Get in contact with Flattr
If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear it.
There's a couple of ways of getting in contact with us, chose one from
the list below.. or chose them all, it's up to you.
If you want to contact us old school style,
this is where you send stuff:
Flattr AB
Box 4111
SE-203 12 Malmö
Sweden
Flattr Network Ltd
2nd Floor
White bear yard 144A Clerkenwell Road
Middlesex, EC1R 5DF
London, England
You’ve signed up and want to put a nice friendly Flattr button on your site? This step-by-step guide explains how to get set up – quick and pain free.
1. Visit our Get button page (you need to be logged in)
2. Browse through the dozens of different platforms and content management systems to see if the one that powers your website is supported. If not then continue with step 4.
Does price per kilobyte equal price per kilo? Normal rules of distribution and cost of raw materials don’t apply in the land of ones and zeros which means only one thing – pricing of digital goods needs a proper shake up.
Long time ago in a not so faraway land people didn’t sell or buy stuff but relied on simple trade. I’ll give you sack of wheat, you give me three chicken. Boom! Valuation was made.
Value would probably wary quite much from day to day depending on supply and demand. To make trade more universal we added money into the equation as a “middleman” that made it possible to store value for later use.
Bear with me here…
I’m the first one to acknowledge that our catalog hasn’t been great. To be honest it was quite awful. And so I’m super happy to say that we killed the old one and just minutes ago released a new an seriously good Catalog.
Why does it matter? Because number 1 complaint our users, especially new ones, have is that they can’t find enough interesting content to flattr. So they forget about Flattr and become inactive. Not good.
The new catalog adresses a number of issues and I’ll highlight the most important features and improvements.
New categories
Looking at what’s the most popular content being added on Flattr we came up with a new list of categories. We might add new ones later as you add new type of content. If you don’t think your stuff fits in any of those then make some noise!
Music, Video, Software, Games, Podcasts, Photos, Comics, Blog & News, Charities
Show, don’t tell – thumbnails are beautiful
One thing that we have wanted to solve for a long time are making the catalog much more visual. You might have seen that we implemented thumbnail placeholders on thing pages and dashboard with the new design. This was of course done with the idea of replacing them with “real” images. After some API magic and love from our friends at embed.ly we managed to get the entire site visual.
Trending Things
To make sure new content can successfully compete with old and popular stuff we implemented a clever decay algorithm which is the heart and soul of the new catalog. This way you’ll almost always see new and interesting Things, not the same old Tim Pritlove (hi, Tim!) over and over again.
Search – it’s magic
The search engine now includes a lot more meta data giving better relevance in the search results. The results page is still the old and ugly one but we’ll get that whipped into shape in not time.
Nerd alert! New categories combines data type and tags
To be able to extend the categories and make them useful, split, change and update them we have combined data type with tags for the categories above. This means people that submit things to our catalog need to care about how they tag their things to make them show up in the categories. Read more about how this is done here: The categories, they are a changin’
Puh, that was probably one of the biggest updates to the system so far. Hope you like where we are going.
Drop your thoughts in the comments, I’ll personally flattr every single piece of constructive feedback.
Here at Flattr we spend much time on IRC and lately we have a new friend, Hubot. Hubot is a chat bot built by GitHub that helps us out with tasks ( for example pulling funny images from internet ) and informs us of new deploys and such. Hubot doesn’t only work with IRC but also with Campfire, HipChat and many other chat services. Check out the adapters page for a full list.
There are several scripts available for Hubot that the community built and today one for Flattr is available. With the Flattr script Hubot listens in on the chat and if it hears a URL that is a Flattr Thing it spits out information about the thing.
smgt@ : https://github.com/simon/flattr
Hubot : Thing: { 5 } Ruby gem wrapping Flattrs API - https://flattr.com/thing/450287
You can also ask Hubot about a Flattr user.
smgt@ : Hubot user me smgt
Hubot : Flattr user: smgt (Simon Gate) from Sweden
Hubot : More: https://flattr.com/profile/smgt
And you can ask Hubot about specific Thing id.
smgt : Hubot thing me 450287
Hubot : Thing: { 5 } Ruby gem wrapping Flattrs API - https://github.com/simon/flattr (https://flattr.com/thing/450287)
I hope you will enjoy the script or if you need any help send a tweet to @simongate.
One thing that we have been discussing back and forth since we started our company is if “flattring” is a payment or a donation. I don’t think we’ve come to an agreement or decision, or if we ever really will, even though we say “payment” on our website.
One day people will of course call it a “flattr” but until then, here are my thoughts about one and the other.
This post is important to users who add Things to Flattr system.
In a few days we will change the category system of Flattr to make finding things in catalog easier and overall improve the usefulness of it. It also means that criteria for picking content that is shown in catalog will change.
If you have Things that do not match any of the criteria below then they will not show up in our catalog, no matter how popular your Thing is.
Old categories will be called “data type” as that’s what they really are. New categories will combine these data types and tags to be much more precise, extendable and it’s easier to add more categories as we go along.
Tag your Things you want to be included in the catalog. Here’s how:
What better way to kick off 2012 than with a proper developer challenge? We’re inviting all software developers, hackers, code slingers to get their API hats on and mash up Flattr in a new and incredible way.
This iPad 2 could be yours. Keep reading!
Back in November we released a new and improved Flattr API v2. We’ve now rooted out the bugs, written a proper documentation so here’s the challenge:
Build something using the new Flattr API, impress us with your idea and execution and take home a top of the line iPad 2.
A simple “Thank you!” (or “Danke”, “Merci”, “Gracias”, “Tack”…) is one of the most powerful things in the world you can say to anyone. Add a smile and you’re ready to make the world a better place.
You can now send a friendly thank-you-notice to those who flattred you last month. There’s a link in your revenue report that leads to an email form. We’ve filled it out with a default message but we encourage you to replace it with your own little message, make it more personal.
Look for the friendly green button (yes, that’s my actual revenue report)
For privacy reasons we only show how many people receive that email and not their email addresses.
Right now the from: address is support@flattr.com – we’re trying to gauge how many of our users consider this email as spam. If we’re happy with the results then we’ll change it to the address of the sender so it’s possible to respond and get in touch.
By the way, if you wanted to learn to say thank you in more languages then this list of translation of “thanks” is a good start.
Some of our more privacy-consious users have asked us what kind of data do we collect about our users and what do we do with this information.
There’s also the “why collect data at all?” question and I’ll start with that. It’s clear that we need to know enough about you so you can log in and see your stuff. The other aspect of building websites, services and web apps is data for usability – it helps in understanding if we’re building a good product. Are people getting things done or is our poor design getting in the way, making users, you, frustrated, and leave us.
Theoretically we (or anyone) doesn’t need to collect this information but practically it would be like throwing darts in the dark, we’d have no idea if anything we did mattered to anyone.
Welcome! Let’s walk through all the options that Flattr gives you whether you’re someone who creates and shares content or you simply want to support your favorite blogger, coder, web comic artist…*
Use this easy flow to figure out what’s next for you. (Click for larger view.)
Broadly speaking people sign up for one of two reasons:
1. Givers – want to support content they enjoy
2. Authors – use Flattr on their site to offer a simple way of supporting
Often the authors are givers themselves too, hitting Flattr buttons on their own favorite sites. And likewise the givers could easily turn into authors.
The idea had already been initiated in 2007, but the first release was in 2010 due to typical geeky laziness.
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not just content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate was Paypal but the transaction cost was (and still is) too high. Visitors would ignore the option. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Flattr is changing this.
Read the whole story »
