Chaggle Enters St Louis Business Plan Competition

Well, it's now official, Chaggle is now entered into the first ever St Louis Economic Council and Edward Jones Business Plan Competition!

We are very excited that the St Louis Economic Council and Edward Jones have put together this fantastic opportunity for small businesses. This is really a model of how government can help small businesses get the help they need to get off the ground.

We are looking forward to it!

Chaggle IPod Nano Giveaway

I am very happy to announce that Chaggle is going to be giving away a brand new, 16 Gig IPod Nano to the user who signs up the most new Chaggle users before 1 April 2010.

"So, how do I get myself a brand new IPod Nano", you ask...well here's how:

1. Send a buddy the link to the Chaggle Account Creation Page.

2. Make sure you give them you Chaggle username so they can enter it in the "Referred By" box.

3. Make sure they get the client downloaded.

4. Have them jump onto any webpage and post at least 1 Chaggle message.

5. Repeat

6. Get your name announced on 1 April 2010 as the owner of a brand spankin new IPod Nano.

Chaggle Featured in St Louis Globe-Democrat

Well Chaggle was in attendance at the recent announcement of the St Louis Regional Business Plan Competition organized St Louis Economic Council and Edward Jones. The 1st prize is $50K and 2nd and 3rd are $30 and $20K respectively, plus all of them come with a ton of hours from local law firms and top, local PR companies.

We are really looking forward to this event, it should be fun and we've already gotten to meet some great folks from all around St Louis.

So, while we were at the event, Jordan Lanham of St Louis' the online newspaper, the St Louis Globe-Democrat, was good enough to interview us and she wrote up a fantastic story:

St. Louis entrepreneurs compete for prize money

Thanks Jordan, and thanks to St Louis Economic Council and Edward Jones for putting out this Business Plan competition for local St Louis businesses. That was a great idea!

Chaggle Links Your Tweets

We are very happy to let everyone know that we have successfully integrated Twitter!

So now you can automatically configure you Chaggle account to post your Chaggle Shout Outs to Twitter. And what is even cooler is that each Tweet will be automatically tagged with a small hyperlink to the webpage you were viewing when you posted the message.

So you no longer have to go through the pain of copying and pasting links into your tweets...Chaggle will do that for you! And don't worry about going over the 141 characters, Chaggle will break your message into multiple messages if you go over the limit.

We are very interested in getting feedback on this new feature so all comments are welcome.

Clayton

Chaggle's New Look

As many of you have noticed, we recently gave the Chaggle webpage a new look. So I wanted to walk though a couple of the updates really quick so that everyone knows what was added.

The first thing we did was to streamline the sign-up process. We had a few users who were getting lost while they were trying to get all signed up, so we made it easier for everyone. We removed a step or two and we bulked up the help that you get while your working through that process.

Also, we were lucky enough to work with Jenn Mathews (SEO expert of Classmates.com fame) and Jenn has made sure that the new Chaggle site was built to be as searchable as possible. The goal here is to get as many new Chagglers as we can to come join those of you who are already out there. We wante to send out a BIG thanks to Jenn for all of her help...and we look forward to her helping us out alot more in the future.

There are a ton of other upgrades that came with the website re-vamp that I'll talk about in my next few postings, but that's plenty for now.

Thanks again to all of the Chaggler's out there and we'll be chatting with you soon.

Laters,

Clayton

Chaggle for Firefox

As many of you know, on 1 Sep 09 the Chaggle Add-on for Firefox first hit the street! And we could not be happier with the results. We are very excited about having the Firefox option since the number one question we got when we initially rolled out was, "When are you guys going to have one for Firefox?" :)

So thanks to everyone for the feedback! Chaggle is getting better and better by the day!

We have now started working with the folks over at Obvio.us folks (www.obvio.us.com) who are helping us put together a shiny, and very sleek new website design for Chaggle, so we're looking forward to that as well!

Thanks again to all of the Chagglers out there! Keep the feedback coming.

Clayton

Chaggle Featured in St Louis Post Dispatch

Well it was as very good day for Chaggle, we were featured in an article on the front page of the St Louis' Post Dispatch newspaper.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/sciencemedicine/story/9F893E980EC42A55862575ED000A2DB0?OpenDocument

The article does a good job of laying out the current social networking landscape.....and I don't think that all of the newly started social medial sites are destined to be smashed against the establishment (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and that the game is essentially over since the market is saturated and content is free.

The reality is that you (customer/user/web junkie) are always looking for new and better ways to collaborate, and there is no such thing as an end to the competition....there is ALWAYS the next big thing. Like....oh, I don't know....maybe.....CHAGGLE!!