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.
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.
11 comments »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.