Name changes and channels
January 30th, 2008
Name change
Earlier this month we changed the name of our social network yoMedia to yoFriends.com, to make a clearer distinction between the social network and our company. We have been talking about it for a while, but the actual switch was a bit of a rushed thing, as there were press releases going out for a conference where our company website was mentioned as yoMedia.com - which was at that point still our social network. We made the switch in time, but the transition was a little bumpy.
Now, a week later we tuned and tweaked things a bit to make the name change more convenient for our users. There are automatic redirects from the yoMedia to the yoFriends domain, and the yoMedia business website now has a link to the social network yoFriends.
Channels
Today we opened up Channels to the public. They have been visible as a 'future feature' for a long time now, and we had actually forgotten about flipping the switch to allow everyone to have their own channels. Now everyone can enjoy them.
Channels allow you to group content of different types. Whenever you are watching or listening to content, there will be a link below it where you can either create a new channel, or add the content to an existing channel you have moderator access to.
When you view one of your own channels, you can move the content around or remove it.
As a channel owner, you can even assign moderators who can help you maintain the channel.
Riot police evicting squatters!
October 31st, 2007
Update: Our social network yoMedia has been renamed to yoFriends to make the distinction between the website and the company. Links have been updated.
Yesterday, the Amsterdam riot police evicted squatters from a house next to the yoMedia office. Today, their friends were back and they re-claimed the house. The riot police came is bit by bit and blocked off most of the street. Paint bombs were thrown, water cannons were fired. It was quite a spectacle to watch and record from the sideline.
yoFriends presents: Channel 22, the Amsterdam Squatters Eviction channel.
Stay tuned for more content. If you have more content, upload it and we'll add it to the channel.
There is an article about it on: indymedia. It's in Dutch, but there are photos as well.
Long time no blog
October 24th, 2007
Update: Our social network yoMedia has been renamed to yoFriends to make the distinction between the website and the company. Links have been updated.
We've been really, really, really busy working on our upcoming project: making the technology behind yoMedia available as a platform for other companies to license. Media conversion to mobile and web formats, as well as file hosting and social features like rating and commenting will be made available through this platform.
Because we had to build a number of things from scratch, we could apply all the experience we gained while building yoFriends.com to make them more robust, faster and easier to use.
We are currently working with a number of A-brands that are going to use our technology in their systems and websites. Once their services launch, we will of course blog more about it. Just know that we are really ambitious about it and that the services made available at launch will just be the beginning. Expect to hear more within the next few months.
Once we have the platform up and running, we will rebuild the yoFriends.com website to use our new platform. We have a number of ideas on what we want to do with it, including making it a lot simpler to use. There are just too many 'hidden' features right now.
On a totally different note, we are glad to see that even with the low amount of media coverage we have received in the last few months, we still have a steady flow of users.
Maintenance
July 19th, 2007
Update: Our social network yoMedia has been renamed to yoFriends to make the distinction between the website and the company. Links have been updated.
Due to the large increase in users on the website, we have focused a lot of attention on improving the yoFriends back-end to handle the increased load. We just deployed a number of updates and changes that resulted from this.
Changes:
- Setup a test server to test changes and deployment before moving them to our 'live' servers.
- Automated update deployment procedure.
- Added a nice maintenance notice page to show during updates.
- Optimizations on overview pages, to make the site faster during peak times cache misses.
- Moved the news items to the blog.
For the users, the largest change is that they enjoy some more speed while the site is busy. For us, it means we can now test our changes on a separate server before pushing them to the 'live' server. So there should be less bugs that make it there.
The new automated deployment, using Capistrano, means we can (almost) release updates with the press of one button.
3 comments »More press popularity
July 18th, 2007
We have had more coverage in Dutch newspapers and we sure noticed. Last Friday, De Telegraaf wrote a large article about yoMedia. If you have access to the paid part of their website, you can find the article here.
Last Monday, Metro wrote about us. If you have a free account there, you can read it here.
Both papers resulted in a nice increase in website traffic as well as new users.
Both articles highlight that we're opposing the more traditional 'Ringtone Mafia' by allowing people to both create their own mobile content, as well as download it for free. There's no hidden costs or subscriptions, just mobile content for free.
Multi-uploader and new look
June 25th, 2007
Update: Our social network yoMedia has been renamed to yoFriends to make the distinction between the website and the company. Links have been updated.
We have just released multiple updates to yoFriends.
We added pretty urls for content. The title is appended to the url, so now you can get a better impression of what to expect just by looking at the url. This is especially useful when posting links on other websites, like Digg or when you encounter a yoFriends link on google.
A lot of the cool features are restricted to registered users, but they were not visible to users who were not logged in. Due to this, a lot of users would not know what the site was about, and had no real incentive to register and 'discover' features like making ringtones from video, wallpapers from images and downloading a mobile version of videos.
We changed this by making more of these 'hidden' options visible and we now indicate to users that they have to register before they can use them. The menu bar and the content display page now have a lot more visible links on them. The ones that require registration will take you to a registration page when you click them.
We released our multi-file uploader for public usage. It allows users to upload up to 15 files at once. This should make it easier to upload more content in less time.
The content display page got a make-over. The old look was fine when we created it, but over time the amount of information on the page grew and the page looked a bit too gray and dull. The new look groups related features and has a bit more colour. We hope you like it.
yoMedia now has a blog
June 20th, 2007
Ever since we started we have had a 'news' section on the yoMedia website, but it was well-hidden and the text editor tools were less useful. Now we have decided to just setup a weblog so we can properly write things. A blog offers niceties like RSS feeds and extra coolness points. We love the extra coolness points.
Since we're using Ruby and Rails for almost everything we do, we decided to go with Mephisto. So far our experience is positive. Customizing one of the templates to suit our taste has proven to be easy and writing posts is not hard either.
One of the goals of this blog is to update our users on changes and updates to our yoMedia service. We have a lot of features planned, so whenever we do larger updates we will try to blog about it. This lets our users know what has changed and it provides them with a central place to give feedback. Bugs, complaints, usability issues and more things can be brought to our attention.
Since we love to use Ruby and Ruby on Rails, we might blog about that every once in a while as well. Cool features we discovered, magic gems we found, interesting code snippets, etc. There are a lot of great blogs out there with even more great posts that have helped us a lot. So if we have a chance to give back to the community, we will gladly do so.
Spits article was a massive success!
May 15th, 2007
As posted yesterday, there was a large (near full page) article about our service in the Dutch newspaper Spits today. This has resulted in a nice boost to our user count. We had a massive amount of users visiting us today, more than we expected.
We were experiencing some technical difficulties, which occurred because we had a very large number of users on the website. A number of the problems have been fixed, which should be noticeable due to the website being faster than before. There is still a small number of know issues that we are going to look into starting tomorrow.
If some of these problems affected you, then we apologize for that. Even though we are in beta, we aim to provide a good service and we do our best to become better every day.
The pressreleases are out...
May 14th, 2007
Two weeks ago we removed our site-wide password, to allow more people to use the website. Since then we fixed a lot of bugs, polished a lot of little things and we are now nice and shiny.
Tomorrow, a large article about us will appear in the Dutch newspaper Spits, which is the second largest newspaper in The Netherlands. We hope that at least some of the 1.7 million readers will stop by. Over the next couple of weeks our press releases will reach other newspapers, magazines and weblogs, so we are bound to get more publicity, users and content.
Stay tuned and keep sharing your (mobile) content!