"What in the tarnation happened to all my old wall posts from friends? Did you people screw up again?"

OK, the quote is from me, but in a word - Yes we did screw up again. However, we have a fix for it. Wall posts previous to Wednesday are still in tact and stored away in the database. It just happens to be a different table then the one the new Wall logic (or illogic) uses to display messages from your friends. Never fear, once the mistake was gently pointed out by our kind users, we began a fix for it. That fix has been completed and being tested and we will be able to rejoin you with your old wall posts in the next few days (I really want to say tomorrow, but I want to test a few hundred times before we deploy the fix).

-m

OK, so what is this Status feature? Is it a popularity contest like in High School?

No, the status feature is a quick way to post things to your friends and followers. A status post can contain text, a photo or graphic and some formatting.

So why would I want to use this?

I see two great applications off the bat (and am waiting for you guys to show me more)

First, many of you go to each of your friends walls and post a daily/weekly message (Happy Hump Day, Thirsty Thursday, Race recap). This message is repeated for each friend. Now, you can just post this message in your status and all of your friends will get it in their NewsFeed. Save you the time of pasting it on everyones page. Don't worry, if you want to post it on a person's wall directly you still can.

Second, and is just an idea I have. What if we used the status message as a way to carry on a conversation, like a race thread. This would only work if everyone involved was friends, but the idea would be that each of us would just post messages as the race is going on. This is very similar to how some people use Twitter on race day. Not sure if the experience would be good or bad, but it would be interesting to try.

Let me know what you think.

-m

PS: It is no secret that I would have failed any High School popularity contest, so let's not go down that road again.

We are pretty excited by the changes and know that they will make the Infield Parking experience even better. The new features will allow you to:

 - keep track of your friends  activities with the user NewsFeed.

 - post quick status messages to your followers and your profile page.

 - keep current with the latest in NASCAR News from around the sport.

 - drill down into the stats of all three NASCAR series

 - make sense of it all with the newly designed home page and site navigation

Here are a few screen movies that I have made to explain some of the changes.

Home Page changes:

NewsFeed:

Status:

Today we did a beta update for Infield Parking. If you log in to the beta site, you will see a new design for the home page. We have reorganized the main navigation, added Racing News and Standings sections, and change the main column to be called "Latest Buzz". 

The Latest Buzz section is divided into areas for drivers, VIPs, Infield Parking announcements, and users. It shows status updates, bog posts, media uploads and new forum threads. The idea was to surface a lot of the information that was hidden behind the tabs on the boxes of the old home page design.

Also added is a poll in the lower left and call out boxes for the new Racing News and Standings sections.

Here is a little video of the changes:

If you haven't checked out the Beta yet send a note to this account and we will add you to the list.

Let us know how you like it and have fun.

There has been some posting from people who have entered the Sponsify promotion from Toyota. Even our friendly, neighborhood moderator has gotten in on the act (http://www.infieldparking.com/users/IpModerator/channel/item/405124). This gave me an idea. Everyone go to Sponsify and make your own cars, take a screen capture of them and post them in your Infield Parking gallery with the tag "DOT";  Design of Tomorrow - get it? Then when the Sponsify promotion is over in 9 days, we can have our own vote. I will make backgrounds that you can use in your parking space of the top 5 vote getters on Infield Parking. To become a background you can't use copyrighted imagery (no snagging pics off the net).

If you need help with the screen capturing process then let me know.

In the mean time remember to vote once a day for your IP friends in the Sponsify competition!

New Text editor added to the Beta site. Many of you have noticed that the Beta Status feature and Wall feature had a different text editor. This new editor has now been added to the rest of the Beta site. I think it will make life much easier for everyone. Let me know how you like it.

NOTE: We will probably be beta testing the site for another week before rolling it out to the general population, so if you want to get a sneak peak at whats coming, there is still plenty of time to send an email to this account.

We've been getting some very positive feedback regarding the Newsfeed Beta changes. Several of you have sent ins some great suggestions like the ones I just received below (feed back in italics, my responses below).

"The News Feed is cool, I wonder if you can hook it up with Facebook? What I post there shows up here and the other way around."

We are working on tighter integration with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There are many different ways we can do this and we want to see how people use the Status updates and then will finalize the approach.

"Also lets say I got into a chat in the feed on someones comment, and when a hour goes by, it will be hard to find. Seeing pages filled with one persons comments on a thread is much, maybe a ignore "thread" feature? Or a "Follow" function for that particular post/thread/comment?"

Having your news feed overwhelmed is deffinatly an issue (Facebook seems to be struggling with it as well). I like the "Follow This Thread" idea and will discuss it with the team. We are looking into ways to "filter" your newsfeed. Right now the only option is to "unfollow" someone which is a bit drastic.

"I also think it would be inviting to have updates show up on the Home Page. Maybe not what was posted, but that a member just posted and where? "ex. "username just posted something in the 'Dale got skillz' thread"? "

Home page changes are in the works this week. As well as the addition of a few more sections of the site.

Thanks everyone who is helping us out by reviewing the new features.

• - Event listings from Drivers, sponsors and VIPs


• - Users can add themselves to an event and share with their friends


• - Events can have a special forum thread


• - Users can share media from the event


• - Take photos at the event and share them with the special mobile media upload tag for each event