Ohpan Prepares to Blossom

It has been a week since Ohpan, the news aggregation service that sends an endless stream of news across your computer screen, opened.

I spoke to Simon Plashkes via email today to get the update on what’s been happening at Ohpan over the past week.  They have some big ideas up in Canada as to what their service can, and will, eventually do.  They are hard at work making improvements/enhancements to the service based on known issues and user feedback.  Below is the list of things Simon and his crew have been working on for us:

Over the last week we have:

• Dealt with guest login issues impacting about 30% of attempts
• Improved scrolling code to reduce client resource requirements
• Implemented the much requested, pause on open feature

Sometime later today we’re launching an important enhancement to forwarding: as it currently stands, users can cause items to appear in the streams of friends (or, right now, ANYONE using the beta). You can load address books from Facebook/Google or ‘Ohpan Beta’, and double clicking on a name will add it to the recipients list.

What we are adding later tonight: ‘Now when recipients get a forwarded message, they will be able to see all of the other recipients, the message, and an immediate chance to reply. Usernames of co-recipients will also be linked to the published collection of each of those recipients – clicking will show all items that a given user has ‘published’

Obviously they are making progress.  I also asked Simon about the memory usage issues I was experiencing that were bogging down the rest of my system and he told me the performance changes on the stream should help a lot with the memory issues; on some browsers more than others.  So things are progressing.

There are still some little glitches that I see here and there.  The links on the bottom of the stream page don’t seem to work.  There is no “Sign Out” button, and still no “Pause” button (but it is under consideration).  It would also be nice to be able to see known issues and upcoming enhancement on a separate page.  This could avoid duplicate requests from users.

If anyone has the opportunity to sign on with a friend and look at trading stories back and forth, please let me know how it works for you.  And, as always, you can send email/suggestions to Simon and his team at ateam@ohpan.com or find him on Twitter.  Judging from how quickly, and thoroughly, Simon got back to me today, they should be pretty accommodating.

One last note, I meant to ask him about the progress on the iPhone app, but completely forgot.  More updates to come…