General Questions

What is loopnote?

Loopnote lets people create alerts. Say you're in a band or you own an art gallery. You can use Loopnote to alert people about an upcoming show. The way it works is simple: You create a topic like "Governor's Park Band" and let people subscribe to it. When you're ready to promote an event just post a note to your topic like "Governor's Park Band playing 2nite at 9pm, Larimer Lounge". All subscribers will receive an alert with your note. People can subscribe via email, IM, text or RSS.

How can I use loopnote?

You can use loopnote in a variety of ways. We use loopnote to subscribe to some band loops that we like, which let us know whenever they are playing a gig. We also subscribe to a local art event loops which send out alerts about all sorts of artistic events around town.

Others can use loopnote to send notes to subscribers. Take Nick's band, More than Medium. Whenever they have a show he sends out a note like "More than Medium, tonight, 10PM, Soiled Dove". Everyone subscribed to the topic gets the message.

Check out some other common usage scenarios.

Is loopnote free? If so, how do you make money?

Yes, loopnote is completely free to use, and the basic functionality always will be. However, we reserve the right to charge for certain 'premium' features that we have in the works, and might attach ads to the notes that we send out. We will NOT send out notes that only contain ads, and we'll make sure that the ads are unobtrusive.

Loopnote is currently in beta, which means that we are making it available to the public early to get feedback and test out features. Unlike so many other Web 2.0 sites, we are not planning on staying in beta forever, but while we are, we'll try to offer all of loopnote's functionality for FREE.

What are loops?

A loop is a way to send and receive notes about a certain topic. You can subscribe to an existing loop or create your own, and you can unsubscribe at any time. You can receive notes that are sent to the loop in any way you choose: email, IM, text message, or RSS.

What are notes?

Notes are alerts that are sent to a loop. Notes are short, sweet and to the point. If it can't be said in fewer than 100 characters then it probably doesn't make sense to use loopnote to send it.

But I need more than 100 characters for my note!

If you absolutely need more than 100 characters, we give you the option of attaching an extended note to your note. Extended notes can contain HTML (fancy graphics, links to a Google map, a YouTube video, etc.), but they are not sent out to subscribers.

In order to see the extended note, subscribers have to click on a link in the note that they receive, which will then take them to a page that shows the extended note. Moral of the story? Put the core of your message in the note, and use the extended note for extra information.

Will I get spammed?

No! Your information will never be shared with anyone else. When you subscribe to a loop, the loop owner can see how many people are subscribed but he cannot see who is subscribed.

We promise that we will never send you anything that you didn't request by subscribing to a loop or to verify your information.

Can you get too many notes from a loop? Unfortunately, yes. However, if that happens you can easily unsubscribe from that loop and you will never receive another note from it. A good way to see how many notes to expect from a loop on a weekly basis is to check out the loop statistics on the right-hand side of the loop page.

Can you add feature X?

We're open for suggestions, so please let us know via our support forum.

What is RSS?

RSS generally stands for "really simple syndication". RSS delivers information as an XML file which can be read using a variety of RSS aggregators. For more information, check out the Wikipedia definition.

My question wasn't answered here. What can I do?

If your questions wasn't answered in this FAQ, we suggest that you check out our support forum. We regularly monitor the forum and will try to answer your question as soon as we can.

Alternatively, you can contact us directly.

Troubleshooting

I didn't get a verification code. What's going on?

Sorry to hear that. We're doing our best to make sure that verification codes make it to their recipient, but in some cases it's out of our hands. Some things you might want to check:

• If it was an IM verification, were you online when the verification code was sent? If not, go online now and have the verification code re-sent to you.

• Did you enter the right information in your account settings?

• Wait a while to see if the verification code turns up. Depending on the channel, it sometimes takes a while for things to get delivered.

• For IM verifications, you can try adding the loopnote notification agent as your buddy (MSN, Jabber: loopnote@loopnote.com; AIM, ICQ, Yahoo: loopnote)

If none of that helps, please let us know in our support forum.

I can't subscribe to loops, all of the checkboxes are greyed out!

Before you can actually subscribe to a loop using a certain channel (e-mail, IM, mobile, RSS), we need to verify that channel with you by sending you a verification code. You can manage the verification process here.

IM notifications don't work very well! Why is that?

While we did our best to make IM notifications work as smoothly as possible, we are aware that there are still certain quirks with them. If you are having problems or suggestions on how to improve our IM functionality, let us know in the support forum.