Mento Blog News, Tips, Notes and Smiles from the team that brings you Mento

While one of part of the world is getting ready for some amazing athletics and fireworks, Mento just finished its own marathon of updates. During the last month, we overhauled the look of Mento in many places, added a bunch of new features and simplified a few others. Today we’re excited to finally tell you about them and give you a peek of what’s still to come.

What’s New: The Big Things

• A new Mento Box
• Channels 2.0
• Mento Points
• Discover
• Feedback Everywhere

The Small Things

• Easy Re-Sharing
• Navigating Your Links
• Displaying Your Name
• Search is faster
• Twitter Shortcut
• Firefox Extension update

What’s New: The Big Things

A new Mento Box for Sharing Links

It’s really important to us that posting links to Mento is as straight-forward and simple as possible. For that reason, we replaced the current popup with a new slide-in box that loads more quickly and has fewer distractions.

What’s cool about it:

• Fewer clicks and better use of channels
• Easier image selection
• Customize your interface with the features you use

Start using the new Mento Box
with the updated Firefox extension or the new bookmarklet!

Channels 2.0

Channels are social categories: they let you send a link to the people you associate with that category. But if you were confused by Mento’s distinction between groups, tags and channels, you were not alone. It was a forest of previous design iterations that needed some uncluttering.

What’s new with Channels:

• The new organization of channels makes them more prominent, easier to navigate and easier to post to.
• A link can now be associated with 1 main channel and up to 4 additional channels.
• Tags and Channels are now separate things.
  Unlike tags, channels are fairly broad and they’re shared among many people — think of them as sections in a newspaper or magazine. When you want to be more specific, use tags to further categorize your links in any way you want.

Points

A big part of Mento is getting feedback for the links you post — it’s one of our main distinctions to most other link sharing sites out there. That’s why we’re excited about introducing Mento Points! They summarize all the feedback you get into a quick glance and a good feeling.

When others click, reply, plus or re-share a link, Mento now adds up points. Each of those actions gets a different number of points — for example, re-sharing a link gives the highest number of points (compared to clicks, pluses and replies) because it’s a really good indicator that a link is worth spreading. The specific point values get adjusted over time because we calculate them dynamically based on the overall activity on Mento.

Why Points? Mento uses all of this information to find the most interesting links and people in each channel. That’s in part how Mento determines what links are popular and how Mento makes recommendations to you when discovering new things…

Discover

While we focused on sending, receiving and feedbacking on links until now, Mento didn’t support browsing and discovering all that well.

Say hello to the new Discover section then — your starting point for exploring Mento! And when we say “Discover”, we don’t just mean links. Discovering people is just as interesting and discovering new channels (plus the links you’ll find there) is fun, too.

Location, Location, Location. Maps are the ultimate discovery playground — and if you ever wondered why Mento asked for your location when you signed up, now you know: Discover Mento members around the World using our special map interface. Besides location, you can explore them by channel - such as Design or Technology - and also by website - such as Flickr, YouTube or nytimes.com.

Feedback Everywhere

Underneath every link on Mento, we now summarize all of the activity elsewhere on Mento. It lets you see more easily who shared the same link and gave feedback. When you’re looking at a channel or your Mento Mix, we’ll display all of the pluses and all of the replies — previously, you had to go to each person’s Mento page and the feedback there. Here’s an example of what a such an entry look like:

The Small Things

Easy Re-Sharing
Every link now has 3 actions underneath that are always consistent: Plus, Share, Reply.

Share is your new 1-click way to copy the link to your Mento page and share it with your network — we copy all of link’s information (channels, images, tags) and also point back to the user where you found it (shown as via Boaz Gurdin, as seen here for example).

Navigating Your Links
Now cleaner and easier to navigate: Your Links and the links of others. We summarize the information about favorites sites, tags and channels on the new Explore page for each user. It gives you a quicker overview of the different interests and lets you jump to specific links more quickly.

You should also try the simple filters that you’ll find on the left of every link list (Videos, Images, Top Links).

Displaying Your Name
If you want to change how your name is shown on Mento, we replaced the First Name / Last Name distinction with a single “Full Name” field. If you prefer to use your favorite nickname to represent your Mento account, we now make that easier — and if your “Full Name” is the same as your username, we won’t show them twice on your Mento page (dotdean on the image above is an example).

Search is faster
That pretty much sums it up. Searching for links got a speed boost
(all muscle, no drugs — we swear!)

Twitter Shortcut
Do you share links on Twitter? The new Mento Box now makes that easier: from the Extras menu, you can select a convenient, 1-click Twitter shortcut. When sending links to Twitter, we also display a brevity counter now.

A similar shortcut for posting to Facebook will be coming later this month.

The Firefox Extension
Along with the new Mento Box for sharing, we also updated and uncluttered the Mento Firefox extension. If you didn’t like the second big button, it’s now turned off by default. If you liked it, you can select it in the Settings menu — where there’s also a dedicated Screenshot button now.

What’s Ahead

Organize Your Links
We updated the Mento Box, we updated Channels — it’s time that Mento has a proper way to help you manage and organize your growing number of links. That time will come later this month too, when we’ll release a first version of the “Organize Your Links” tab.

FriendFeed Comment Import
Many, many Mento links get re-shared on FriendFeed these days and as a result, a good amount of feedback gathers there. Later this month, Mento will turn on the automatic import of feedback from FriendFeed, which will include both Likes and Comments.

Internet Explorer extension update
We’re still working on updating the Internet Explorer extension so that it also uses the new Mento Box for posting links. You can already use the Mento Bookmarklet while the extension will follow soon.

Needless to say…

We’d love to hear from you! Many of the things we worked on came directly from your feedback. So please leave your comments below or visit our forum at GetSatisfaction to share your thoughts on the update and new ideas.