Monthly Archives: September 2006

Yesterday we launched our biggest upgrade yet. Although we didn’t officially announce an upgrade, we made obvious improvements to our profiling system and user connectivity. Y’all spoke up and we listened. Now the Evoca community can communicate by audio message to each other as well as leave personal comments, be notified by email of new recordings, set their preferences, and create an awesome profile. And if that weren’t enough we used some spiffy AJAX! So, if you like it go on over and “digg” it!

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It was a good morning here in Evocaland. We woke up to find in our RSS readers this little tidbit from Mashable! You can now find Mashable on Evoca and make them your friend or you can just read the post (and leave a friendly comment…hint, hint) by clicking on the image! Keep on speaking up and speaking out….

For a few months now everyone has been speaking up and speaking out to us. In fact, some people have been yelling at us to beef up our social networking. Well, we have heard your voices and today are launching our *New and Improved* Evoca Social Networking. You already know that Evoca is about communicating and recording yourself and the world around you. And, like us, you know it is hard enough to keep up with your online contacts and what they’re saying and where they’re saying it. Therefore, we wanted to add improvements to Evoca that would help you effortlessly and painlessly meet us at Evoca!

Onto the new features that empower your voice:

Expanded Profile:



Let’s first start off by pointing out that there is no ‘My Recordings’ tab anymore at the top of your My Home page. We just got the sense that we were appropriating too many pages to not enough information. This made for messy navigation and resulted in too much non-essential clicking. Now ‘My Recordings’ are an expandable list (just by clicking the orange expand/collapse link). Very cool and very efficient for making the overall size of your page smaller!

You may also notice that your profile is much larger than it has been in the past. With your new profiling options (found by clicking ‘My Account’ in the upper right corner of any page) you can make up to a two-minute recording about yourself, add a text description, list your gender, birthday, and location. We will then add to it how long you’ve been a member, when you last visited, and how many times your profile has been viewed. And if that weren’t enough you can also list your general interests, favorite books and magazines, favorite movies, and favorite music as well as any other websites your new friends can find you at. Oh, and speaking of friends…you now have the option from almost every page to enter the email addresses of as many friends as you can think of and invite them to talk on Evoca.

You have comments:

This is probably my favorite new feature. Now Evoca gives you the ability to leave audio comments for people and even receive some. On the new My Comments page you can listen to the audio comment left for you, read the message left for you, see where it came from, when it came in, and even copy/paste the HTML of the comment on your blog or personal website! This is what I call real communication.

Create and organize:

It’s obvious now that My Home has had a bit of a facelift. In fact, it has had an extreme makeover. The top of the page features your profile. There is a recording all about you. Friends can see all your interests and hear your personal recordings. But when you are logged in you also have the option to create and organize recordings right from the side of the page. Waterfalling down the right side of My Home is now an creation hub where you can use the various Evoca recordings methods, organize your recordings into albums and groups, invite friends to Evoca, view your contacts, your albums and your groups. And to keep with the expandable theme, you can view your home with expanded or collapsed viewing options.

Make an audio comment:
Our new commenting system is a bit like this…

Leave an audio comment on another users recording. That’s right. When you have listened to a friends recording you can simply leave them a recording to comment on the audio or to just invite them to take a listen to your recordings. They will then be able to view their comments page and listen/read your comment(s).

Leave a private audio comment. Let’s pretend you want to tell someone that they have a beautiful voice and they should consider becoming a public speaker. Now you can with complete privacy. When you are viewing their profile you simply click on the link that says “Send user a private audio comment”.

Share Evoca with a friend:

When we first started talking together you could only invite one friend at a time to Evoca and even that was a bit of a “Where’s Waldo?” hunt. As of today you can invite multiple friends (just separate their emails with a comma) from almost any page on Evoca. The more friends that join, the more fun you can have leaving each other recordings, downloading each others words, and creating albums together!

Sometimes you have to look:

Finding someone is not always the easiest thing to do in the real world. But on Evoca it is quite simple. Especially with our new ‘Advanced search’. By clicking either the ‘People search’ text link in the upper right corner of any page or by clicking ‘Advanced search’ under any standard search box, you are taken to a new search page where you can find people by name, location, age, gender, etc. This way you are sure to meet new people on Evoca.

Those are the highlights of today’s release. There’s always a lot of work to do and these features are in constant development so that we communication gets easier with each new release. We’re happy with the direction of this release and hope that our Evocalizers will be equally pleased.

Enjoy the new release and thanks for your continued support!

-the Evoca team.

Hyku, in partnership with Rollins College in Orlando, Florida is hosting the first ever blogging event in Orlando today through Saturday. Open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike from Florida and anywhere else, it is a great opportunity for the pasty Evoca team to get a little sunshine and talk about web communications. Like [tag]BlogOrlando[/tag], blog conventions have become quite popular in the last two years and with the number of [tag]blogs[/tag] approaching 57 million including private, corporate, business, and media blogs, we are bound to see more in regional locations. The topics discussed will be blogging, podcasting, public relations, [tag]social media[/tag], citizen’s journalism and other related topics. And the exciting part is that Evoca will be there to participate and to talk about the role of [tag]Evoca[/tag] in the blogosphere. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll even have a product or two to talk about.

Just a sidenote: If you know of a Blog convention happening in your area, let us know. Upload some recordings. Let the world hear about your blog and conference!

This morning an online article by William M. Bulkeley appeared online with a mention of Evoca. The Wall Street Journal boasts a daily circulation of 2.1 million with an additional 1.1 million online readers. They have a dozen or so journalists who dispatch for the telecommunications field alone. So needless to say, it is quite noteworthy to be mentioned by WSJ.com.

The article itself focuses on Surfing the Internet for Spoken Words and mentions Evoca partners PodScope as well. You can read the entire article HERE.

Q: I’m a blogger. I have been for a while now. As part of blogging I like to advertise what tools and programs I use to power my blog or to make it as cool as I think it is. Does Evoca have buttons and if so, where do I get them from? -michellefox

A: Thank you for your question, michellefox, and for speaking up and speaking out! Your bring up a great point. We love bloggers and we especially love when they want to become EvocaVangelists spreading some audio love throughout the blogosphere. Let’s have a look at our buttons first though!

We have the big button:

We have the Powered by model:

And we have our cute mascot, Evoca Boca:

Not bad, huh? But, your question is still unanswered. How do you get these buttons? Well, when you’re logged in, head to ‘My Account‘ at the top/right corner. Click on ‘Get the buttons‘ under Spread the word (left/bottom). It’s that simple!