A few days ago, JPG Magazine added a new feature to their themes area called Hotness. In a nutshell, this feature essentially filters the photos submitted in a theme to those that are getting a lot of interest by viewers (aka, are hot).
Side Blur: if you’re into the business and legal aspects and anglings within the technology business world, Thomas Hawk wrote a post about JPG Introducing Hotness… that I found interesting.
While this feature is great, I still have the list of improvements for JPG around viewing theme photos and making it more efficient for their users that I mentioned in my posting Just Discovered: JPG Magazine. This ties into another technology posting of mine…
Here’s a little back story that reflects on one of things I like about JPG (and I haven’t even meet them yet in person…). My friend Jon Hodgson was uploading some photos for one of their current themes yesterday when he found that Hotness wasn’t so hot. He noticed that the photos that were being displayed as “hot” were always in the same order! Jon is a geek at heart (this is one of the reason’s we ended up working together…but that’s another story) and so he wrote a script and did some investigating. Ends up that the reason the photos were in the same order was that they were inadvertently being sorted by an incremental ID that was given to the photo when it was uploaded. Thus, the first photos uploaded that were considered hot become the defacto “hottest”.
Jon realized that this was obvious an un-intended behavior and took action. Knowing that small things like this are important (see my recent post The Key to Technology Loyalty – Think Small) he contacted JPG. What happened next is why I like the guys behind JPG so much…
Within an hour of Jon’s email (I checked the time stamps) they had the bad behavior disciplined and Hotness got Hotter. Now, Hotness randomly displays the photos that are hot, so it is fair to all photos regardless of when the photos was uploaded. Jon even got a thank you email right from the Founder of JPG and a thank you gift for being such a attentive and detailed contributor.
JPG Magazine’s actions is one reason why I think they will be such a success. They know how to take care of community members that go all out for the sake of the community (and thus JPG Magazine as a company). This is such a simple corporate trait that is so lost on most companies today…
Keep up the great work JPG Team!
Oh yeah, and check out Jon’s photo for the theme Entropy (I loved this photo from the first time he showed it to me!). He’s the official photographer for his township’s fire department in NJ and has some amazing photos from his this work, you can check out his work at MTFD Photos.