We consider every feature request (we’ve got a growing list) and look into bug reports where we can (those of you that have sent screenshots and detailed steps to reproduce have been especially helpful). We can’t respond to everything but we’ll try. Just know that whether you’re posting to Twitter, on our Facebook page, in the Google Groups (iPhone, Android, and soon Windows Phone 7) or sending us an email, it will always be seen by someone on the team.

Now to address a few points that we’ve noticed have been hot topics:

1) Not seeing a confirmation email. We’ve found that a lot of spam filters are blocking the confirmation email when you initially sign up to Glassboard. We also don’t yet support email addresses with characters like ‘+’ signs. We’re working on ways around this, but in the meantime if you haven’t yet received this email, send a message to support@sepialabs.com with the email address that you’ve signed up with and we’ll get it fixed.

2) I want to be able to choose a person’s email address from contacts, not have the app just select the first one (iPhone). Good point. We’ll look into making this process easier.

3) Glassboard, Y U NO HAVE WEB APP/DESKTOP APP? We wanted the initial launch to focus totally on mobile. More and more people are using their mobile phones to access the web. We hear you though: we are seriously considering a web and/or desktop app, so keep the requests coming if that’s what you want to see. A handful of folks have mentioned that their Grandma does not own an iPhone. Well? Why not buy her one? What could go wrong?

4) On the iPhone, if I tap a notification that includes an image I’m taken to a page that I can’t back out of. We’re looking into a fix for this. In the meantime, close the app completely (even from the background) and restart it.

Getting Started with Glassboard

Glassboard is all about sharing privately with different groups of people you know, so if you’re used to non-private apps, you may wonder how to get started with Glassboard.

You can’t search for people you know like you would on Twitter or Facebook. You can’t even search for groups to join since every group is private.  You have to be invited to a group to know it even exists.

But getting started with Glassboard is easy if you forget the idea that you’re supposed to share with everyone.  Glassboard isn’t designed for that.  It’s designed for sharing only with the people you want to share with.

The first thing you do is create a board (that’s what we call a group in Glassboard).  After you create a board, invite some people to it.  They’ll be the only people who can see what’s posted to that board.

Perhaps you want to share pictures of your kids with your extended family?  Create a board and invite your family to it, without worrying that your pictures will show up in a Google search.

Working on a project that you don’t want the world to know about just yet?  Create a board and invite your co-workers to it.  That’s what we did – we created a board just for those working on Glassboard, and we freely shared ideas in private.  We built our app using our app, and it worked wonderfully.

Or maybe you’re at a concert and you know a bunch of your friends are there somewhere.  Create a board, invite your friends to it, then share messages, photos and videos of the show.  When it’s over, you can even delete the board and know that it’s gone forever.

There are countless examples of other boards you’d create in Glassboard, but it all boils down to this: after you install the app, create a board and invite only the people that should belong to it.  Then enjoy the private conversation.

How Sepia Labs used Glassboard… to make Glassboard

From almost the beginning, Sepia Labs has used Glassboard, our private group sharing app, to actually build the app. People have often asked me, what would I use an app like this for? This example should give you some idea.

It wasn’t even a matter of testing the app during its creation. Of course we needed to see if posting pictures and videos was working. We needed to test if locations were represented correctly on a map. We needed to ensure that comments on your status messages were sending push notifications. But besides simply testing Glassboard, we built the app using the app. Because of Glassboard we could easily coordinate the entire group. More than once I posted my location on the way into the office to give my fellow Denver crew an idea of when I would arrive. We also grew closer as a team and have been able to learn even more about each other (I can’t tell you how many pictures of Brent Simmons’ cat I’ve seen).

And now that we’ve arrived on our official launch day, we’re still extensively using Glassboard. We’re coordinating responses to inquiries, informing each other of bugs, typos, and broken links. We’re high-fiving and calling out each others hard work. And the best part is that it is isolated to just us team members. It’s a completely private conversation that feels validated and secure.

Glassboard launches!

Glassboard, the new private group sharing app, is launching today! The Sepia Labs team is thrilled to make this announcement.

So what is Glassboard? Glassboard is a mobile app for sharing privately with groups. The app gives groups (or ‘boards’ in our parlance) robust social sharing capabilities in a very private context. With Glassboard, you will never question whether content will be found in a search engine (it won’t), you will never worry that content will be re-shared to an unintended audience (it can’t) and you’ll always know who you are talking to.

Download it now:

iPhone
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glassboard/id453661198?ls=1&mt=8

Android
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sepialabs.glassboard

Visit our FAQs page for more information about how to use Glassboard.

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Send us an email if you have any questions