We’re excited to announce that we’ve integrated Facebook Connect into The Point, making it possible for Facebook users to use The Point without setting up and managing a separate account or maintaing a separate login.

Back in December 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect – a service that lets people use their Facebook login and identity on third party sites that provide integration, like The Point.

Connect!

If you already use The Point and have a Facebook account (who doesn’t!?) clicking the Facebook Connect button will link your account on The Point to your Facebook account and you’ll be able to use your Facebook login from then on.

New users of The Point can just click the Facebook Connect button when joining a campaign for the first time, and a quick Facebook login is all it takes – no account setup, no account activation.

Your Facebook login information is never sent to or shared with The Point in any way; it’s entirely handled by Facebook.

Your Portable Identity – You Can Take it With You

Once you’re connected, your identity on Facebook – your name, profile pic – even your friends – will be available on The Point.

Tired of that profile pic?  Change it once on Facebook and it’ll be visible on The Point.

Your Facebook profile information is subject to the same privacy controls on The Point as you set in Facebook.

Let Your Friends Know What You’re Up To on The Point

When you join a campaign on The Point, we’ll ask if you want to publish a Facebook feed item to share it with your Facebook friends.  You’ll see a preview of what the feed item will look like, and have the chance to post it or, of course, say ‘No Thanks’.  It’s up to you.

You’ll also see your friends’ activity on The Point on their feeds so you can keep up with what they’re up to.

What’s next?

Of course, what’s Facebook integration without friends, right?  We’ll be adding features over time to let you see which of your Facebook friends are also using The Point and let you invite them to connect.

For example, you might want to know which of your Facebook friends are already members of a campaign you’ve joined.  Or maybe you want to invite your Facebook friends to a campaign on The Point.

What about Groupon?

For those of you using Groupon in Chicago (and soon Boston, and beyond!) to get great deals through the power of collective buying, you probably know that Groupon is powered by The Point.  We’ll be making the Facebook Connect features of The Point available to all Groupon users in the coming weeks.

-Filed in Groupon, News, The Point, Uncategorized

We’re excited to announce our newest site section: Community.

Community is a one-stop-shop for you to keep up on what people are saying and doing on The Point.   The goals for Community are to help you find people to connect and collaborate with, and to inspire you by highlighting success and recognizing people who are doing great things at The Point.  Community includes the latest discussion, top contributors, new members, success stories and more.

There are lots of useful features wrapped up in Community, with more to come.  We hope you like it – stop by and let us know what you think or give your suggestions on how we can make it even better.

Here are the highlights:

Discussion

Keep up on the discussion going on within campaigns at The Point, start your own conversation by posting your campaign idea to the Brainstorm forum, or join the General Discussion.

You’ll always see the latest posts in all forums right on the main Community page, and be able to dive in with a click.

We also gather all discussion happening within all campaigns into a single view called Campaign Discussion, where you can see what people are saying elsewhere all around The Point.

Find People

You can do a quick search to find people you want to connect with on The Point.  We’ll be expanding this in the future to help you find people by geographic location, your address book entries and more.

Success Stories

From time to time, we’ll be featuring people who are having success with The Point, and we’ll talk about what made their campaigns tick.  We think this will help you find ways to make your campaigns more successful, or inspire you to start a new campaign.

Each time you visit the Community page, you’ll see a randomly-chosen Success Story.  You can click to see another, or click-through ‘Read More‘ to see a mini case study.

New Faces

You’ll see the newest members of The Point on the Community page.  We only show new members with profile pics, though.  Generally speaking, we find that people are more successful when they have a visual identity online – even if it’s a picture of your dog with a party hat – so we’ll be favoring people with a profile pic when we feature members around The Point.

Top Contributors

We like to give recognition for a job well done.  Here we’re showing people who are having the biggest impact on The Point.  We use a scoring system that gives points for creating successful campaigns, joining campaigns, and recruiting others to join campaigns, and contributing to discussion.  The Top Contributors leader board is just a start – we’ll be adding more ways to recognize our members’ great work in upcoming releases.

Successful Organizers

People who have run successful campaigns are given some time in the spotlight here.  Like Success Stories, we randomly choose a group to show each time you visit Community.

The Point Blogs

Finally, at the bottom of the Community page, you’ll find the most recent posts from here on our blog.

-Filed in News, The Point

Over the past few months, we’ve been beavering away on the 1.0 version of The Point, making campaigns more flexible, improving the visual design, boosting performance, and a whole host of other improvements.

Now that we’ve delivered our 1.0 and are on a more steady schedule of delivering new features and improvements, we’ll be announcing what we’re up to here on the blog.  We’re just getting started – we have a lot of great stuff in the works!

Our aim is to release improvements to the site every week, some big, some small. Here are some highlights of what we’ve delivered in the past few weeks:

Embeddable Campaign Widget

Anyone can now embed a widget into their blog or website that allows people to join a campaign directly from there.  Today, the widget can be used for campaigns that aren’t raising money, but this week we’ll be delivering an update to allow people to join fundraisers as well.

Related Campaigns

We now show you a list of related campaigns in the left sidebar of the main campaign page, helping you find other campaigns that you might be interested in checking out.  Relationships are based on similarities among campaigns such as the same organizer, a high number of the same members or tags, etc.

Follow Campaign Discussion

You can now follow a topic or the entire discussion within a campaign.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for a topic, you’ll get an email for all new posts to that topic.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for the campaign discussion, you’ll get an email for any new topic that’s created or any new post.  You can turn ‘Follow’ off at any time with a single click, or from a link in any of the email that you get.

If you’re the organizer of a campaign, you’ll automatically be set up to ‘Follow’ the discussion as a convenience.

Invite People to a Campaign from your Email Address Book

The campaign invitation page now has an option to send invites to anyone in your Yahoo!, GMail, Outlook, AOL or Plaxo address book.  We never ever see nor save any of your email account information.

-Filed in News, The Point