What's new on Kiva 3/22: Social sharing, wish lists, loan alerts and more
March 22, 2013By: Martin Butt
The last update to the Kiva website is what we call an Innovation Iteration -- the engineers got to vote on the projects they wanted to work on. The results include some fun and interesting improvements to the site.
Social Share Buttons
We've made sharing great loans with your networks even easier by adding social share buttons to loan profile pages. Now you can share borrower stories easily on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Loan Wish List
Have you seen a great loan you want to remember? You can now “star” a loan and add it to your wish list by clicking on the star icon next to the borrower’s name on a loan profile page. You can find your wish list by logging in, going to www.kiva.org/lend, and clicking on “My List” in the sidebar to the left.
Fundraising Loans on Lender Maps
In addition to loans you’ve already made, it's now possible to see fundraising loans on the maps that appear on your Lender page. Just choose 'Map View' of your loans on the My Portfolio page.
Saved Searches
Being able to save a search has been a long sought-after feature. So we've built a version with a few limitations. This was a first try and we’d love to hear your feedback. If you do a text search for a loan and get 0 results, you will now see a button to “Get Alerts" when more loans become available.
Once you sign up, whenever new loans matching your search are posted, you’ll get an email alert.
Kiva Zip lona on Kiva.org
Our latest Kiva City, Kiva City Little Rock, has an interesting new feature. We're showing both traditional loans and Kiva Zip loans! Now we can show Zip loans anywhere easily on the main Kiva site.
Open-Source Projects
Here at Kiva, we rely heavily on open-source software to build our infrastructure. Open-source software is freely distributed and allows Kiva to keep its costs down. We've been exploring different ways we can give back to this great community -- and now we can! There's now a list of our open source projects on our developer site. If you are a software developer, why not download them, take a look and even send a pull-request?
Have questions about changes to Kiva's website? Send them our way at blog@kiva.org!
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