Since our public launch five months ago, we've been rolling out a steady stream of enhancements. Spring is in the air, and we’d like to share some new cool features since our last update.

New Services and Enhanced Integration

We have launched integration with LinkedIn, which was one of the most popular requests. You can now see on Alternion all the news from your LinkedIn contacts as well as your own updates. We import and automatically update all of your LinkedIn contacts, which you can now combine with your friends and subscriptions from other services, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa. We also import your LinkedIn profile information, so you can create your ‘social resume’ by combining it with your ‘About’ information from other services.

Our Twitter integration has been enhanced with the ability to manage direct messages. You can see on Alternion all your Twitter messages and send new ones. We now also import your Twitter favorites and retweets. Editable retweets or “quote tweets” has been another desired feature, which is now available.

Have you visited our Explore Videos sections with the most popular YouTube videos? Not only can you browse and filter trending videos from all around the world, but you can now also search all YouTube videos, as well as videos from a particular channel.

Detailed Contact Pages

If you’re tired of checking your contacts on many different networks, our Contacts People section is here to help. You can now see full profile pages of your contacts from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and Picasa. They include the latest updates of each contact, their most recent profile information, photos, albums and videos. You can filter your contacts by service and by your lists on Facebook and Twitter.

We’re continuing to work on further enhancements to this section following our vision of making it your full-featured social address book.

Facebook Fan Pages

Another very popular request was support for Facebook pages. We heard you and we have added them! When you connect Facebook on Alternion we now automatically connect all your Facebook pages too (privately, of course). You can view their timelines, and you can comment, like, delete, and post new updates from any Page. You can manage an unlimited number of Facebook Pages, even together with other admins managing the same page. And yes, all that is free!

New Photo Viewer

It's now easier than ever to browse and view photos on Alternion. In the past, when you clicked on a photo, you were taken to a new page to view it, losing your place in an endless scroll of photos of your friends and contacts from Facebook, Flickr or Picasa. Now, clicking on a photo opens a lightbox where you can see photos in large size, with detailed info and comments. To go back to exactly where you were, just click outside the lightbox or press the ‘Esc’ key.

Our new photo viewer also allows you to easily browse between different photos (you can expand or hide a line of photo previews) or go to a full screen view, so you can sit back and enjoy a gallery of large photos on a black background. To browse between photos you can also use the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ keys.

These features are available on all pages with photos, including your News Feed and Profile, as well as Contacts Photos and Explore Photos sections. If you’d like to go to a detailed photo page with a separate URL and share a photo with others, you can do it by clicking the “Photo page” icon on the photo in the lightbox.

Even More

We have also introduced many other features and tweaks. Some of the most newsworthy changes include:
- More convenient posting to other services, including the ability to select default accounts for your future posts. If you setup your default accounts, you will still be able to change them for each individual post.
- General optimization and speed enhancements. Our traffic growth has allowed us to identify a few spots which required attention, and we have made a number of back-end improvements to increase the speed and improve scalability. And we’ve never had any downtime, which confirms that our efforts in building a scalable platform have been paying off.
- We’ve added support for several more services, including Instagram, Pinterest and Pinboard. Even more services are coming, as one of our goals is to enable you to stay connected with all your social circles.
- Hundreds of smaller enhancements and bug fixes.

We’re excited for you to check these features out and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

What’s next? Well, we don’t want to spoil the surprise, but be prepared for a major upgrade in the Alternion design and functionality... We’ve been working on that for quite some time already, and we’re hoping to release it very soon. Stay tuned!

After six months in private beta, we’re happy to announce that Alternion is now live and open for everybody! You don’t need a beta invite anymore, which means no more wait, just a simple sign up or even simpler sign in with one click via Facebook or Twitter.

With Alternion you can bring all your social web and email to one place. You can connect your profiles from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and any of 220+ other services. You can connect your email accounts from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and any other IMAP or POP account. Not only can Alternion be your personal aggregation center, but you can also view and comment on updates, photos and videos of your contacts from other networks. We are building Alternion as your ultimate communication center, social address book and much more.

Many of you have asked when you’ll be able to share your Alternion profile with your friends on other networks. The answer is - right now! On your Alternion profile you can collect all of your updates and content from other networks, and share them with your friends from anywhere. Don’t want to share too much? No problem! On Alternion you have full control over your privacy, so you can choose to open as much or as little of your online identity as you wish.

What’s also very cool is that if you’ve connected your Facebook or Twitter accounts to Alternion previously, you can now sign in to your Alternion profile with one click via Facebook and Twitter Connect buttons. (Of course, you still have the option to sign in with your Alternion username and password). If you haven’t connected Facebook or Twitter yet, give it a try to make your future logins to Alternion easier.

We look forward to the very exciting times ahead. We’re very grateful to all of you who gave feedback, spread the word about Alternion on social networks and blogs, or simply used our site and helped us understand what’s working and what’s not. We’ve listened to all your suggestions and will continue to do so.

We’re also excited to announce several new features with our public release.

1. Your “Social Resume”

One of the most requested features was ability to export your profile information (your ‘About’ section) from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Naturally, not everybody wants to write about themselves over and over again on different networks, let alone keep those bits of information in sync. Well, you don’t have to do that anymore. When you connect either of these services to Alternion, we export all of your profile information from these services to your Alternion Profile page.

If you make changes in your ‘About’ sections on other sites, we’ll export these updates to Alternion. And as with all other updates and content on our site, you can filter profile information by different services.

We’re working hard on connecting LinkedIn, so you’ll soon be able to add your professional resume, too.

Of course, your privacy settings will apply to your profile information as well. For example, if you choose to show your Facebook updates only to the people you follow on Alternion, or even keep them private, the same settings will apply to your profile information from Facebook.

2. Creating and Editing Facebook and Twitter Lists

Your already had the ability to aggregate all of your Facebook and Twitter lists on Alternion, including updates and contacts from these lists. Now you can also create and edit or delete your Facebook and Twitter lists directly on Alternion. To do that, simply go to Contacts People section, choose Facebook or Twitter in the left menu, and you’ll be able to edit your existing lists as well as to create and manage new ones.

Today we’re excited to release a new version of Alternion. We’ve been working on it for the past 4 months, so you’ll find quite a few new features. We’re also introducing a new look of the site that will make everything cleaner and easier to use. All these enhancements are another step towards our goal of creating an ultimate social aggregation and content discovery service.

If you visited Alternion during the last couple of weeks, you might have already noticed many of these improvements live in your news feed, profile and other pages as we have been gradually introducing new features to test them live and gather feedback.

We’ve been very busy with the development lately, but we promise to update our blog more frequently from now on :)

So, what improvements await you when you login to the new Alternion?

1. New Design

You can see many interface improvements in your news feed, profile, photos and videos of your contacts, email and direct messages, settings, and most of the other pages. Our first priority, since we started developing Alternion has been to keep everything very clean and easy to use. With the amount of new features and sections we’ve been adding recently, it made sense to rethink the layout.

We kept the general structure, but improved many navigation elements to make it easier for you to navigate between different filters and pages, as well as enrich your overall site experience.