Friday, May 11, 2007

Welcome Our Newest Partner: Plaxo - Helping Us Spread The Word, One Address Book At A Time.

Here is the deal - we are a small startup trying to take on the likes of CL and other giants… we don’t have time to write import tools for the dozens of mail systems floating around the web… we have to keep our eye on the prize. BUT we knew when we launched our Tell-A-Friend marketing feature a couple weeks ago, we needed a way to let our merchants import their friends in a fast, easy, reliable and secure way.

Enter Plaxo. One of our laziest engineers (god bless avoidance) did a little ‘research’ - instead of coding his 3rd address book import - and found them. Plaxo’s Open Platform Program lets us import addresses from gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, aol, outlook, thunderchicken and everything else we thought our merchants might want… It took a couple of hours to add their code to our code and do some testing and viola…. we were in business. Actually, you - our loyal merchants - are in business. With a few simple clicks, you can import hundreds of your friends - and send them all an email announcing your latest post on Gumiyo. That’s it. Simple.

We were so excited about this ‘extra’ time - that we made a little movie about our new feature - check it. It stars our very own VP Rich as he bravely makes his way through the tell-a-friend process. It is like 30 seconds of your life people and it would really help [enter reason here i.e. save the world, end hunger, make a crying kid happy]. Seriously… Do it… no, no, Do it.

We are proud of our partnerships - and Plaxo is another great partner. They provide a well-tested, secure and reliable component in our ever growing platform of tools to help connect sellers with buyers. Check them out.