Good news everybody: we released a new help section. We realized that the old one had become a bit disorganized in the midst of all our development work and we decided to gather and update the best and most useful content all in one place. This is a continuation of our efforts to make ThingLink’s dialogue with its users sparkle.
We divided the sections into five parts: “Setting up ThingLink” helps you get started and guides you through the installation process, “Support forum” puts you in contact with our team directly to ask questions or submit feedback, “Features and integration” tells you about other services that work with ThingLink, “Developer resources” features tips on how to tune the tool to your liking and “Frequently asked questions” answers all of the most interesting and thoughtful questions our users are thinking about.
The new help section helps you find information on virtually all aspects of using ThingLink. Visit it now to see what we did.
You can now sign up for and log in to ThingLink using your Facebook account. We’re making use of the 600+ million user network to make the process of signing up and logging in to ThingLink as easy as possible.
You’ll notice that above the username and password fields, there is a new “Log in with Facebook” button, which will allow you to sign up for or log in to your ThingLink account using your personal Facebook username and password. If it’s the first time you’re signing in with Facebook, you’ll see a pop-up window asking you to allow ThingLink permission to access your account. Follow the ensuing prompts and you’re brought to ThingLink’s dashboard. To start tagging you only need to do a simple install and you’re set to go. It’s that simple!
Everybody should get a chance to try how ThingLink and Rich Media Tags work together. That is why we left a couple of photos taken by ThingLink’s team members open for you to tag. No strings attached. Consider it a test drive before signing up.
You tag by hovering the image and selecting “Edit tags” from the top left corner. Why not start by selecting a tune from SoundCloud, or video from YouTube or a Twitter profile and placing it in the link field in the tag. What kind of media association do the images bring to mind and what tags and links could give it another dimension?
Once you’ve tagged the image you’ll be able to share it through Twitter, Facebook and email. You can also choose to embed it wherever you like. Get busy!
San Francisco, March 8, 2011 — ThingLink, the provider of image interaction tools, and SoundCloud, the fast-growing audio platform, today announced an innovative collaboration of technologies that enables anyone to add sound and music directly to their images. For the first time, it is possible to link a SoundCloud waveform player to any photo or picture, thereby connecting the subject to sounds, music and effects, voice annotations and narrations.
This collaboration means that SoundCloud’s more than three million registered audio creators will be able to bring additional context, interactivity and meaning to both their sounds and the images that inspire them; whether it’s to a promotional flyer, a memorable photograph or an album cover artwork. By simply scrolling over the uploaded image, a series of ‘hotspots’ appear, each one linking to a sound that can be played directly from within the picture. By using Thinglink, users can also include links to social networks, blogs, news and commerce web sites, as well as email.
“Images and sound are a natural combination and really compliment each other,” said Ulla-Maaria Engeström, ThingLink CEO. “Context invites clicks, and sound adds a new dimension to images, be it fan shots, fashion photos, or family albums.”
Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud said, “This simple concept of linking sound to the images that are meaningful to you opens up endless opportunities to audio creators. Not only will it change the way artists promote themselves, their music and their live shows, but it will also allow people to add narrative to their holiday snaps, verbal descriptions to their designs or funny soundbites to their illustrations.”
An example of how this new collaboration of technologies is already being embraced, includes: Paper Garden Records, a NY-based record company and music promoter, who has created an interactiveflyerfortheirbandsatSXSW. They use ThingLink tags to link the flyer to their music samples on SoundCloud, as well as website, party venue, Facebook page and sponsors. When flyers are shared onwards via Facebook, Twitter and email, the interactive hotspots follow and bring traffic back to Paper Garden Record’s website. Further sound-filled images, including Moby, Beck and The Smashing Pumpkins, can be viewed at gallery.thinglink.com
Want to add your sounds to your website’s images? The process is quick and easy:
ThingLink, launched in 2008 by Ulla Engeström, develops tools for image interaction that allow content sharing via online images. ThingLink technology changes the way people interact with photos by transforming them into a surface for advertising, commerce, entertainment, search and social connection. Brands, publishers and bloggers utilize ThingLink in their images to share links, drive traffic, and set up image-based advertising campaigns.
About SoundCloud
SoundCloud, launched in 2008 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, is an audio platform that enables anyone to create, record, promote and share their sounds on the web, in a simple, accessible and feature-rich way. SoundCloud allows sound creators to instantly record audio; upload large files; share them publicly and privately; embed sound across websites and blogs; receive detailed analytics, plus feedback from the community directly onto their waveform player.
For more information, please contact:
Neil Vineberg (ThingLink)
631-377-1494
Email: neil (a)ThingLink.com
Alice Regester (SoundCloud)
+44 7758 834 646
Email: alice(a)soundcloud.com
Christopher Buttner (Vineberg Communications)
415-233-7350
Email: chris (a)vinebergcommunications.com
First of all: thanks for all the good questions we have received by email in the past months! To make sharing questions and answers easier, ThingLink now has community support on Get Satisfaction. Our community page allows you to post service- and feature-related questions and comments to us directly, and check how other questions have been answered.
You don’t have to create an account to post your questions. However, by creating an account you can get updates on when your question was answered, and you too will be able to answer questions.
Just hover on the image below to see some of the features that the community forum offers:
Looking forward to see you on the ThingLink community page!
As we announced a few weeks ago ThingLink allows you to easily share your tagged images on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to our active community, we noticed soon that the Facebook sharing is not working as smoothly as it could, because the thumbnail that appeared besides the shared link on FB seemed to be any random image from the same page – and not necessarily the one indicated in the link.
To solve this, we built our own Facebook application that shows the shared image in the wall post. You can also add your own comment above the image.
We also added our sharing panel one of the most common ways of communicating: email. Email sharing allows longer messages and serves those who prefer not to comment images via Twitter or Facebook.
ThingLink is nicely on a roll and we are developing new feature ideas daily. Remember to let us know what features would be useful to you, and what you would like to improve. Also, we are always happy to hear what you think about our existing features so please visit our community forum and have your say or send it to info@thinglink.com.
This week’s special includes a shiny new editor UI that features Facebook and Twitter sharing. While previously the image editor was hidden behind the little dot icon in the upper left corner, it now appears on the image together with share and embed options.
Image: Dangerous Crafts
This is how it works: Move your mouse over the image.
– If it is your image (and you are logged in), click the edittags to edit and reposition tags.
– Click shareimage to share your favorite images on Facebook or Twitter.
– Click embed image to copy the image with tags.
Let us know how the sharing is working for you! Are your friends retweeting your images? At least in this case, it is easy to monitor — just take a look at your statistics!
Thinglink recently launched a new front page and we’re proud to highlight some of the features. The updasite makes it easier for brands, bloggers and publishers to get started with Thinglink and signing up is just one click away. We’ve listed some of what’s different in the image below. Feel free to browse around.
We are also testing out an Amazon affiliate model with image tags . Drop us a line at info@thinglink.com and we’ll tell you more on how you can try it out.
We would love to hear what you think, so please comment here or let us know on Twitter.
Thinglink will beta release an Amazon associate feature today. This means that you’ll be able to link your image tags to Amazon products and generate revenue on sales completed through your links. It’s already working like a charm but we would like to know what our users think. Therefore we’re now looking for a few good beta testers.
Just drop a line to info@thinglink.com and we’ll tell you more about it.
We launched yesterday a new feature for Thinglink. As soon as you log in and create a Thinglink account, you can see statistics for all pictures you have tagged. The numbers are crunched in near real time, so you can be on the top of things right away! Naturally we are all very excited about the new feature as we believe the tagging statistics can provide bloggers, publishers and brands some interesting additional data about their images.
Views, hovers and clicks
The statistics tell you how many people have viewed or clicked on your image, but you can also find out how many hovered over the tags and actually saw what you wrote. If you are featuring several people or things in your photo, you can see which tag has generated the most action. Hover on the image above to see it all explained!
Hover is halfway to click. If you haven’t tried out Thinglink and the statistics yet, do it now and let us know what you think.
