Yay ! hover.in has crossed  its first million impressions today - the second half million coming in matter of just couple of weeks. What is significant is that we have achieved this feat with just couple of beta publishers.

There is another reason for celebration as well – We have today released the first version of Wordpress hover plugin – wp-hover. Now wordpress bloggers can add hoverlets to their blog in matter of minutes.

The current version allows bloggers to create hoverlets without even registering. While creating a post, just highlight the keyword you want to hoverize and click on wp-hover button on the wordpress post editor. Bloggers can choose from many pre-fabricated hoverlets which include, youtube videos, flickr / Picasa photos, Wordpress related articles, product pricing hoverlet, Slideshare presentations and many more.

Once you have chosen the desired hoverlets, they will show up as hover links in post editor – After publishing the post, a small hover icon will appear next to all the hoverized keywords. When the visitor hovers over those keywords, hoverlet content will show up.

Go ahead give it a try. You can either download it from here, or directly install the plugin from wordpress admin dashboard.

Note: wp-hover currently supports wordpress 2.7 and above

Yes, we have taken your suggestions. Many publishers have been giving us feedback, that we needed a simpler dashboard. We heard it and we have taken action. We have just released the spanking new dashboard for hover.in publishers.

We have tried to stick to K.I.S.S principal and made it so easy to start managing and creating hoverlets, that even a novice can do it in less than a minute.

Atleast, thats what we think!

You will have to now give us feedback on whether you find it as simple as we think it is.

Here are some of the screenshots of our new Publisher dashboard.

Main Dashboard Page

Hoverlet properties page

Hoverlet Preview Page

You got to login and check it out for yourself. For any feedbacks or suggestions do mail us at support@hover.in

There is lot happening here at hover headquarters !

Over last few months, not only have a build a great team, but have also added loads of new features – and yet more in pipeline. I am very excited and here is why

Touched Half Million Hovers

Now that may not be a big number, but remember we are still in early beta – and have opened up only for couple of publishers in last couple of months. The response has been not only encouraging, but we have also got tremendous feedback from these publishers.

We have close to 300 publishers who have registered with us and waiting in the wings to try out our services. We will be opening up few more accounts in next couple of weeks. So just hold on for a bit more !

Super fast crawling and hoverizing

We have been constantly improving upon time it takes to first show hoverlets (from the time it is crawled), and I am delighted to say that the time has come down from 4-8 hours to 15- 45 mins. Thats a big jump and I am sure publishers will also be very happy with it. We are also hopeful that in coming few weeks we can get it down to sub 10 mins levels.

Multi Language Support

Hover.in is probably the only in-text platform that supports nearly all local and International Languages. This has been in development for quite some time and over last few weeks it also has been live on one of publishers – Oneindia . The Tamil channel of oneindia has been showing hoverlets over past month and has been very stable. Here is a screenshot of related articles in Tamil Language.

Shiny New Admin Interface

One of the primary feedback we got was that admin section (where hoverlets are created) had to be more user friendly – and we have done exactly that. We will be launching our Shiny new admin interface next week, and believe me, it will really please you. It is fast, user-friendly and most importantly works well with IE 6 (I really hope that it will discarded of the face of Internet sooner than later). A big shout out to Sushant, who has worked tirelessly on it for last 3 weeks.

Developers Blog

We had this in offing for sometime now. We have great set of Developers here at hover.in – and Developers blog will be a place where you will find them ramble on latest in Erlang, Yaws and mnesia (yes, those are the technologies we work on). If that sounds like fun to you – the developer blog is for you :).

If you are web publisher and want to make positive difference to your visitors, why not go ahead and sign-up

We’re pleased to announce that the hover.in team will be on a 4 city tour prior to our launch in March 2008, as part of a pre-launch initiative and we’re excited and looking forward to meeting with the users signed up for beta.

We ‘re also coinciding these trips with a few exciting partnerships that are in the making, more of which will be announced soon. Exciting times indeed, and you’re invited to be part of it all. If you are a blogger looking for new ways to interact with your readers, a startup open to partner with hover.in , a developer looking to use the hover.in API’s , a designer looking to create themes for the hover.in platform, or a portal looking to monetize your content - we ‘re listening .

Bombay February 24th
Pune February 28th
Chennai March 1st
Bangalore March 4th

Do get in touch with Arun ( +91 9822 575676 ) , or Bhasker (+91 988 4545 944), or send in a mail to contact@hover.in . We’ll also be posting updates over at the hover.in on twitter.

- Team hover.in

Yahoo! pipes is one the most truly innovative applications that have provided a platform for application developers and end-users alike. And ever since their launch, several reviews later, it has grown well beyond being just a “An interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” . Hover.in is the organizer of the first ever pipesCamp, which will be held in Chennai,India on December 23rd, 2007 . It ‘ll be interesting to bring the community together and just see can be hacked up, track work being done , and generally see how yahoo! pipes could churn out some amazing hacks and brilliant applications for bloggers, developers and end-users - at the same.

What?

An unconference for yahoo! pipes hackers and hobbyists.

Why?

Why not ! building a community around the yahoo! pipes enthusiasts, share ways to maximize the power of the utility itself, learn how your favourite pipes are built, show off neat tricks of your own , and spread some “pipes” love to the community.

What next ?!

Check out pipesCamp right now,or on upcoming! Add a talk of your own , register by adding your name to the participants list, and get hacking !

Today, we are excited to open up our beta invite page to public after 2 months of intense preparation. We will be having our private beta testing with a select group of bloggers and web publishers, and are pleased to invite everyone to sign up for the beta.

We have put up a demo that gives you a very brief idea on what you can expect from hover.in in the near future. Here is a brief round up of important features that hover.in has to offer:

• Customized Content Display:
  One of the most important requirements of a web publisher is to use the whitespace available efficiently. With hover.in, you don’t have to worry about it one bit. As an example, have a look at the ‘apply for beta‘ hover.in link on our demo page. Normally having rich applications like these would take considerable space. But, with hover.in ’s unique script installed, you can reduce the space taken to just 3 words and provide a more intuitive browsing experience. And whats more, this is just one of the thousand possibilities. A web publisher can strategically use different words or let our algorithms identify them for you, for maximum utilization. Think of it, as showing contextual applications, advertisements and content taking just fraction of the space, but on a whole new plane.

  

• Improved Visitor experience:
  We hope that visitors will have a look forward to much more intuitive browsing experience on a site / blog with hover.in installed. Calibrate the degree of widgets, ads , and content from third party sources as per your liking, and in customizable multiple themes as well. If you are someone who appreciates the increased whitespace for your readers or if you on the other hand believe in improvising on your brand identity and content ; we let you make that decision.
• Multiple Monetization Opportunities:
  This by far is the most attractive and the important feature of hover.in and one that we believe our target audience of web publishers and bloggers will love. You can monetize both the content and hundreds of keywords on your page as well as hover.in’s in-built brand promotion widgets - to build a truly compelling brand identity that helps you earn as well . A hover.in window can display contextual, sponsor or affiliate ads from any 3rd party network like Google, yahoo, MSN, Commission Junction etc. Imagine the amount of monetization opportunities that open up - minus the clutter.
• Fully configurable hover window:
  hover.in lets you change the look and feel of the hover.in window to suit your site / blog ensuring consistency and a positive feel . We also encourage ideas for new themes, and perhaps users to create their own skins for increased integration.
• Ease of use:
  Even a novice user will find hover.in extremely easy to use. Just insert a snippet of code and you are done. Everything else can be managed from the hover.in ’s easy-to -use administration panel.

While we’re at it , we’ d love to have your views and suggestions before the full fledged launch to so that we can try to integrate features ranging from your popular widgets to your preferred ad networks and contextual needs.

- the hover.in team

Publishers Rejoice !

Hover.in is going to change the way you display content on blog / Website. Subscribe to this blog to get the updates on launch. We will be announcing our private beta shortly.