When I was starting out with web design and development around 10 years ago I used to subscribe to a magazine called .net. I used to read it each month and follow their tutorials. After a while I stopped subscribing in favour for finding the same content online. It's a great magazine though and it's nice to read something printed even if the news can be a little outdated with the speed things move at now as a result of things like Twitter.

Many of you will be aware of the energy and enthusiasm Oo puts into what he truly believes in, and OnePage was no different. Oo put his passion behind OnePage to drive it forward as co-founder dealing with business, marketing and shaping the experience of the service. We recently agreed that it would be better for OnePage if one of us were to take it forward and Oo is kindly stepping down from the day-to-day runnings of OnePage. I am delighted to say we will both be supporting each other in current and future ventures. Oo has played an important role in shaping the start of the process and I hope that he will continue to be a great ambassador for the service.

So, what happens next?

I am now taking things forward by myself and am prepared for a tough but exciting journey ahead. There are many requests which have been coming in through our UserVoice forum and there are also many enhancements I have in mind myself. I'm happy to say that growth has never been better than it is right now and you are choosing to use OnePage from all over the planet. Remember, we are still in the early stages and your input will make a real difference, so get in touch and be part of something big. Thanks for all your support so far, and I look forward to being in touch with you all. Joel

We have been missing because we have been busy creating the product you want. I am happy to announce the following features

Embed

You can now embed your (and any OnePage) on your blog, or website. Yes, go ahead and kiss the contact form on your about page goodbye :). All you need to do is click the embed tab and it displays a link which you can put where you want  to embed it. The card below is a live embed:)

Storing contacts

People have asked what they should do if they come, across a OnePage they want to take note of. Well that's simple, store the card with a click.

Multiple Sign in

We know you are tired of remembering those pesky email addresses and passwords which is why we have created multiple was to sign in. So no more excuses. Go ahead, and create your OnePage and share the love, it takes only a few seconds.

Please let us have a feedback. Yes, you can contact me through my OnePage

We are pleased to announce OnePage is the first statup (we know of) that has implemented the new  Facebook OAuth login which was announced by Mark Zuckerberg a few hours ago at the ongoing f8 conference. What this means for our existing users is that you can login to  your OnePage with your Facebook account* automatically. New users can get a complete OnePage in about 3 clicks and 30 seconds.

Of course Joel was the one that did the implementation and talks about it below. I leave you with one quote from Joel

“Facebook's new login is so easy, I feel I have not done anything"

Thanks Zuck, you can have a beer on us.

*As long as you previously added Facebook to OnePage. If not, login normally and add Facebook and it will work for you.

The implementation

If you saw the f8 keynote earlier, you might have noticed how easy Mark Zuckerberg and Brett Taylor made it sound to implement Facebook into your website now. I am very happy to say that it is in fact as easy as they said. In the process of developing OnePage we inherently deal with many social APIs, Twitter and LinkedIn being the others which use OAuth. With OAuth 2.0, the use of signatures is eliminated and instead HTTPS is used to get the access token used for API calls. Implementing the authorisation process is as simple as sending the user to a link, getting a code passed back to your page and then accessing a URL with that code in order to get the access token. Once you've got the access token you can use the new Facebook Graph API to obtain JSON data objects for various information stored within Facebook.

For OnePage, this means we've been able to easily facilitate a process where users can sign up using Facebook and we can grab their Name, Photo, About me, Email and Birthday to add to their OnePage profile. This means the signup process is now shorter than ever before.

Your OnePage becomes more useful if more people know about it. Towards this end, we have put in a little feature that will help you in spreading your OnePage. Share. With a click you can tell people on Facebook and Twitter how awesome your page is. You can even change your ‘website’ on  Twitter to your OnePage address. We made a little screencast to show you how it works. Let us know your thoughts in the comments

It has been about eight months since Joel and I launched the first version of OnePage, which was created in response to our scattered identities and contact points in various places on the web, we wanted to bring order to that space. In the past months, we have made several changes to our product, logo (yet again), design and even the web url. It was all in a bid to find the right direction as regards to what our users have told us.  We moved very slowly as we had several commitments (school, work, etc). Eventually, we decided if we really wanted to make this happen, we had to take the plunge and go full time. This meant being in the same place (I was in Coventry and Joel in Sheffield). We decided to move to  Birmingham and luckily, got into the BSEEN program almost immediately. We are happy to say we are now ready for primetime.

Opening up means people can sign up to OnePage without waiting for an invite and more frightening is the fact that we do not have any control over growth :)! In the coming weeks, we have some interesting features we hope will make your OnePage more useful. Please just keep giving us feedback. If you have not signed up, please do and tell your friends to do so too.

Thank you for all the support!

We are pleased to announce that OnePage has been chosen to be a part of the BSEEN Programme.

The BSEEN (Birmingham Skills for Enterprise and Employability Network) programme aims to offer graduates and students a diverse package of support at a time when many will see business start-up and self employment as an attractive career option. With incubator support, training, mentoring and career guidance, the programme will give participants the tools they need to succeed. A city-wide network of entrepreneurs will give much-needed peer support and access to the regional economy.

Asides the mentorship and training that will be provided, we get a FREE office space for 6 months at the Birmingham Science Park Aston (pictured below), in addition to a little monthly stipend. It is a really exciting milestone for us, as for once, we would now have some form of stability almost one year after starting OnePage. You will certainly notice our pace pick up exponentially as we will dedicate as much time possible to OnePage.

We are being joined by a group of other young entrepreneurs who were chosen alongside ourselves. What is more exciting is that we will be sharing the same space with about 18 other startups from the e4f programme most of which are digital technology companies. We will blog about our new neighbours in a subsequent post.

We are very grateful to the Birmingham City council, Aston University, everybody involved, most especially Simon Jenner, who alerted me to this great opportunity.

We want let you know of some new features we have added to OnePage based on Feedback

1. Reorganisation of services: You are now able to position any of your services anyway you want.
2. Auto population of your card with LinkedIn. When someone signs up newly, the person can half fill his/her card by just signing into LinkedIn. This feature is enabled for new users only.
3. Cropping of Pictures. When you upload a picture, you can now select the part of the picture you want to be the profile picture. We recommend choosing your face though ;)
4. We have added a bunch of services to stay abreast with the unending number of contact points we have everyday. They are Gowalla, SlideShare and WordPress.

Hurry along and play with the additions. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. If there are particular services you will like to see next, let us know in the comments. As I said on my personal blog, Joel will join me in Birmingham so we can move at the required speed. Thank you for keeping faith in us.

Creating a startup is hard, really hard, and it has been for us here at OnePage. Quite a lot of twists and turns have occurred since we launched and even since our last post. The only thing that has not changed is our determination to see OnePage become a success. We actually had to make a lot of changes under the hood which is why it seemed we had abandoned the site. We will explain all the “behind the scenes” stories and causes for delay on a later date. For now this post is about the changes that have been made to the OnePage product. The reoccurring feedback (aside bugs) we received since our initial release was that our product was not well defined: it seemed we could be anything or everything, thereby being nothing. Someone actually thought we wanted to create something like Tweetdeck!  Our vagueness limited the amount of useful feedback we could get since people were suggesting things in completely different directions. We take the blame for this mix up which we will throw more light on this in a subsequent post. Let us now clearly define what OnePage is supposed to be:

OnePage is a digital platform for creating, sharing and storing business/contact cards.

For OnePage to be complete, you should be able to create, share (especially with mobile phones) and store business cards. As students of the lean startup, we are focusing on the first part: create. We want to be sure you can create your card in the easiest possible way and like it enough to be willing to share it, i.e. use it as your default email signature, ‘website’ on Twitter and Facebook, etc. One great thing about the new OnePage is that you do not need to be on many social networks to find it useful. See my card below: And if you have several contact points, you will also love  and find OnePage very useful. See Joel’s card below: You may notice that we have removed several features (for now) to simplify our offering. The reason being we are not sure we know what you find useful so we have decided to put out the minimum feature set. Changes made include: Addition: The card is much more like a business card compared to what we had before. You can add multiple contacts of the same service (RSS, Twitter) and even label it too. Subtraction: The stream does not exist anymore (is that a good move?). We have also removed the various backgrounds. Other: The landing page has also changed to communicate what OnePage is in the shortest possible time. Is it clear enough? We also sorted a lot of the issues raised in Uservoice. We want your OnePage to be your primary url/website, the single thing you need give people so they can then connect with you in the one million other places you exist (Skype, Twitter, email, Blog, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn etc). An excellent use case is your Twitter account which has only one entry field for ‘Website’; you can safely put your OnePage there and people can connect with you everywhere. Another good use is as a better alternative for your email signature. see picture below. You may notice that we do not use Posterous for our blog anymore. It is not that we do not like Posterous (we think it is a very lovely product) but Wordpress is much more extensible and better suited for what we envisage out company blog to be like. We want to use this blog to talk about our product and more importantly document our journey launching our startup. Our role model blog is the 37Signals blog. We believe that if we teach what we are learning, we will learn and benefit more. I hope you visit more frequently (you can subscribe to our RSS feed, Fan us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter). Thank you for all your support. Welcome to the journey! Please let us know what you think.

A lot of people have been asking that question since it seems no activity has been taking place on the site.  We really appreciate your concern therefore we have decided to update you on what we have been up to. One of the challenges we have had was making people understand the primary function of OnePage. This confusion was brought about since it looked like it could do quite a number of things. This might have been because we follow the lean startup here which suggests you put out the minimum viable product. The risk of that means you might have your customer requests deviate from what your product is supposed to be since the minimum viable product might not be self explanatory enough. Therefore we have decided be much clearer when we do our next iteration.

Our plan for OnePage is to change the way we network by revolutionizing the contact/ business card, we decided to take important steps therefore we are taking the following steps in our new iteration

Standardization: If you read the last post on semantic markup by our wonderful Chief Designer Laura, you would realize the importance of interoperability and seamless integration with various standards of the web and mobile

Scalability: Since we are certain that with your help OnePage will grow, OnePage CTO Joel has taken some steps to ensure that the architecture of OnePage will be allergic to fail whales.  The refactoring of some of the code has meant that we had to slow down a bit.

Structure: At the moment, we work on OnePage part time so we can pay the bills, which meant that we have to be conscious in managing our growth. We have had lots of wonderful requests from you our users and we want to ensure the time between working on an issue you have raised is done in the barest minimum time therefore we have undergone some behind the scene restructuring.

All we want to do is just to let you know we are listening and we really appreciate the support you are giving us. Please keep flooding the Uservoice with your awesome suggestions. We will soon (really soonJ) be bringing out a new version and what OnePage is about will be clear in 4 seconds, Deal?