Colnect, Connecting Collectors. Colnect offers revolutionizing services to Collectors the world over. Colnect is available in 63 languages and offers extensive collectible catalogs and the easiest personal collection management and Auto-Matching for deals. Join us today :)
Sunday, April 5, 2009
GMail turn 5 - still BETA??? Colnect will not follow.
Google even created the 'beta' mark trend in logos of companies and services.
I personally find it rediculous and unfair to the customers. Of course products sometimes fail but we cannot abuse the term "BETA" for 5 (FIVE!!!) years.
Colnect has been marked as beta for less than 6 months since it went public before all key features were ready and prior to proper testing. Raising a site from grass-roots up is not a simple task. However, as of today, since Colnect is relatively stable and many of its key features (a lot more is to come but I'll elaborate on that another time) are ready and publicly available, the BETA mark will be removed.
Yes, my system may sometimes fail. Yes, it's not as perfect as I'd like it to be. However, it's public, it's working, it makes many people using it happy so it's not a beta anymore.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Buying and selling collectibles
Buy List / Sell List
These lists are available with Premium Membership. Unlike Custom Personal Lists, collectibles added to these lists appear on the Collectors inventory information section of each single collectible item page.
When adding collectibles to these lists it is best to put the relevant price in the public note box. We suggest using world-popular currencies and use their 3 letter code rather than symbol. Example: USD is always US dollar, but the $ sign has different meaning in different countries.
NOTE! Prices you quote must be valid. You may add details regarding trades on your personal page under My Account. Complaints received regarding invalid prices (for example: you offered to sell an item for a certain price but later asked for a higher price) will be investigated. If you are found dishonest, your Colnect account may be deactivated without any refunds.
Japanese and Lithuanian languages added
Translations on Colnect are performed manually by volunteering translators who are members of the site. Whenever a phrase is not properly translated they can translate it easily. It's all explained here.
A recent addition is the use of automated suggestions. When a phrase has not yet been translated, it'll first be translated with an automated suggestion. An icon telling the translator he should translate (or confirm) that phrase still exists. The use of suggestions is intended for the period of time after a new content is published on Colnect (which is quite often) until a translator actually gets to translate it.
Yes, automated translations sometimes suck really bad. For example "FREE trial - 1 month" had a Hebrew suggestion that can be translated back to English as "Free trial - 1 year". What?!?! How did a month become a year? That is quite dangerous and I hope these mistakes are not too frequent. I hope that the automated suggestions many times "get over the net", meaning they are understood by the reader although acknowledged as improper language use.
Japanese is currently the only language for which Colnect yet has no translator and so we rely on the automatic suggestions. It's a sort of pilot to see if it can attract Japanese collectors and hopefully one of them will agree to become a translator. If this experiment succeeds, other languages may be added this way. A warning message will be displayed with languages that are not completely manually translated.
You're welcomed to check Transposh for translation solutions.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Twitter fails as a promotional tool?
* Colnect news Twitter @colnect
* A personal Twitter for Colnect's manager @AmirWald
* Automated feed reporting new collectibles in Colnect's catalogs @ColnectCatalogs
* Automated feed on Colnect's catalog edits @ColnectEdits
During these days 28 visits came to Colnect from Twitter, a meager amount in comparison to the number of "followers" and energy invested. The bounce rate (visitors seeing a single page and leaving the site) was incredibly high as well. In comparison, a few posts on a relevant forum resulted in hundreds of relevant visits (with much lesser bounce rate).
It seems a lot of people use Twitter to self promote and so it's more of a bubble where "followers" is a rough indication of the number of people who will actually read anything of what you write. My guess is that for most people, a small percent of their "followers" actually read more than 5% of their tweets. Though some people think of it as a useful personal tool, it doesn't seem like they dominate Twitter.
Though less than a week may be a too short amount of time for a verdict, results so far are very unsatisfying. In the future, the automated feeds may be of use to some of the addict collectors on Colnect. Let's see what the future brings.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Colnect on Twitter
Easier than blog posts? Obviously...
Useful? hmmm.....
Anyway, you're welcomed to follow the official Colnect on Twitter
All public updates regarding Colnect may be there before anywhere else.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Custom Personal Lists on Colnect
Custom Personal Lists
In addition to the common inventory lists on Colnect (Collection / Swap / Wish), premium members can create more lists. When custom lists are added, you can add and remove item to and from them in the same way you do for the common lists.
Common Uses
- Reserving items for a specific swap
- Offering many item for a single sale
- Marking items you wish to attend to later
- Creating a list to be shown to collectors on other sites
Monday, March 23, 2009
Gmail: back to the future
Here's the attached picture. My interface is in Spanish so "minutos antes" means "minutes ago".
Link and Search
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