Hey, Smubbers!

If you’ve created or followed a smubbed link lately, you may have noticed some changes to the look & feel of the Smub banner. Hopefully, you will like it a super bunch, but please feel free to let us know what you think.

You may also have noticed that we now use OAuth for logging into your Twitter account — just trying to simplify the smubbing process for you.

Additionally, we’ve done some bug fixing for smubbing from iPhones, particularly in regard to emailing links.

As always, please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any comments, questions or observations. We’re here for you!

Talk to you soon!

Howdy, Smubbers!

Everyone at Smub has been busy working on a brand new and very exciting offering! It’s hush-hush at the moment, but we’ll be able to share with you soon!

In the meantime, we’ve got a brand new, handy update for you! If you’ve been using the Smub toolbar for Firefox and IE to access smubs, you’ll find that the latest update allows the shortcut field to automatically complete your smub, based on the first three letters you’ve typed in! This is particularly handy if you can quite recollect the shortcut you’re looking for, but have some idea of what it may be!

ENJOY!

I’m sitting in my home office in Portland, Oregon, watching the snow gracefully fall in front of the window. Its been snowing here all week, an odd occurrance. We’re not exactly set up for snow events, so weird things happen:

• The local news starts at 4:00 a.m. and goes ’til 10:00 a.m., then returns at 4:00 p.m. ’til 7:30 p.m.
• School districts cancel classes two days in advance, then hope the snow hits
• Or, school districts open for the day, but close two hours later…
• Stores are overrun with people stocking up on bread and milk

It seems no one here knows how to handle the snow. Few of us (unless we’re skiers) have snow tires or chains, and very few of us grew up understanding how to drive in the snow. (No one wants me out on the streets this week!)

So what’s happening all over town, all over the NorthWest, and in other areas (I’m imagining in Las Vegas and Southern California), people unused to the snow have a reprieve from “normalcy.”

• We stock up on bread and milk, and get the urge to bake… (http://smub.it/jlj/crunchcookies)

Smub to Great Cookie Recipe

• We set up informal networks to share information about weather conditions around town… like Portland’s #pdxtst (Portland Twitter storm trackers) (http://smub.it/jlj/pdxtst)

Smub of #pdxtst Tweets

• …And we do an awful lot of picture taking and sharing… (http://smub.it/jlj/flickr)

Smub shortcut to Flickr photostream

And we share and share and share… on our blogs, on Facebook, via Twitter, in email and on the phone.

Perhaps it’s the holiday season, perhaps it’s the snow. But people are connecting and sharing experiences like never before. It’s a joy to watch and participate.

I like to Smub in the snow… you?

What if you could shortcut your way around the complexity and richness of the web with the simplicity of using one word? We’re testing this premise here at Smub.

We believe people are yearning for more simplicity in their lives. (When was the last time you yearned for more complexity? Here’s a pretty good solution for you then. Enjoy!)

So in conversations at the office yesterday, we got into discussing the real value we all find in using Smub, and it kind of all came down to one word access to anything online.

Here’s how we think about it, and we would be terribly interested in your thoughts:

I went over to Chris Brogan’s excellent blog on community and social media this morning. He had a guest post from Theresa Wu on what Generation Y expects from work. Since we’re marketing to Gen Y here at Smub, I thought the rest of the team would like to read it, too.

We all use the Smub Toolbar, which looks like this:

Smub toolbar - one word, go!

From the toolbar, I was able to create my Smub of the article, and I named it GenY. (Okay, perhaps GenY isn’t exactly one word, but when you read it or text it to someone, it comes across as a perfectly memorable URL.) And it beats the heck out of this:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/guest-post-generation-y-in-the-workplace-explained/

I can let Heather know she needs to check out this article by simply saying “Check out geny. It’s a great article.”

I’ve mentioned before that I can use my Smub toolbar to gain access to other people’s Smubs. Once I know any Smub user has shared a Smub, all I have to do is go to my toolbar and type in their “handle,” and any one word will take me to their shared page.

For example… my friend Matt has a Smub account. (As an aside, he also has a blog called “The Monk and The Riddle of The Red Rubber Ball.” You can bet I Smubbed that down to “matt.”)

In my toolbar, I choose “Goto…” (vs. “Create) and type in “Matt” and “auto,” and up pops a BusinessWeek article on the automakers he found interesting in November, just when the brouhaha started.

Get your friends' Smubs from your toolbar

And the word “auto” does a heck of a lot better job communicating a place Matt cares for me to see than this:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_48/b4110000545461.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story

Ironically (via Twitter), I found that Matt and I both have “geny” Smubs…

Guess where his goes? http://smub.it/matt/geny … Wanna see mine? http://smub.it/janet/geny

(Anyone can ‘consume’ a Smub, just by typing into your browser window, even with out a Smub account or toolbar.)

And sometimes, one word - even if it’s “GenY” or “geny” - is all it takes to get you where you want to go.

What do you think? Compelling? Interesting? Too much fuss? Let us know.

Todd was visiting his sister (I hope I’m getting the familial relations right!) over the Thanksgiving holiday. Her husband is a contractor, and found something at Home Depot that he really needed. He ran down to the store, and didn’t find it on the floor. (Raise your hand if that’s ever happened to you!)

He found somebody to help him (raise your hand if that’s ever happened within 15 minutes of your need!) and between them, they couldn’t figure out exactly which mat he was looking for. So he did the next best thing, he called his wife to ask her.

She went online to the Home Depot site to find the mat, which she did. It probably was a URL that looked kind of like this:

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100607095&N=10000003+90401+500018

Lucky for all of them (especially the store clerk, who’d moved to the computer in the store to surf along with Todd’s sister), Todd was visiting. As she started to try to describe the mat to to the clerk, Todd said, hey, just Smub the page, and he can see exactly what you need from his browser.

She typed smub.it/ to the left of the http://, and was able to create a Smub that probably looked kind of like this:

http://smub.it/janet/mat

And reading that simple URL over the phone to the clerk was all it took to turn what might have taken ten minutes into two.

Okay, so it’s not turning lead into gold; but in this day and age, anything that’ll save time, improve communications and shorten the distance to success is pretty magical.

There’s a personal story behind every Smub. What’s yours?

I have come to love the Smub toolbar, which is an entirely optional, but very cool add-on to Smub’s innate capabilities, which work without any downloads or add-ons. I can use the toolbar to shortcut my way through the web.

Smub toolbar is a shortcut to any shared Smub

Using the toolbar, I can pop among my own Smubs, (typing in “bank,” for example, takes me right to my bank login page). But it gets really cool when I can share other’s Smubs from the toolbar.

Go right to any Smub that's been shared

Thierry, our CEO here at Smub, has been using Smub longer than almost anyone. He has Smubbed just about everything he’s ever wanted to share online. He’s even Smubbed Craigslist searches (more on that soon, suffice it to say, you can do so). So anytime I want to reference something he’s shared with me, I can just select “thierry” from my Smub toolbar, and type the specific Smub I want to find, and voila! I’m there.

The toolbar is currently available for Firefox or IE users.