One of the nicest bits of feedback we've received last week
was a message from two users who had just connect based on their compatibility
score registering as "Best Friends." The two users shared the
exact same favorite producers based on our "Music Compatible Test."
They wrote to say that they decided to form a
collobaration. It all started through common musical interest, which led
to them becoming friends online, and to discover that they had a true bond for
music. Wow!
As it happens we've been working on this feature for months
to hopefully match your tastes with those of other users, and showing what they
friends like. Judging by a compatibility score, users can be led to other
users' profiles in order to find new music beats that you might like.
Making this vision is reality is challenging, but we think we've made a
promising start. Please let us know how you think we're doing, and what
would make your experience even better.
Open Web Awards is the only multilingual
international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web
technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web
Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories. The first
Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes.Winners included Facebook, Digg, Google, Meetup, Twitter, Netvibes, woot!,
Last.fm and Mahalo.
Nominations will be held from November 5th till
November 16th 2008. The first and final voting rounds will be held from
November 19th till December 15th.We are
asking for your help to vote us the Best Niche Social Network for 2008.
Our thanks to all the people that voted so far, and
to all of you for using the site and helping to build beatbuggy into what it is
today.We're looking forward to bringing
a lot of great new stuff to Beatbuggy in 2009.
On
Monday night, we kicked off a 1 week focus group with 10 friends just south of
us in Washington, DC.Most of the
participants were coming from a late night flag football game so it was great
that they were willing to come out, grass stains and all, for another hour
instead of calling it a night.Free
pizza and beer never fail to help the cause:-))
User
feedback is an important part of how we improve our service.We will be run a number of these focus groups
of the next nine months.
We're
always looking for new circles of friends to run focus groups with so drop us a
line if you're interested in helping out in exchange for some free food, and
drinks.You should also feel free at
anytime to just shoot us an email with your thoughts.support (at) beatbuggy.com
Those of you who
enjoy customizing profiles, Beatbuggy is a godsend: offering full CSS and HTML
editing.This means the page can look
like anything you can imagine, as long as you imagine it without
Javascript.We've tried to make
customizing your BeatBuggy profile easy and fun.We implemented a page to view all the latest
customized profiles.Here are some
profiles (in chronological order) that have been customized:
Well, I know it may sound silly, but this is the feature we implemented a few weeks back.We've forgot to blog about it.Sorry:-)Now when you're watching a video, you can click on the little light bulb image next to it which turns off the lights on the page so that you can more clearly watch your video.
Another feature we implemented a couple of weeks ago is our "Remove Customization" button. This means that if you're looking at someone's profile but having a hard time reading their text because of the colors they've chosen or their background image, you can just click on the button and you see all of the data in the default beatbuggy profile layout.
Hope you enjoy the new features of the site, and invite your friends to check them out!
Meanwhile, we also made a number of quick performance fixes to improve the speed of our Web site - our userbase is growing at an accelerated pace so every week involves a lot of database and server work simply to keep up with the growing traffic on the Web site.Additionally, we are making updates/improvements to the music charts, review system, and developing a customization page that will showcase some profiles (in chronological order) that have been customized.Stay tune!
There are a number of smaller bug-fixes, and a bunch more in the works, but that's a short summary of what's new:-)
After dismissing it for months as nothing more than a fad,
we've recently signed up for a Twitter account.Now you can get the inside scope on beatbuggy and what we do on a daily
basis.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a fast, convenient way to give a "shout out" to your friends
and family. It works like this: whenever you want to (or whenever you think
about it), you post a short (140-characters or less) message (called a "tweet"). Just had a great mea? Post a tweet. Rented a great movie?
Post a tweet. Get a raise? Find a great website? Find a hot beat? Found a news article that set
your blood to boiling? Post a tweet.
People who want to read your tweets are called "followers." Each
time you post a tweet, it shows up on your personal Twitter home page ....and a
copy is also automatically forwarded to each of your followers. In addition,
when you follow someone else's tweets, they are automatically forwarded to you
and appear on your personal Twitter home page.
Soon, your Twitter homepage fills up with your tweets ... and tweets from
people you care enough about to follow. At a glance -- you're in touch!
On the day of launch, our disbelief that people were actually going to see all the work we've put into Beatbuggy gradually gave way to overwhelming excitement and relief.The team crowed around a single computer to witness the launch.The good news is our server did really well!Thanks again for spreading the word.We really appreciate it!!!
We think it's really important to share the Beatbuggy experience with you - not only on the technical side, but also on the whole "re-launching" side.In addition to making Beatbuggy a consumer service, we've also had to deal with the less user-oriented tasks of finance, legal, and other business matters.Jesse's our go-to guy on that.If you ever wonder what he does all day (besides buying lunch), you'll be happy to know he does quite a lot.
We've been receiving a lot of interest for partnerships, and as we're only officially one week into the re-launch, we're naturally still sort of figuring it all out.Building a scalable, useful service is not an easy process!We really didn't expect the overwhelming support for Beatbuggy and the kind suggestions for features and improvements.We never knew the power of direct user feedback until we launched - it was all of you who told us what features to add, not advisors, not VCS, not other entrepreneurs.We think it's great!Thank you all!
We're loving the ride, and hope you guys are having fun with us.
Btw - Beatbuggy was reviewed by Killerstartups.com.You can read the review here:
Hello and welcome. Maybe you don't exactly know what BeatBuggy is? Then, we'd suggest you go and get yourself a new account. Give it a spin. Make some friends. Listen to music. We think you'll like it here.
19 November 2008
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