Sometime over the last few days, while my back was turned, the developer guys pushed out a new version of StepRep. It’s hard to keep up with ‘em.

As usual, a lot of the changes will be invisible to slobs like you and me. But there are two big changes that I should draw your attention to:

Promoting stories to Faceboook

A couple weeks ago I alerted you to a workaround for getting your StepRep widget to appear on your Facebook profile. Now there’s a way to publish stories right into your Facebook stream.

Each story now has three options under “Promote”:

  • Add story to your widget and profile page.
  • Send the story to Twitter.
  • Publish the story to your Facebook stream.

When you click on “Publish to Facebook” you’ll get a little pop-up asking for your Facebook credentials (unless you happen to be logged into Facebook already). Then you’ll have the option of adding a personal message to the story before it appears on your profile, where it will look something like this:

Interacting with members of the MyFrontSteps community

Most of our users probably don’t pay too much attention to the little orange buttons across the top of the screen, the ones that say “StepConnect” and “Referrals & Quotes”. That’s okay; so far there hasn’t been much to do on those screens except watch some Spokesmonster videos.

But if you click on “Referrals & Quotes” now you’ll see…well, depending on which city you live in, you might not see anything at all. But I’ll show you what it looks like for my hometown, Saskatoon:

Y’see, the table displays questions from folks in the MyFrontSteps community – specifically, from our new Facebook application Homebook. Click on the entries and you can interact with whoever posted the question. You can offer an answer, request more info, or post photos. Your replies will be visible but anonymous to other service providers, but the customer will be able to see who you are.

Right now when you visit this screen, the questions may or may not be relevant to your business; but as the action picks up in your town, we’ll narrow down the table so you only see questions related to your line of work.

This probably isn’t something you need to worry about right away. We’ll soon be adding a way to notify users when a potentially interesting question comes in. Just letting you know that, as always, there’s cool stuff coming your way in StepRep.