We’re excited to announce that we’re joining the talented team at Airtime and will be continuing what we set out to do: develop interesting new social consumer services.

Our apologies for being so cryptic about what’s coming next, but we haven’t launched yet and we’re not quite ready to share the details. But you can sign up to be among the first to know as soon as our doors open.

As for Erly Events, our existing service, we want to take care of our users. We’ll continue to maintain the website for users through the end of the year at erly.com, and during that time you’ll continue to be able to create and view your Events on the site. Users have always been able to download all their content from Erly Event albums, and before the end of the year we’ll also release a viewer so that you’ll be able to continue to view your downloaded Events in the same layout as they are displayed on Erly.com.

Thank you all for sharing your events with us at Erly and we hope to see you soon at Airtime.

Sincerely,

Team Erly

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We’ve just released a series of updates to Erly. Here’s a quick rundown.

Erly allows you to both plan future events and commemorate those that have already occurred, and our users have been using the site for both. While an event is an event, more information is required for an event in the future (e.g. event details like location and start time), so we’ve bifurcated the new event creation flow. Depending on whether you’re creating an event webpage for a future or past event, we’ll present you with a custom flow.

We’ve also added some more options for customizing your Events. You can now change the typeface choice, color, size, and background color and opacity for the information for your Event.

Finally, we’ve integrated a suite of fun and useful photo editing tools from Aviary. On any photo in any of your albums, click the Open Photo Filters button to access these tools. In addition to common editing functions like Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Redeye, you’ll find some fun filters like Toy Camera, Old Photo, and Retro for applying simple 1-click makeovers to your photos.

As always, we remain committed to making it as fast and easy as possible to create beautiful, elegant Event pages and albums, whether they’re for events you’re planning or past experiences you’re looking to commemorate. Let us know if you have any other feedback or requests at feedback@erly.com.

Team Erly

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When we launched our first product Collections, we noted that we’d be working on a product focused on future events. For events that have already occurred, your primary concern is to remember and document the event with photos and other content. For events in the future, discovery and planning and promotion are more critical. But every future event eventually comes to pass and becomes an event you want to remember, and so Collections are useful regardless of whether an event is in the future, present, or past. So rather than launch a new, separate product, we decided to integrate Collections into our new product, which we’re launching today. We call it Events.

We continue to be focused on the experience graph, and the basic unit of the experience graph is an event. We believe Events from Erly is the fastest way to build a beautiful webpage for any event in your life. If you want to document an experience in your past, as many people have been doing with Collections, you can still do so by creating an Event on Erly. All the functionality of Collections is included in Events, and the new name better encompasses the scope of the product, besides being more straightforward and self-explanatory.

For planning an event in the future, however, we’ve added some new features to make it as easy as possible to plan and promote. To set up an Event on Erly, simply enter the Event details (what, when, where) and then choose a background for your Event webpage. You can choose from one of our high-res fullscreen images for your background— we’ve added many more to cover common event types and even integrated web image search — but as with Collections, you can choose an image of your own for a more personal touch.

Inviting people to your Event can be as simple as copying the link to your Event page and emailing it to people or posting it on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere. Guests clicking through on that link will be sent to your Event page to read details about the Event and RSVP. But we also support the more common online event planning model in which Erly can email custom invites to a specific list of guests. Simply provide us with the email addresses of the guests you want us to invite.

Every Event webpage comes with a discussion thread and, as noted above, a multimedia album. At any time, guests can add photos, videos, text, and links to the album for an Event. While most people tend to add photos and other content during or after the event, we’ve had lots of fun during testing adding content before an Event occurs. What better way to build anticipation for a special dinner out than posting a few photos of dishes from the restaurant or linking to a glowing review in the press? What better way to fire people up for a concert than posting a video of one of the artists greatest hits? It’s the equivalent of the postcard you pinned to your cubicle wall, the postcard of that beach you’re hoping to visit someday.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments. We still have a long list of ideas and plans for how to extend our platform, and your feedback helps us to prioritize our work.

Thanks,

Team Erly
feedback@erly.com

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We’ve released another batch of updates to Collections. Some of these were planned, but many resulted from your feedback. Thanks to all of our users for your thoughtful notes.

Our goal with Collection has always been to give people the tools to quickly create a beautiful shared album for a shared experience. People will occasionally build websites for big experiences in their life, like a wedding, but doing so takes an immense effort and typically is only done by more technically inclined users. We want to lower the bar to building a microsite for an experience so that anyone can quickly post a page to collect the content from any event they wish to remember, however big or small.

The biggest visual update to Collections is the addition of a cover page for each Collection. We’ve always planned to give users more control over the look and feel of their Collections, and this is another step in that direction. Now, when you create a new Collection, you can select a photo to serve as a full-screen cover photo. We’ll overlay information about the event (title, date, location, an optional description) on top of the photo, and users who visit your Collection will see this full-screen cover first.

The cover page provides a dramatic entry to any Collection, but for events in the future, it can serve as a beautiful event information page that transitions into the cover of a Collection once the event occurs and content starts to accumulate. The cover page also includes a few other pieces of information: the number of likes and comments and a guest list of who was there. You can add people to the guest list, or people can add themselves.

We’ve added numerous other updates and bug fixes. Among those are the following:

• You can now like and comment on both Collections and any item in the Collections.
• Notes are now editable.
• You can email photos into a Collection. Send an email from your Erly email address (or your default Facebook email address if you created an account through Facebook Connect) to editor@erly.com, put the title or at least one word from the title of the Collection you want to add content to, and put the photo in the body of the email.
• We’ve added an Activity feed for every user. The feed includes updates on any Collection you’ve built or liked and any Collection you’re on the guest list for.
• You can now optionally password protect your Collections so that only users with the password can view the content.

We no longer require Facebook Connect to create an account. Users can create an Erly account with an email address and password now. To simplify the work of creating Collections with others, the owner of a Collection no longer has to add and/or approve other people to contribute to that Collection. Anyone with the link to a Collection can contribute content, so inviting other people to contribute is as easy as sending them the link.

We built Collections to provide every event and experience a permanent, beautiful home. We’ll continue to update Collections to be the best place for you to build a page for any event, so please continue to pass along your feedback and suggestions.

Thanks,

Team Erly
feedback@erly.com

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Thanks to all of you who’ve offered notes and feedback on Collections since it launched last week. We’ve released some updates today, some planned, and some based on your feedback:

• To simplify Collection creation, we now automatically create Collections from all your albums on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and SmugMug when you connect those accounts. Privacy settings are preserved, so private albums on those services are imported as private Collections. You can delete any Collections you don’t want from your Timeline.
• We now support SmugMug as a photo source. You can link up SmugMug from the Add Photo form in a Collection or from your Settings page.
• When albums are imported, we now sort photos from left to right, oldest to newest by time snapped.
• Within each Collection, you can now drag and insert or drag and swap content cards to achieve the exact ordering you desire. Drag any item on top of another item to swap the position of those two items. Drag any item to a border between two items to insert that item there and shift other items to accommodate it.
• Now, when you are inside a Collection and add an item, we drop it into the Collection in the upper left corner of the section of the Collection you’re viewing at that moment.
• We’ve increased the number of photos you can add in one batch to 100 from 50, and we’ve increased the maximum number of items per Collection to 500 from 250.
• A few assorted performance improvements and bug fixes.

More big updates are on the way shortly, so stay tuned! As always, your feedback, suggestions, and requests are welcome.

Thanks,

Team Erly
feedback@erly.com

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During the past two months, our team has spent a lot of time together. Most of our time together, in fact. Working, for the most part, and eating (which is really important to us). Like many people today, we snap a lot of photos, fire off status updates, check in at restaurants we visit for team meals.

But with every day that passes, it becomes harder to track down that exact photo, or remember when it was exactly that we reached a particular milestone, or visited a particular restaurant. Usually it involves trying to remember who captured the content, and then trying to find which service they published it to, and then digging back through that service to track down the content.

The story of how we started Erly and our fun and intense first months together is one of many experiences we want to capture, and while it’s easier than ever to produce content around these experiences, it’s still too difficult to organize in a usable way. A variety of services have made it easier than ever for us to organize all the people in our lives, but too many of our pictures, stories, and digital memories continue to be buried in hard drives, emails, and feeds.

This is first of many problems we want to tackle at Erly, where our mission is to build a series of linked products and services to help you find, discover, plan, organize, share, and remember your life’s experiences. We plan to do that by having all of our products and services build off of what we’re calling the experience graph. In contrast to a friend graph, of which there are many great examples already and which organizes all content by the people you know, the experience graph aims to organize content and connect people through their shared experiences.

To that end, today we’re launching our first product: Collections. We built Collections to give groups of people a simple, beautiful way to gather and share all the content from their experiences. Collections are collaborative albums that can hold all types of content, from photos to text, to videos, to webpage links.

When you sign up for Erly, you’ll find a sample Collection. In it, we’ve shared a bit of our company history so you can see how you can use Collections. Each Collection is a permanent home for an experience. They need not be as momentous as starting a company. As we’ve played with Collections, we’ve found ourselves building Collections for everything from a team dinner (we like to eat) and past vacations to business articles that have guided us in building our startup or online videos that we pass around to each other when we need a laugh.

You can learn more about Collections and Erly and sign up for a free account at Erly.com. We’d love to hear your thoughts and requests at feedback@erly.com or @erlyco on Twitter or www.facebook.com/erly. And stay tuned for more updates to Collections and new products coming soon; our plan is to release early and often.

Thanks!

Team Erly
feedback@erly.com

P.S.: If our mission interests you and you happen to be a great developer or designer, drop us a note at jobs@erly.com. We’re still looking for a few good people to join us in the Bay Area or New York City.

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