It’s one week after our launch at web 2.0 here at nomee, and it’s been busy! We’ve received a lot of questions and feedback about our desktop dashboard, and it’s been a big help to us to see everyone discussing us on Twitter.

If you haven’t gathered yet, my name is Katherine Bell, better known as Kat. I’m nomee’s support-go-to-girl, though I’ve gone through many roles here at nomee. I’ve even done quite a bit of coding for the desktop application( something I sometimes miss and sometimes don’t!). I’m the one who’s been offering up solutions to problems to all of our new users through Twitter and email. 

I thought I’d address some common questions that have been appearing pretty often on Twitter.

1. nomee just seems like a TweetDeck/ping.fm/Digsby competitor.

 

We’re not! No, seriously. One of the main focuses of nomee is to monitor your social networks for alerts. TweetDeck, Digsby and ping.fm are about either about publishing to your social networks or publishing and monitoring a few sites( Twitter/Facebook). Digsby would be our closest competitor, but Digsby is a multiprotocol chat that lets you manage your chat accounts and email, and if your friends are using Digsby as well, monitor Twitter and Facebook.

nomee’s biggest feature is supporting over one hundred sites( click to see a list of the sites we support) and their alerts. Even if we don’t directly support a social network, we automatically crawl any generic website added to a nomee card for an rss feed.

2. I can only create a nomee card for myself! How am I supposed to use this if my friends are required to sign up for me to see their updates.

 

We realise that it’s tough figuring out what to do with nomee, when none of your friends are using it. The reason we chose to require your contacts to sign up through nomee to see them through nomee, is that it’s a ownership of information issue. If you were to build your own nomee cards for all your friends’ activity on the internet, and then your friends DID join nomee, but they didn’t want to share certain things with you, there’d be two versions of them on your nomee dashboard. Since at nomee we really want to emphasize that people control their identity and who sees what, through our product, we decided during the design phase to not allow users to create their own nomee contacts. You can’t get upset at Facebook because you want to add your friends on Facebook but they haven’t joined. You get upset at your friends, right?

In the meantime, while your friends are being fuddy duddies and not using nomee, check out our nomee newsmakers page. You can follow your favorite celebrities( whether they be Miley Cyrus or Barack Obama) through the nomee dashboard. We’re adding new nomee newsmakers daily, and hope to emphasize that in future updates, so keep an eye peeled for your favorite blogger or podcast.

3. Wow, nomee is hogging a LOT of memory. I really don’t want to use an application that uses so much memory.

 

We know. We hear you and we’re working on it, night and day, weekday and weekend. What we’ve done here at nomee with the Adobe Air platform is nearly unique, and sometimes we encounter problems with performance. We’ll have some intermediate improvements soon and hope to nix the issue entirely before long.

4. It’s great and dandy that you have those little red numbers telling me when someone’s updated their nomee card, but I want to see what has been updated before I click on the social network.

 

Each nomee card has a sliding panel along the bottom called nomee newstream. It will usually take four to five seconds to load on each nomee card as the application checks the updates and pulls in further information on the updates. Once you see it attach itself to the bottom of the nomee card, you can click to open it to see something like this:



For now, we’re only showing the latest twenty updates for any nomee card but we hope to expand that to have a full history that you can click through for each nomee card.

Also, we are still in beta, after being in development for a year. And we didn’t just slap a beta on the end of our logo to make it look cooler. We really wanted user feedback about what features you guys wanted, not what we just thought you guys might want. If enough of you clamor at us asking for features, I’m pretty certain you’ll get what you ask for. Don’t pull any punches either! We want to hear it all, good and bad.

These are just the most common questions and comments we’ve gotten the last week and we’re always looking for more. We’ve really appreciated all the feedback we’ve gotten from everyone. If you have more questions, we do have support forums monitored by us at support.nomee.com or if you prefer, anyone can email me at support@nomee.com.

And just for kicks, anyone can see my nomee card over here.

nomee in the news

• TechCrunch covered us last week at the beginning of Web 2.0 Expo, which started the ball rolling for our launch.
• Read Write Web has a superbly honest and thorough review about nomee and what we do as a product.
• The Social Networker posted a walkthrough screencast with their feedback about nomee.
• the Daily Network Monitor offers up some sweet kudos about us.
• Ojo Flotante was one of the first blog writeups about nomee that really got what we were about. Translated from Spanish to English.