We’ve covered Erly, a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup in the social ‘experience’ space that counts founding Hulu CTO and former Kleiner partner Eric Feng as a co-founder. Erly launched a month ago as a way to build and share social content around experiences. And today, the startup is updating its application with a few more features.
As we explained in our initial coverage of Collections, the application is a place to house all the content around a given experience. It’s sort of like a next generation photo album, but with more than just photos. Users can aggregate and share content, build an album of photos, links, updates, and more. You can import content from other social services including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Picasa, Flickr, and Instagram.
Based on user feedback, Erly has released a new version of Collections that are more ‘event’ focused. As Feng explains, it wasn’t clear to sers why and when they should use Collections over let’s say Facebook or Flickr. The startup has also made the service simpler and more user-friendly.
In order to place the focus on creating memories around events and ‘targeted scenarios’, Erly now allows users to create a permanent landing page for any event they want to remember. It’s sort of like creating an event microsite. Users can select a photo to serve as a full-screen cover photo. and Erly will overlay information about the event (title, date, location, an optional description) on top of the photo) and more.
The cover page also includes a few other pieces of information including the number of likes and comments and a guest list of who was there. You can add people to the guest list, or people can add themselves.
Generally, you can now like and comment on both Collections and any item in the Collections and you can email photos into a Collection (but Erly doesn’t require Facebook connect to create and account). You can send an email from your Facebook email to editor@erly.com, put the title or at least one word from the title of the Collection you want to add content to, and put the photo in the body of the email. The photo will be added to the appropriate collection. And Erly has added an Activity feed for every user. The feed includes updates on any Collection you’ve built or liked and any Collection you’re on the guest list for.
One of the main goals with this update, says Feng, is to lower the bar to actually creating and contributing to this microsites.
And we can expect more from Erly soon, as the startup plans to launch a new product every two months.
