Great news: We have improved the way that Kindo resizes the picture you upload!
Flip-side: Since we want to bring this features to all the profile pictures in your trees - we decided to give Kindo a short lunch break while we are processing the image database.
Your family tree will be back to nomal (but in a better version) before you even notice!
Update: Back in business! 
As a follow-up on yesterday’s post, we just want to inform all the Kindo users that we know will resend the old invitations that went out to Hotmail addresses. This, we do in order to ensure that your family members really have received them.
Please let us know if you still have suspicions that some emails haven’t reached the inboxes!
DISCLAIMER: If your mother-in-law doesn’t reply to your invitation, it MAY be other reasons behind…
“This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”… Those words of Neil Armstrong from 1969 could just as well refer to the project of getting Hotmail to work with Kindo.
As reported earlier, we have had problems with emails going from Kindo to Hotmail addresses. Some of them haven’t reached their recipients at all, while others have ended up in the junk mail-folder. Now after intense work from the tech guys in our office, we think we have solved the problem but we want to check that with you:
- Do the invitations you send out to you family members get through properly?
Remember that you always can use Kindo’s new invitation overview panel to see the status of the emails. There, you can also send out a reminder to your family members that haven’t taken action yet.
As much as many people report that they like the looks of Kindo and are fascinated by the tree building, it’s also true that the real fun begins when other family members step in!
>Lots of love to the Kindo community from Uncle Martin!
By now, many people have started to notice and also like Kindo… The footprints are from all over the world, or what do you say about:
Well, enough of language school for today… If it is a fact that many people are starting to like Kindo, its also a fact that the popular email service Hotmail doesn’t really embraces us -We have noticed how some of the emails we send out to Hotmail users goes directly into the “junk mail”-folder of the recipients. To fix this has proved to be easier said than done!
Let’s not get too technical here but the problem arises when a service like ours send out too many mails per day. This is then recognized by Hotmail who flags us as a spam. (how dare they!) We have during the last week gone through a quite long list of things in order for Hotmail to validate us as “good guys”. Some things have been to create a “spf-record”, a little text file in an open database where we say that Kindo sends mail from “this and that” ip-address. Further we have signed up to Microsofts “Smart Network Data Services”, studied the Postmaster Guidelines in detail etc without any result… When we contact Hotmail, they can only say that it’s the “Smart Screen Filter” that stops us.. (duh).
We have seen how many other web-services have the same problem so it’s not a unique thing for us. Being optimists, we are working on another solution that we hope will work soon! (It’s not sending them a box of chocolate… that’s way further down on our list.) Until then, if you have sent out emails to your family without any action from their side, you might want to tell them to check their junk folder.
With the new Kindo release, it’s also much easier to view all the outstanding invitations and e.g. send out reminders. Have a look on http://beta.kindo.com
Take care all Kindo-family out there!
One of the problems of doing something as complex as Kindo is that you get so caught up in the bugs, issues and things you want to do but can’t for whatever reason, so you forget what’s going right and what works well….
So, as a reminder to myself more than anything (cathartic blogs are great), I’m posting some good feedback that has come in so far, and also asking if anyone has any other good feedback for us?
So here we go:
” - it looks just great. The design works beautifully”
“It’s a pretty cool website. I started in the alpha release on my tree, and put in as many as I could think of. I only invited two people - my fiance and my mom. One day after I invited my mom (in the beta), I logged back in, and she had filled out a HUGE portion of my family tree that I had no idea about! It was pretty neat to see all the links - I would love to see it grow further & further, and see who I’m related to that I don’t know about. My mom also corrected a few things that I’d got wrong in the distant family that lives in the States - shows how little I know! I imagine it would be really cool when two huge “trees” get linked up through a common point, by email address, I imagine. All of a sudden your tree can double in size!!
Functionality-wise - it’s pretty easy to use too. I wish it could be a bit faster, but that’s more an issue of being in SA. I’m sure the UI could be tweaked to be a bit cooler - and I’m sure that will come in later releases.
”
“looks v cool mate; pretty addictive usability”
“congrats!
it looks beautiful - love the design.
ageless/genderless and cute as well…
the afrikaans sounds ok, one or two spelling mistakes and I am not used to using Afrikaans on the web so would possibly rather use the site in english…
seems to be easy to use…
really nice!”
And that’s it for now 
kindo, family, bugs, web2.0, usability, design, brand Hi everyone, after a week or so of bugfixing and user interface improvements, we’re happy to say we’ve just updated Kindo Beta, so we’re hoping you will like it!
If you’ve been using the Alpha, then don’t worry as your data is still in place (!), and you should be re-directed straight to Beta.
Improvements we’ve made so far:
You should experience faster page loading.
Kindo is translated into 8 languages, and we’re working on another 4.
Problems we’ve experienced:
Sending email in 9 languages isn’t as easy as it may seem - this is mainly due to accented characters in languages like Spanish and Swedish.
A few issues we know about and are working to improve:
Only currently married partners are place side-by-side.
Ended relationship grey lines will cross *through* siblings and other partners until we implement pruning (pruning is where you only see your blood relatives).
Sending invitations more than once. We’re adding a page to make it much easier.
Hotmail doesn’t seem to like our email…
More on our Known Issues page…
As always, we’re super happy to be getting bug reports, user interface feedback and suggestions for improvements from you, so please don’t be shy!
More soon
kindo, beta, updates 
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