Dorthy.com Blog

Hey this is Sarah. I’m the Director of Product Development here at Dorthy.com. I love hearing what you think about Dorthy.com … it really helps keep me focused on what you love about Dorthy.com and also helps me figure out what we can do to make Dorthy.com more useful for you :)

This morning, I found a blog that made me smile. One of our users wrote a review and said that Dorthy.com “just might be my new favorite” … thanks Amy!

Here’s a little bit of her review:

“You complete a sentence ‘I want to…’ and up pops your dreampage with articles, videos, photos, and blog posts that it collects from all over the web …. On the same page, you can create a custom plan of action by notes, saved items, etc.

I just created 3 to experiment and I’m already hooked. YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE how many great links, photos, and videos popped up …”

Head over to Amy’s blog to read her full review.

Be sure to let us know what you think of Dorthy.com by sending us your thoughts on our feedback tool or by leaving a comment on our blog.

PS - You can also reach out us on Twitter: @dorthy or @sarahdoody

Ok, have a confession – the community section of each dreampage was not working as planned. When you chose to “Subscribe” to another person’s dreampage, we were only showing you the Activity starting at the day that you subscribed to them. But, really, it was supposed to be showing you their activity from the very first day the page was created. The good news – it’s working correctly now.

The idea is that it if you want to Go skiing in Park City Utah and you subscribe to someone else’s dream about skiing in Utah, you could probably learn a lot from seeing what they’ve done – what content they’ve viewed or saved and things like Notes or Plans that they’ve created.

Check out this example in action: Activity for Go skiing Park City Utah.

Now, the Activity is much more helpful for you because it shows what others are doing around your interest.

Let us know what you think about the changes. We would love your feedback on this.

How many times have you found something cool, but a few days later, forgotten where you saw it? It frustrates us too! Traditional bookmarks work for a while, but then, things get disorganized quickly.

On Dorthy.com you can save any piece of content, and it goes into your Saved Stuff for that specific dreampage.

Let’s say you have a page to Learn To Ski, and you see a cool video on Dorthy.com about someone taking ski lessons, or maybe an article reviewing a local ski school. With Dorthy.com, you could save the article or video, and then it would be within your Saved Stuff for your Learn To Ski page. So, we help you keep everything organized around your interest – and not mixed up with other things you’re interested in.

We like Twitter and there’s a lot of smart people on there. So, we decided to add a Twitter section to each of your individual dreampages.

On the Twitter section, we’re always doing a live search for tweets that relate to your page. So, if your page is to Lose 20 Pounds we would find tweets for you that relate to losing weight. We’ve also built in the ability for you to reply to tweets and send tweets directly from your page on Dorthy.com – so you can engage in conversations and learn from others.

We hope that the idea of our topical Twitter discussions will help bring you more relevant information about anything you want to do – and connect you with people who know about it.

We know many of you are on Twitter. So, we’ve made it easier for you to tweet about your interests and stuff you find interesting on Dorthy.com. On our Twitter page, we’ve included a way for you to post tweets without ever leaving Dorthy.com.

To start using this feature and tweet about your interests, you need to connect your Twitter account - which you can do via your Settings page.
That’s only part of the story though. We’ve also included a way to see live Twitter searches and topical Twitter discussions that relate to what you’re interested in.

Want to invite your friends to join you on Dorthy.com? Now that we’ve lifted our wait list – anyone can join. So what are you waiting for?

If you are logged in, go to the Invite Friends page. From here, you can choose to enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite, or you can import your contacts from your address book on sites like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail.

We’re guessing that you and your friends have some common things that you want to learn about or achieve. Maybe you and your friends want to plan a trip, do a sport, or learn something new. Whatever you want to do, its better to do it together. So Invite Your Friends to join you on Dorthy.com.

Leslie Grandy mentions that users today are looking for “referrals from taste-makers, analysts, and friends to help discover what is called “the long tail” of content”, and that you could have a new search BFF in Dorthy.

“Dorthy is like a cocktail party host, making social introductions to new people and interesting things”.  The original article is titled “Beyond Bing, Does Semantic Search Work?” and can be read here.

Over the past few days, we’ve been doing some testing and research into making your experience on Dorthy.com faster. We know that at times it’s been a little slow going - and believe us - just like you, we don’t like to wait. :)

Yesterday we released an update that has helped to make your experience on Dorthy.com faster today than it was previously.

Our technical team is working towards doing some major changes to some key processes and methods that will decrease the load time and further optimize the site’s speed.

We expect to have another major update next week that will further increase your experience. Stay with us – we’re working on this and appreciate your feedback and patience during the Alpha season of Dorthy.com.

Sometimes you just want to see what’s new and browse what stuff other people are checking out. Our Discover section allows you to do just that.

Within the Discover section, you’ll see all the pages that are most popular on Dorthy.com as well as recent activity and featured dreamers. From here, you can go deeper into by discovering a Community such as Health, Mind & Body, Business & Finance or Travel.

When you create a dreampage on Dorthy.com – our system automatically puts your page into a Community – so you’re instantly connected to people who have similar interests as you.

So check out the Discover section – who knows, you might just find something new that you’ve never thought about before.

Thanks to the quick response time of Twitter customer support @Dorthy is back up. Thanks for your patience - we’ll see you there ..