We’ve come a long way with Pring. From an early vision of connecting every Pakistani with SMS to the full-blown product Pring has become today. It has been a tough journey and we have a longer way to go to make Pring a communications platform.
After a few months of testing Pring on Ufone, we are very excited to announce that we are going to go live on the 1st of September 2010. What does this mean?
On the whole, we think that these changes are going to make your Ufone experience much better and will allow us to expand with additional functionality. We hope you enjoy these changes!
by @Nash
When we started Pring, we designed the whole system in plain English keeping the popularity of English websites like Orkut, Google, Youtube etc. When you send one of our shortcodes an SMS the response from Pring is in English. Same is true for any other command.
After running Pring in the wild for sometime, we’ve noticed that 90% of our users use some form or the other of Urdu written in English (or Roman Urdu). So, starting from today, we’re introducing Urdu for Pring over SMS.
You can SMS URDU or ENGLISH and we will change the system language for you accordingly. To find out what your current interface language is, SMS ZABAAN. In the coming days, we will make Urdu as the default system language for SMS in Pakistan. Ofcourse, this does not effect the actual messages from fellow Pringers, they will remain the same.
We’re also working on supporting Nasta’liq Urdu support for our interface language in a way that does not limit Pring. We hope you enjoy using these new features as much as we had fun writing them!
Happy Pringing!
by @Nash
We’ve released a few new features that would make it easier for you to invite friends and use Pring. Here’s the rundown:
Next time when you’re on a some one’s Pring page, there will be a new option under the Pringer’s picture:
Click on the picture and you can then send a direct message to the Pringer:
Previously, whenever you invited someone via SMS they received a message such as “Jeera100 wants to follow your updates on Pring…”. This was fine but sometimes, your friends might not know who Jeera100 is. To improve this, we’ve added your cell number to the invite message. Now it will read “Jeera100 (0321-123-4567) wants to follow your updates on Pring…”. This should make it more transparent to the invitee who is inviting them.
Also, you can SMS a valid mobile number to Pring and we will convert it into an invite.
Whenever your friend accepts your invitation and signs up on Pring; they just want to start receiving your updates. But instead, they had to register with a username. Setting a username is a hard thing to do. It has to be the right length and with the right characters.
To make it easier for new users to join and receive updates right away, we’ve removed the need to have a username. When you join Pring, you will be given a new random username likePringerr129. You can always change your username with the Name command.
We’ve also made a lot of minor updates to improve the overall service. For example, we’ve noticed that 90% of all communication on Pring is in Roman Urdu, so we’re making Urdu our default language wherever we can. We’re working on multi-lingual features so you can select which interface language you want soon.
Till then, Happy Pringing!
by @Nash
Ever wondered what’s going on in Pakistan right now? We sure do! Whenever a non-private Pringer update’s their status, it gets sent to the public page. If you visit our public page, you’ll see a whole lot of updates coming in every minute. This page gives you a good idea on what everyone is talking about. Private messages, updates from private accounts, commands etc do not appear on this page, but comments on public updates do. We turned this page off sometimes back because of too much traffic, however, after shifting to a much better database for our needs (Cassandra), the public page is lightening fast! Give it a visit here.
by @Nash
We’ve talked about the complexity of having a conversation over SMS before. The updates you receive from anyone you follow on Pring has a number at the end. If you wanted to comment on that update, you had to reply using that number followed by your comment. Sounds complicated? Well, it can be.
But worry no more! We’re very happy to announce that starting today, if you’re a Zong customer, you can comment on any update by simply replying to it. This really simplifies the experience of having a conversation around a particular update.
So, how do we achieve this? When you reply to an SMS, we have no way of knowing what you are replying to. In order to keep track of what you are replying to, we send you updates each time through a different shortcode. For example, instead of getting an update from 2323 (for Zong customers), you will get an update from 232310 or 232311 etc. When you reply to this shortcode, we keep track of the message we sent to you and add your reply as a comment to it. But for updating your status, you still have to send it to 2323. Everything else works the same.
Working with CMPak (the people behind Zong) has been great and they’ve been the first in taking innovation like this forward quickly by allocating us a hundred codes from 232300 to 232399. We’re working with other Mobile Operators to bring this functionality there as well. We hope this update makes it easier for you to make comments.
Happy commenting!
by @Nash
One of the hardest problems we still have is explaining what is Pring to users. We could spend the next few paragraphs explaining to you what Pring is, or you could see this video embeded below:
Please, currently, the narration is in Urdu only!
We’ll confess that we love Twitter and what it has done for the micro-blogging community. But, at the same time we’ve noticed that using Twitter over SMS tends to get out of hand very quickly. We’re focused on making Pring an excellent SMS-only experience and that means controlling the level of noise that is generated at Pring. Here’s an example from Twitter:
Suppose @Ali from Twitter says: “I LOVE the view from Burj Al-Khalifa!”
@Ali’s friend @Sana replies: “Me too, I love it!”
If you were following @Sana but not @Ali and were only on SMS, the message “Me too, I love it!” won’t fall in context. What are they talking about? A common solution to this problem is for twitterers to RT the old update:
@Sana replies: “Me too, I love it! RT @Ali I LOVE the view from Burj Al-Khalifa!”
This gives you the context but as you can see, it quickly takes away space for your comment. And what if @Ali comments back to @Sana?
Ali: @Sana where are you, let’s meet up! RT @Sana Me too, I love it! RT @Ali I LOVE the view from Burj Al-Khalifa!
See how quickly does the conversation get out of hand? The final issue with approach is that you may not be very interested in this particular conversation but might still like @Sana’s updates, so why should you get all these comments from @Sana?
We like how FriendFeed and Facebook have solved this problem. If Ali was on either of these networks, comments on his updates appear under his main update “I LOVE the view from Burj Al-Khalifa!”. This gives context on the conversation and reduces the amount of work @Sana has to do to have a conversation (no more RTs) and will give her more space for her comment.
This works well online, but how do we make it work on SMS? If you receive an update from someone you follow, this is how it’ll look:
Ali: I LOVE the view from Burj Al-Khalifa!
r10
Notice the r10 at the bottom? If you want to comment on this Pring, you can do so by prefixing your update with r10 such as:
r10 Me too, I love it!
This comment will be sent to the original Pringer as well as to anyone who has commented on this Pring so far. A comment appears in a different format:
r10 Sana: Me too, I love it!
We think this approach is better when having conversations over SMS but it still adds complexity which can be improved more. We’re working on a much better simplification of this feature so that conversations over SMS will not require any additional thought or prefixing by Pringers. We’ll be launching this feature this week for our Zong users. Please stay tuned, we will blog about it soon!
by @Nash
We’ve been working on a whole slew of features to make the core Pring experience better. Here is the latest batch of freshly baked features:
Nobody’s perfect and we all make mistakes, especially while we’re sending SMS. Mobiles make it so easy to make typos. The small keys, weird T9 word auto-completion and our tendency to press send just a bit too quickly. It’s no wonder we receive so many typos from our Pringers.
How many times has this happened to you: you wanted to follow waqas but instead of writing follow waqas, you accidentally wrote folow waqas (missing L) or follwo waqas (common swapping typo) or foollow waqas (extra letters)? To make matters worse, the wrong command gets sent as a broadcast to all your followers! Not good!
Well, worry no more! Starting today, we will be accepting all common typos for commands. That means that if you missed a letter, added an extra letter, swapped two letters or mis-typed a letter, we treat it as a command. We’ve built nice fuzzy logic so that you will have lesser errors, lesser typing and more action! And no more embarrassing typo updates!
We get a lot of emails for help from people who can’t remember their password and can’t remember which email they used to signup. Not to worry! We’ve come up with new ways to retrieve your forgotten passwords. Now, you can enter your username or your mobile number in the Forgot Password page. If you have a mobile setup, we will send you a verification code which you can then use to reset your password or if you have an email configured, we will send you an email.
When we send an SMS to you, it first goes to your Mobile Operator who then sends the SMS to you. Sometimes, because of various reasons, the SMS we send to your operator is rejected or gets lost along the way. Starting today, we have rolled out new connectivity logic that will improve the delivery rate of the SMS we send to you significantly.
We’ve also made lots of speed improvements and UI tweaks. We will continue to update Pring to make it better for you based upon your feedback. What do you think? Facing a problem? Have a suggestion? Let us know! We love feedback!
by @Nash
Today, we’re happy to annouce two more domain names for Pring: pring.us and pring.me. Accessing these domains point back to our main domain pringit.com. You can also access Pring from pring.pk and pringit.pk.
So now, you can give out your Pring address as pring.me/<username>. For example, my username is Nash and you can reach me at pring.me/nash.
If you’re a company or an individual you can also use pring.us/<username> and it will work just as fine.
We hope you enjoy these updates. Happy Pringing!
by @Nash