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The new, shiney Trusted Places went live today and we’re proud to say that Caffeinehit played a big part in the new site design and fresh UI design.

Following on from the relaunch of Qype last week I think TrustedPlaces has the upper hand, visually (obviously). Still a long way to go but with the site bringing in close to 1,000,000 uniques a month it’s just going from strength to strength.

As with all social networks it’s going to be interesting to see the reaction of the community that use it. When the latest version of Facebook was released the general feeling was that it wasn’t any better, maybe more confusing if anything else. Fingers crossed the reaction will be different in this case, with a much cleaner product it should make finding and understanding content a lot easier.

Either way, well done guys. The site’s looking great and I know that it’s just going to get better based on the plans you’ve got and the super team you’ve got working on the product.

Check out the new look TrustedPlaces here.

LONDON, 9 February 2009 - Caffeinehit Ltd are proud to announce the launch of new Caffeinehit Labs product Gighit.com, a site offering wiki style content, powerful features and access to a passionate community of fellow music lovers to UK gig goers. The work of designer-turned-entrepreneur Andy Ashburner and stunt coder Alen Mujezinovic, Gighit focuses on enhancing the live music experience, acting as the helpful, knowledgeable friend users will wish they’d always had: recommending bands, reminding them of upcoming gigs and even working hard to find them the cheapest ticket price.

Gighit.com originally launched in 2000, acting as a forerunner to successful sites like iLike and Last FM and existing in various forms until an identity crisis put the project on hiatus in 2006. In 2009 the new Gighit.com is a team player - offering full integration with its successful peers and bringing its own expertise to the party too.

“Gighit makes use of popular social networks like Facebook, Last FM, iLike and Twitter to help users filter their content”, said Andy Ashburner. “By registering with Gighit you can import a vast amount of information you already have on other sites to help you personalise your experience very quickly - add geo-location and matching stuff with your friends and you have a perfect mashup of content.” Looking ahead, Ashburner and Mujezinovic are already building on the existing features with plans to “refine this uber-personalisation with the release of the ‘mojo filter’”.

Gighit.com launches at 4pm GMT on 9th February 2009 - http://www.gighit.com.

Well, it’s not very often I get as excited about something as I am with the new Gighit. It’s been a long time in the making, most of the time just bubbling away at the back of my head. NOW those thoughts are becoming a reality.

Alen and I have been working tirelessly for the last 2 months on the new Gighit. Designing, coding and now plugging in all of the bells and whistles that are going to make this website (hopefully) rock your social worlds.

I’m not going to reveal anything yet other than the logo (above), even though it’s been bouncing around for a few months on the web THIS is it’s official ‘launch’.

Other than that I can reveal the new beast is being coded in Python/Django and will be hitting your monitors in December 2008. When it’s live we will let you know here first!

I’m sorry, did I miss something? When did Facebook get a sense of humour?! The usual po-faced website appears to have a penchant for Little Britain.

I happened to click on a friends profile and it came up with the error “You want to see a profile? - Computer says ‘no’”. How random!

FINALLY, I can blog about it!. It’s been on the cards for some time now but finally Kindo has merged with MyHeritage. Now they can boast a user base of over 25million people, not a bad jump in traffic there guys!

I’ve been working as the ui designer for Kindo since December 2007. They’ve come on leaps and bounds, taking on some of the more established genealogy websites (Geni and Genoom). The Kindo team is unlike any other group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Dedicated, passionate and above all a true pleasure to work with. They really do deserve to bask in the glory of what they’ve achieved AND to get excited about what they’re going to accomplish in the coming months/years.

WELL DONE GUYS!!!

Here’s the official press release from the Kindo website:

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

Could be a sign of things to come…

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That small Finnish startup, Nokia, has bought German social networking location-aware site Plazes for an undisclosed amount, Reuters reports. Plazes is, simply put, a service that lets you know where your friends are; the last time we’ve reported on it, it was a story about Plazes’ CEO Felix Petersen allegedly being caught somewhere else than he’d said he’d be, exposed by none other than Plazes itself.

Cases such as this raise considerations about location-aware social networking. Recently, I’ve speculated on iPhone 3G’s GPS as its most important new feature, and many commenters have argued that users aren’t interested in exposing their location because of privacy issues.

Nokia doesn’t seem to think so, and its acquistion of Plazes can be seen as a direct answer to the upcoming threat of many new location aware services that will inevitably appear when iPhone 3G hits the stores.

Source: Mashable

Another release via Caffeinehit Ltd is the new look last name pages for Kindo. The original design was made only for one country, Sweden. Now there is last name data for a number of countries there needed to be a page that was easy to add future countries to.

Anyway, here’s the design I came up with, since it’s launch traffic has sky-rocketed. Watch this space and while you’re at it, why not see if your surname is in one of the countries listed on the site.

More: Kindo Surname Pages

Another recent creative release from Caffeinehit Ltd was the photo gallery solution for Kindo.

Kindo is one of the fastest growing family tree websites on the internet, their recent release of photo albums is set to increase their web traffic even more. The final design was designed to be simple and allow users to easily browse and share their photos with their family.

I can’t wait to hear how people react to it, Kindo is becoming such a massive website it really does make it a great testing ground for my designs and UI solutions. Let’s see how this one goes.

Check out Kindo here: www.kindo.com