It's very big day for the Nurphy team - we're proudly announcing Nurphy 2.0, a massively reworked & improved Nurphy, and the starting point of the second phase in Nurphy's life cycle.

The executive summary would read:

• Channels
• A vastly improved @reply and notification system
• Streamlined One-to-One conversation
• REAL-TIME communication     
• ...and a much slicker conversation system all-round.

You only have to try the new Nurphy to see the huge differences in Nurphy 2.0, but let's look at the game-changing parts in more detail.

Channels replace Conversations

In what we've come to know as "Nurphy 1.0", Nurphy was all about creating "conversations". However, there were many areas of user behavior that didn't fit to the "conversation" metaphor. For example, some conversations have been going on ever since Nurphy's launch, but when you've been chatting in a Nurphy 'conversation' for several months, you don't really think of it as a conversation anymore, it feels more like a 'channel' (like an IRC channel, or a Twitter hashtag), or maybe a 'destination'. Channels are a place to hang out in, leave open in a browser tab, and to dip in and out of as your time allows. And that's how people were using Nurphy 'Conversations'.                 

So who are we to spoil the party? What used to be known as 'Conversations' are now available as Nurphy Channels. Channels are far, far better than the old 'Conversations' because;

A) They're a place to hang out in whilst having conversations.

B) The new @reply and notification system (detailed next) allows you to chat without worrying about the number of email notifications sent to each participant in a Channel

C) They have definable URLs and hashtags (yes, it's like group identity and real-time chat, on a URL!)

D) They only list people who are 'online' in the Channel as 'Pariticipants', and people who are 'Away' have the Channel in their list of 'Watched' channels. For example, if you had a Private Conversation in Nurphy 1.0 and you invited in 5 Participants, in Nurphy 2.0 you'll have a Private Channel which lists the people who are 'Online' (which could be anything from 0 to 5 depending on who's online at the time) and 5 people who are allowed to access it. Therefore, your data from Nurphy 1.0 is still there, Nurphy 2.0 has just added a real-time element on top.

E) We'll be adding customisable pictures to Channels, i.e. in the same way that you have a profile picture, a channel will also have a picture. At the moment we're providing a default grey icon to Channels until the feature is ready.

Even with a change to the 'Channels' naming convention, Nurphy is still very much about conversations - but Nurphy 2.0 does conversations better than it's ever done, and in a much more streamlined and interesting way.

Notifications Done Right           

                                   
Further to aforementioned problem with the 'conversation' metaphor, people would arrive at Nurphy, start a 'conversation' with multiple people, and find the number of emails notifications a bit overwhelming. This happened because we, the Nurphy team, felt it necessary to keep both Nurphy participants and email-only participants notified of every single contribution to a conversation timeline, no matter what. But in testing, that wasn't what Nurphy needed at all - we were sending out too many email notifications - and email isn't fun, especially when you've been dragged in to a fast-paced conversation that you don't need to be a part of (people were asking us how to turn off email notifications). Therefore, we needed to cut the one-to-one match between Nurphy remarks and email notifications, and the 'Channels' naming convention offered the freedom to do so, alongside introducing a much smarter reply & notification system.

At this point you're desperate to hear about the aforementioned reply & notification system, right? Ok, here it is...

If you're hanging out in a Nurphy Channel, you can chat away with the other 'online' participants in real-time, and the people 'watching' the channel via email will only be notified when you message them directly in a 'personal channel' (detailed next). You can still @reply people to ping / tag / Nurph' them (choose the verb you like most), but the bottom-line is, there's no more inboxes full of Nurphy email notifications from other participants chatting away in a conversation you were a part of. Nurphy 2.0 will only deliver notifications of remarks that were intended specifically for you.

However, Nurphy Channels still keep recent timeline history - so when you're ready to catch up on the chatter in a Channel that you've been away from, you can check the timeline. It's the best of both worlds; all the context, less email.

We took the decision to bring your conversations across in the most sensible way possible - so if you were previously chatting away in a Nurphy 1.0 Conversation, it should still be available in the form of a Nurphy 2.0 Channel.

Personal Channels             

Another problem with the 'conversation' metaphor (yes, I'm using it as an excuse for everything) was how inappropriate it was to have multiple 'person-to-person' conversations with the same person. For example, if I'm already in a conversation with @Paul, do we really need another conversation, with another subject? No. Having more than one 'conversation' with the same person was an inconvenience. What you really needed was to be able to click on a person's profile picture and to go straight to a canonical conversation with that person, with all your previous one-to-one conversation history in tow. Fortunately, with the new Nurphy Channels handling the group chatter, we had the freedom to introduce something that vastly improves one-to-one communication in Nurphy. Meet the Personal Channel.

Personal Channels augment the Nurphy social design by adding what you might know as a 'private message' channel between you and another Nurphy contact. Only you and your contact are privy to this. It's a bit like when you're in an IRC channel, someone private messages you, and their username appears alongside your list of Channel connections. Or when you click the 'Wall-to-Wall' link with another user on Facebook. Personal Channels are just you, and the other participant, in the timeline.

You can still participant in multiple channels with the same contact, but when it's just you and your contact chatting away, you probably just want to do so in your Personal Channel, away from all the noise.

URLs and Hashtags

Nurphy 1.0 had six character 'star codes' for conversation URLs - they were like Nurphy's own URL shortening service that gave each conversation a short, unique identifier which you could reference in remarks by prefixing them with an asterisk. However, the codes were randomly generated (making them hard to remember), and the asterisk is a small & fiddly character. We wanted to do so much more with star codes and conversation URLs, but the old format was too far off the mark.

In Nurphy 2.0, Channels (taking the place of Conversations) have a URL and a Subject, and both can be defined by the person who starts the channel. This combination gives you a nice memorable URL and byline for your Channel. And forget the asterisk; Nurphy 2.0 Channels use a hashtag, as you may have seen on Twitter and IRC. For example, the official Nurphy Channel is http://Nurphy.com/Nurphy on the wider web, or #Nurphy inside Nurphy.

And here's another example. I'm interested in iPhone Web Development (making websites work nicely on the iPhone), so I started the #iPhoneWebDev Channel. How cool is that? Now can I tweet my Nurphy Channel on Twitter (http://Nurphy.com/iPhoneWebDev), share the #iPhoneWebDev hashtag in my Nurphy remarks, attach a link on open source iPhone Web Dev projects sites, and iPhone Web Developers can flock and join in the conversation in real-time!

Wait, did someone say real-time?

Real-Time!

I could start this paragraph citing the conversation metaphor as the source of a problem, but I've done that fifteen hundred times already. So let's cut to the chase (in the way that Nurphy 2.0 does); Nurphy has gone from pseudo real-time, to FULLY REAL-TIME.

If you have a channel open in a browser tab, the conversation appears in real-time. If you send a message, it's sent via 'AJAX' without refreshing the whole page, and that makes it appear in the channel in real-time. In essence, these changes make Nurphy feel like something that's living, breathing, and running as a desktop chat application, in real-time. It's real-time chat on URLs.

Conclusion

There's so, so, so much more to Nurphy 2.0, but at this point, you just need to try it . The differences between Nurphy 1.0 & 2.0 are a bit like when the sequel to your favorite video game shakes up the in-game dynamics and drastically improves the gameplay. Nurphy 2.0 is a different ball game altogether, but it's the Nurphy we've wanted to build all along. Jump in to a Nurphy Channel to see what we mean. 

And if you're looking for a channel to join, the Nurphy team will be hanging out in #Feedbk for a while - come and say 'hi', and let's have a chat about Nurphy 2.0.

After a festive season of hearing people say, "It's a shame we only see each other once a year', and, "Sorry I'm so bad at staying in touch", my New Year's Resolution is to be better at staying in touch with my family, my extended family, my friends overseas, and the friends I hardly ever see. But every New Year's Resolution needs a new tool or process which with to do things differently, right? Yes. This year, I'm going to keep in touch with these people using Nurphy.

Unlike the conversational tools that have gone before (IM, email, social networks), Nurphy makes it easy to hold conversations that work across everyone's schedules - you don't have to be 'online' to send a message, but if you are online, your conversation can seamlessly turn in to a real-time chat (how cool is that?). Further to this:

• It comes with privacy options you can actually understand (they're based around conversations rather than profiles)
• You don't need to download a program to use it, it just works in a Web browser.
• It doesn't force you in to instant chats as soon as you sign-in, you can just reply in your own time.
• It doesn't fill your screen with someone elses status updates, it just tells you about your conversations.
• It doesn't tag you in photos or let other people post inappropriate things on your public profile - so we can all use it with family, friends & colleagues.
• It's far more fun and streamlined than email (although, it interoperates quite nicely with email).

Nurphy just makes it easy to have a conversation across the Web. Fortunately, it's ridiculously easy to start a Nurphy conversation;

1. Sign in to Nurphy
2. Click 'Start a Conversation'
3. Type the first message in your conversation
4. Enter the  email addresses of the intended participants (or select them as Nurphy contacts)
5. Choose your prefered privacy setting.
6. Click start!

That's it - you have a conversation, on a web page, and you can bookmark this in your  browser so that you're only ever one click away from a conversation with your favorite people. So what are you waiting for? Head along to Nurphy and start a conversation in seconds.