buddystumbler.com | make friends and meet people for free online chat

Big things for BuddyStumbler: BigString acquires us!

2008-07-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

When Yim, Rajesh, and I started the site, our vision was to ultimately allow users to meet and chat with people they "do not" already know through the IM networks they are already part of. I've talked about the problem of meeting people somewhat ad nauseam - but the long and short of it is, why join separate social networks, go through the whole private messaging rigamarole, when you can link up with people instantly with similar interests through IM?

While BuddyStumbler has done a great job of matching people who are mutually interested in meeting each other, we've not been able to do anything about facilitating chat on the site itself. Early, we made a conscious decision not to build the technology ourselves - but that would mean that BuddyStumbler would ultimately need to partner with one of the major web-IM aggregators (web sites that allow you to IM without your normal desktop client).

I'm happy to report that this momentous day has finally arrived! As of today, BuddyStumbler is now part of BigString. BigString has developed, among other things, a web-IM client with a unique capability - self-destructing IM messages. This unique web-IM capability, coupled with BigString's visionary approach to messaging and privacy made it clear to Yim, Rajesh and I that we had found our partner.

In the coming months, we'll be integrating an IM messaging platform into BuddyStumbler itself and in effect finally "complete" the mission that we started 18 months ago. This will mean big things for the users of BuddyStumbler and I'd like to thank all of you for sticking with us this far. Without your encouragement, we wouldn't have made it this far.

When you get the chance, check out BigString's site. If you're ever stuck in a place that won't let you use your normal IM client (at work, at school, etc.) - you can IM from anywhere as long as you can get to BigString's website.

Thanks again and happy stumbling!

Call for admins!

2008-04-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

Interested in helping police the buddystumbler community? Buddy me (viper) up and let's talk!

Universal profile

2008-04-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

many social networking sites require people to add a profile and describe themselves. on the internet it's difficult to know about much about a stranger across the country by simply reading a profile description. moreover most of these sites fall short as users rarely update their profile. so when i'm browsing a profile on other social networking sites i don't really know much about the person hence it makes it difficult for me to reach out to them.

buddystumbler solves that problem by allowing users to integrate their buddystumbler profile with other sites that they update frequently - blogs, photos, knowledge, etc.

last year we introduce an integration to blog sites like blogger, wordpress, xanga, livejournal and myspace. so in the buddystumbler profile the latest blog entries from any of these sites will be displayed.

two months back we introduced photo site integration which allows users to show additional photos as part of their profile. buddystumbler can pull in photos from flickr, sharpcast or smugmug.

today we are also introducing integration with yedda (a leading questions and answers by aol). check out my profile which integrates with all our partners.

again, the goal is to ease introductions on the web so the more you know about someone the easier it is to make the decision to reach out to them. we want your buddystumbler profile to be the universal profile.

around one year ago, buddystumbler stumbled up

2007-12-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a year now since buddystumbler (beta) went live. The original design of the site was in many ways inspired by Craigslist and Google - minimalist, purpose-driven, and simple. Boy have things changed one year later! In the end, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. We set out to solve a core problem to help people make new friends and I know we've done it.

I thought it would be constructive to talk about what went well and what didn't as a retrospective. Since I'd like to call myself a bit of a realist, let's start with what did not go well.

1. Beta launch contest

The beta launch contest turned out to be a major mistake. The vast majority of the users gained through that effort did not stay on the site and had no intention to use the site for what it was intended. The contest rewarded those users who invited and cajoled the most users to join to get a cash prize. In retrospect, that cash prize could have yielded the same number of users by 10x or more through search-engine advertising.

2. Lowering the bar for profile quality

During this same exploratory phase, we decided to lower the number of characters people needed to submit for their description as well as the number of keywords. While this helped our overall visibility rate, it diluted the quality of our user base and attracted looky-loos of various types.

On the positive side, there were a number of things that went very well.

1. Getting the help to fill in the gaps

Amit was an extremely talented developer, however, he needed to exit the project due to his studies. While Yim and I could hold the fort down on the development side, we needed help in other areas. This became patently obvious when Yim and I were invited to meet the members of a certain IM aggregator company. The two of us were like deer in headlights - star struck and speechless. Speaking for myself strictly, I'm not one to brag about what's been done or to sell things. I tend to call things like I see it and in the end that makes me a very poor marketing person.

In time, Yim and I were fortunate enough to meet KopyKat who's overseen all of our Craigslist posting efforts and who's search engine advertising efforts resulted in the acquisition of most of the users we have today, and Drizzle who fields the public relations requests, meets with the bloggers and journalists, and does the leg work for our business development efforts. In an effort to reduce our cash burn, we've since stopped advertising using search engines and have relied on SEO optimization entirely which is a key component to keeping the site up today and we have Drizzle to thank for this.

The combination of these efforts by Drizzle and KopyKat have allowed the site to stay up when it very well would have shuttered a long time ago. My realization here was that building a site is just the first step in keeping a site alive. I have never questioned how great an idea buddystumbler is, but without the right people to execute on it, it would have gone nowhere.

2. User feedback

When the site first began, we thought we had a clear picture of what our users valued. We didn't. While we do show a prominent contact us link on every page - it soon became obvious that few users actually use that facility. The use of polling to garner user feedback turned out to be a huge boon for us. That feedback allowed us to make incremental changes to the beta while we secretly began tooling away at the launch version of buddystumbler you see today.

3. Finding yourself

Speaking strictly on a more personal level, I've never had a shortage of ideas. What I have had, is a shortage of execution. Looking back, I could make an argument for why I didn't do anything about my ideas. Some are obvious: lack of time, lack of energy, prior commitments, someone else is doing something similar, and so forth. Through buddystumbler, I've come to realize what the true reason is for the lack of execution that plagues so many would-be entrepreneurs.

The real cause of inaction is fear. This fear is not the cliched fear of failure, but rather, it is a fear of finding out who you really are. When an idea resides in the realm of possibility, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that the person we have in our mind is the person we are meant to be. To the extent you don't act on it, it becomes easy to seduce yourself into thinking that you were a victim of circumstance. The truth is, only in acting upon your idea will you find out if you were meant to be the person you envisioned. That action becomes a mirror and every moment you are acting you begin to see yourself for who you are. Invariably, you will find limitations and I think ultimately that's what scares people and that's what scared me.

Everyday I see people who dream about doing something but fail to because of some "reason." The truth is, there is no time like the present. Action takes courage, but through action you will know yourself and having crossed over I can tell you that it is much better to live in reality versus fantasy.

A close friend of mine once told me, "The things we regret are not the risks we took, but the risks we didn't take."

A couple of folks have asked what's coming up next? I'm a big fan of flickr and I've been waiting on a commercial API key but sadly I think flickr's business development people are completely out to lunch. As a result, I'm determined to add some form of Flickr integration this month; albeit in a slightly unconventional way. Once we have flickr integration, flickr users will be able to stream their pictures to their profile as they upload pictures to flickr. if you have other ideas for enhancements, please let us know!

Happy stumbling!

making friends and meeting people is that cyclic?

2007-10-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

after the offical launch on sept 30th we the buddystumbler team met a couple of weeks back to review where we are and what we need to do next. would you believe that after one year of work, this is the first time we actually got together in person for some celebration!!!

we celebrated what we have achieved so far. it's been a great journey, where we have all learnt a lot and provided value to the user community. we talked about the definition of success and whether buddystumbler has been a success. we concluded that yes we have succeed in what we set out to achieve. buddstumbler has successfully created connections between members of the buddystumbler community. users have made friends and even some love connections. as a buddystumbler user told me once, "it was much easier to meet my boyfriend in person after several online chat sessions since we had already established an online connection"

are people constantly looking to make friends and meet people, or is this cyclic? the answer is clearly no. on buddystumbler we see people come online to establish new connections and friendships. they meet someone they are interested in and then they go away hoping to focus on the recent connections. after all the power of buddystumbler is enabling chat which users do using their favorite IM client. hopefully those connections work and sustain, otherwise people come back and look for new friendships.

we are thankful for the opportunity to help you make friends and meet people for hopefully lasting relationships/connections.

so go ahead stumble upon friends whenever you feel like, buddystumbler is here to serve you.

make new friends and meet people online: out of beta and into the great beyond

2007-09-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a while since I made a post of depth. Like other members of the buddystumbler team, the summer has proven to be quite busy on the professional front making it hard to squeeze time to blog about the buddystumbler entrepreneurial experience. When we have had the time, we've been working tirelessly on the revision of the site you see today: the official release of buddystumbler which we hope will allow people to make new friends!

Our beta began last December, and in the ensuing 10 months we have:

1. Launched polls to gather usability feedback
2. Experimented with different marketing schemes to build a diverse demographic
3. Tweaked the buddystumbler concept to better meet the needs of our users

With the new look and feel, we hope to build a site that addresses usability issues we faced during the beta and to provide a foundation for new features that are forthcoming before we close at 2008. It has been a great ride so far, and for those users who have stuck by us since the beginning - Thank you! As usual, feel free to buddy any of the team up; we like to meet people online and all feedback is welcome.

Here's our press release:

Buddystumbler has announced its official launch after months of beta testing.

Buddystumbler.com is a new, revolutionary way to make new friends—it is the only social networking site that is based on existing instant messaging (IM) networks. With IM clients such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN or Google, you can meet people online through exchanging screen names. Users create profiles that include photos, a description, and interests to show others what they like. Furthermore, buddystumbler.com provides a powerful interface to enable search by user profile, interest and location.

“There are millions of users on existing IM networks chatting with known friends, colleagues and family members. Until buddystumbler.com there was not an easy way for these users to find other like-minded people to chat with.” said Han-Shen Yuan, founder of buddystumbler.com.
By developing buddystumbler.com, Yuan found a way to enable chatting on a new and more personal level. Buddystumbler.com provides a community of Internet users to exchange screen names so you can communicate with new people for free online chat.

“One of the biggest differences between us and other social networking sites is that you do not have to log onto the website constantly to meet new people. You simply create a profile and make new friends using your existing IM client.” said Yuan.

Recently, buddystumbler has enabled more comprehensive profiles. Users can now include their latest blog entries from Xanga, Myspace, LiveJournal or Blogger. The buddystumbler interface leverages the Web 2.0 paradigm and is built using the Ruby on Rails framework. Yim Lee, UI architect and co-founder of buddystumbler.com, has refined the interface based on feedback from thousands of users after months of beta testing.

Since its beta launch, buddystumbler.com has launched its new interface to create a revolutionary way of social networking. “The production launch is a milestone for the whole team and we hope to continue helping others make connections through instant messaging,” said Yuan. “Our motto is ‘I search therefore IM’. Enabling people to search and establishing new connections with others is our mission. Happy stumbling!”

harassment: zero tolerance

2007-08-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

buddystumbler.com has a zero tolerance policy for harassment of any kind. solicitations for webcam, porn, sex, or any other elicit behavior is strictly prohibited. Any user found in violation of this policy will be deleted without warning.

If you are a victim, please use the contact us page or flag the user's profile. Let's keep the community clean!

Thank you for the support!

got a blog? advertise it on buddystumbler!

2007-07-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, we rolled out a new feature which many folks have asked for (and some folks secretly wanted): the ability to advertise your blog on buddystumbler.

We've gone one step further than simply providing a link to your blog - we'll actually show your latest blog post right on buddystumbler.com! We noticed over time that many folks treat their description like a diary. In other cases, folks simply ask other people to check out their myspace page. Now, you can essentially do both.

For folks who do blog, all you need to do is supply your username for: xanga, myspace, blogger, or livejournal and we'll basically do the rest.

Check out my profile for an example of what your profile could look like!

ebuddy

2007-07-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

over the past few months we have worked hard on establishing relationships with various companies providing web messenger services - ebuddy.com, iloveim.com, koolim.com and meebo.com with various degrees of success.

today thanks to all the efforts we have kicked off an advertising and partnership campaign with ebuddy.com a leader in web and mobile messaging services. since people on ebuddy are focussed on instant messanging we are hoping this will drive traffic to our site.

rajesh

more publicity

2007-07-04T17:32:00.001-07:00

In february i was reading an editorial in east west magazine by anita malik (chief editor). me and my wife are regular subscribers of this hip life style magazine that is culturally insightful and innvovative. she wrote about her life ambition and how she tried many jobs but at the end she knew that running a magazine was her calling. the article was a reminder that we are lucky to live in this country where entrepreneurship is encouraged and where dreams can come true with hard work and dedication.

i talked with anita about buddystumbler to run the idea by her and see if she had any marketing suggestions. she liked the concept of buddystumbler and agreed to help us out by publishing an article about the site in the june issue.
thanks east west magazine. here is the article by ellen horowitz.

Happy July 4th as we work our way to making the site useful and popular.

Rajesh

new advertising tactics

2007-06-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

Greetings folks!

We're currently soliciting members for permission to use their photos for an upcoming advertising campaign. A couple of folks have already given us the a-ok. Thank you!

In the coming month, we'll be rolling out banner ads at a soon-to-be-named well known web-IM aggregator. This will probably be our most targeted marketing effort yet!

One thing we've learned is that where you advertise makes all of the difference in the world. Even amongst search engines there is a dramatic difference between age, sex, and other differences. By leveraging this, I think buddystumbler has been able to entice a fairly broad variety of users onto the site. However, the economics of search engine advertising is not conducive to our financial viability so we're hoping to look for other ways to attract new users. We hope that this highly targeted user base will be a welcome addition to the buddystumbler community.

Beyond this, Yim and I are hard at work on the new shell. For those that would like a sneak peak at the shell, send yim or myself a shout out and we'll let you in on the sneak peak.

Lately, we've been lagging a bit on the server updates. Soon, that'll change... I am taking one day off each week for the next 5 weeks. So, I'm looking forward to making some positive contributions to the site!

Finally, I'd like to urge folks to report any/all nefarious users; you may either flag them or simply write us a contact us message. These days we're particularly aggressive about bringing down profiles that are solicitations by nature. Folks, let's keep things PG as much as we can and keep it fun!

Happy Stumbling!

killer startup?

2007-05-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

as part of our marketing efforts i had written about buddystumbler on a site which allows the community to vote on startup ideas - killerstartups.com

the buddystumbler team obviously believes that our vision and idea has merit and potential. we have a good idea on how the site will grow in functionality and provide value to the user community over the next few months. the hardest thing about building this vision is time, considering all of us have full-time jobs. but even harder is to market and spread the word around. we do believe if we build something the community finds useful the site will grow.

however, other folks on killerstartups.com also thought that our idea has merit and will go far. that's nice validation.

i guess only time will tell.

rails 1.2, bug fixes, architecture updates, and invitations

2007-05-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

Although it may not seem like it, the last couple days have been busy for Yim and I. After we implemented search by city, we later realized that clicking on next page would point you to all results. Quite annoying...

Well, we fixed it this past weekend and things really blew up. Apparently the blind search stopped working which slowed down our sign-ups dramatically (as well as overall system activity).

We finally have all the problems licked (and yes, if we only ran our unit tests before deploying these fixes we would have caught them).

On the architecture side, we've finally moved up to rails 1.2 and made some configuration changes with our e-mail delivery. We've done our best to make sure e-mails still work and the site in general is stable.

In the next couple of days, we'll be making some more changes to our e-mail infrastructure. We're planning to integrate the Plaxo Address Book API for our invitations, so that users can finally perform so-called "mass invites."

As part of our sign-up process, we'll also begin asking users to spread the word. In the early days, we used to prompt people to invite friends - but back in those days, we had less than 100 people and we were told it was presumptuous. Once we've rolled out these changes, both new users and existing users can invite their friends that are already in the address books of their gmail, yahoo, msn, or outlook clients.

We're hoping this will help generate more word of mouth so that eventually we can stop advertising on search engines altogether.

Because of all of these changes, we're really leaning on the user community to inform us if they see any problems with the site.

Please let us know if you see issues, and happy stumbling!

all quiet on the western front - until this weekend

2007-05-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

I know things have been a little quiet since the server move. Truth be told, it took us a little while to get things setup. Our new hosting provider has been great though. If any one needs a host who understands Ruby on Rails deployments check out hostingrails.com. For the geeky, the site now uses three mongrel instances and features a capistrano deployment process as well.

Things won't be as loosy goosy as before where Yim and I would just hop on the server, pull the code and bounce it for an update - but we hope to avoid those situations where we perform a server update, make a mistake and then scramble to bring the server back up. We're also looking to integrate a more formal bug tracking system and possibly open it up to the user community to report issues.

This week, we hope to finally roll out the search by city feature which folks have voted for. From there, we'll begin the long steady march towards a new UI for buddystumbler. Yim may restart conducting user polls as well.

As some of you have noticed, the site now has reached over 1000 people and we're pleased as punch about this! System activity comes and goes but generally speaking we've seen steady growth on the positive side. We've seen more people sharing the site with their friends and we can't say enough that we need this sort of word-of-mouth advertising. As much as we can do to make buddystumbler a nice place to hang out, in the end, it's the community that makes or breaks a site.

Some of you have noticed that I've not been on IM as much as before, the main reason is that my real job has become quite hectic. So, unfortunately, I've needed to buckle down and focus. However, if you do see me online after work hours and I don't message you first - please don't be shy.

Finally, as we prepare for the next buddystumbler - I'd like to encourage the user community to send us new ideas on how they think the site could be better. Do you want other features? The ability to blog? The ability to post more pictures? The sky is the limit... but you need to let us know. :) Just use the contact us link at the bottom of every page.

Happy Stumbling!

the buddystumbler team has a new member!

2007-04-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

besides moving to a new home and being on the front page of businesshackers.com, we have another great news to announce. rajesh, a.k.a. drizzle in the buddystumbler world, has officially become a member of the buddystumbler team. during the past few months, rajesh has been the master mind behind buddystumbler's business and marketing strategies. he's brought to the team his grand vision and countless number of brilliant ideas. han and i really appreciate the contributions rajesh has made towards the growth of the site, and we look forward to continue working with him in the future.

welcome rajesh! :)

www.businesshackers.com - check us out

2007-04-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

Some good news for us on the PR front this morning. businesshackers.com - a web 2.0/entrepreneurship site put us on their front page this morning! Thanks businesshackers.com!

We moved

2007-04-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Just a quick follow-up, the move should be more or less complete at this point. There are still some niggling issues around the email notifications - but other than that, buddystumbler has a new home.

Traffic has been light this weekend, so it's too soon to tell but it looks like the new setup is vastly superior to our old one.

cheers!

moving to hostingrails!

2007-04-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

Folks, we've begun the move in the last hour. Our new host is hostingrails and I'm pretty excited about them from my brief interaction with them so far.

Apparently, they've helped some of their clients survive a slashdotting - so if they can withstand that sort of onslaught they definitely seem to know what they were doing.

Because of my schedule lately, I decided to not burn cycles studying up on the vagaries of yet another deployment environment. So, I paid the hostingrails folks a little bit more to set the application up for us and they did it in a day.

The new configuration features a dedicated memory setup and 3 mongrel instances. The problems with ImageMagick were also sorted out from the get-go. From my preliminary tests, the server is MUCH faster than the setup we had at site5 which relied strictly on fastcgi.

Hopefully, what this means is NO more "rails application error" messages and improved performance throughout. Yim and I have been somewhat playing it conservative on the development side until we made this move - now we can unleash the code demons within us and make some serious changes!

We're hoping we can make hostingrails our semi-permanent home for the time being. The DNS changes were made just 10 minutes ago. I expect it will take between a couple of hours to possibly 2 days for the DNS to propagate worldwide.

Although this is disruptive, this change is essential for the growth of the site. We were in striking distance of 900 visible users this weekend - but it looks like that will have to be another day.

Once we've moved over to the new server, there could be some weirdness initially. If you see something odd, please let us know.

Thanks for the support!

Site5 is an awful Rails host - we're moving!

2007-04-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

As the site has grown, we've started to feel the pains of shared hosting. Our current provider site5 has proven incapable of living up to the task. For folks interested in starting a ruby on rails application, you can look forward to the following:

1. No phone support, no sales support.
2. Overcrowded servers. Don't believe their advertising, their machines are powerful but they put 20+ people per machine and any given user can eat up all the RAM on their machines.
3. Extremely limited Ruby on Rails expertise. Today, buddystumbler.com's ridiculously slow rendering Captcha is due to a random Site5 reconfiguration of their ImageMagick installation which has yet to be resolved. The system administrators do not know why it is so slow.
4. Most technical questions are redirected to their forums where users are forced to fend for themselves.
5. No mongrel support. Site5 uses FastCGI. Moreover, the FastCGI configuration allows each user to scale between 1 and 5 dispatches. There is a process killer that randomly kills off processes when load is too high. This gives folks the "Rails Application Error" problem. They need to configure their box to have a fixed number of dispatches. This has been communicated to their support team - but since they aren't really Rails specialists, they don't know how to size their servers in this situation.
6. Site5's response to any performance issues is to kill people's processes then resolve the ticket. The technical support people basically treat you like a raving lunatic. When asked about upgrade options, they just pointed me to their sales page.

Over time, I've scoured the internet to work on ways to "hide" the "Rails Application Error" problem. The dispatch.fcgi below has worked best for me, much thanks goes to Chris Gaskett.


#   # Custom log path, normal GC behavior.
#   RailsFCGIHandler.process! '/var/log/myapp_fcgi_crash.log'
#
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment"
require 'fcgi_handler'

class RailsFCGIHandler
  private
    # improved version of frao_handler
    # by Chris Gaskett chris.gaskett.com
    # tries to keep one fcgi process alive
    # still might need a kill -9 sometimes if processes hangs
    def pfrao_handler(signal)
      dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately"
      number_procs = `/bin/ps ux | /bin/grep -c fcgi$`.to_i
      # note: to_i produces 0 if conversion to integer is not successful
      case number_procs
      when 0
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler error, check number_procs query, paths. Exiting"
        exit
      when 1 .. 2
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler restarting instead, only two process left"
        restart_handler(signal)
      else 
        dispatcher_log :info, "pfrao handler agreed to exit, more than two process is running"
        exit
      end
    end
    alias_method :exit_now_handler, :pfrao_handler
end

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 50

I share the code above because, buddystumbler is moving! Over the next couple of week's we'll be moving our source code repository and the entire site to a more reliable host which should help our uptime tremendously (as well as improve site performance).

Thanks for putting up with this!

poll results: week of 4/9

2007-04-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

here are the results for last week's polls:

1. do you think the site provides enough information (faq and tour) to get you started?

2. do you think there should be an optional field on the profile page to input a URL to your personal blog/webpage?

3. should we allow users to upload multiple profile pictures?

(not sure why i can't get this image to show, but here are the voting percentages for this poll:

22.2% - yes, anything more than one is fine
16.7% - no, just leave it as is
16.7% - yes, it would be nice if i can upload five or more pictures
44.4% - yes, three to five pictures would be good enough for me)

in order to prepare for the upcoming site changes, we will stop running polls for a while. thank you all for your participations in the past few weeks!

IMs exposed

2007-04-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

This afternoon we rolled out changes on each user's profile page that will allow everyone to view which networks they have IM screen names on. This is a change you folks voted on and we've gone ahead and delivered it! To view a person's available networks, simply navigate to a person's profile and look at the icons that follow the "available on" page text.

Thanks to rana for this excellent suggestion! Hopefully, this will allow folks to make "informed" decisions when requesting people to be buddies.

Keep the suggestions for new enhancements coming! You can always drop myself or yim a line through shout outs, the contact us page, or by matching up with us (we won't bite).

Happy stumbling!

poll results: week of 4/2

2007-04-08T17:03:00.000-07:00

here are the results for the most recent polls:

1. should we require user to input his/her birthday during registration?

2. how would you like us to improve the buddy matches page?

3. how would you like us to improve the shout outs page?

Search changes rolled out

2007-04-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Over the last 2-3 days, some of you may have noticed changes to search. We now allow you to pick your own age ranges. In addition, we've expanded the distance searches up to 1000 miles.

One popular request per your votes still remain - searching by city. Yim and I haven't worked out when we're going to build that one yet because it conflicts with some larger changes we're planning to roll out onto the site. So, unfortunately that change will take a bit.

We are however looking at all the poll results and actively building what you folks are asking for. If you have any new suggestions, please let us know!

buddystumbler blog badge

2007-04-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

if you've been to your public profile or your "my account -> summary" page in the past day or so, you might have seen an image like the following:

yim82 on
buddystumbler

below or right next to the image there is a text area that contains code you can copy and paste to you blog or any web pages you might have. the image will link directly back to your buddystumbler profile.

this is the very first enhancement that han and i make based on the feedbacks we received from the polls. it still has a few problems here and there. we've tried to fix them as we discover them, but please let han or me know if something doesn't work right. we hope you guys will use it. :)

finally, i would like to give tonton credits for proposing this wonderful idea. if you have any feedbacks or thoughts on how to make buddystumbler better, please send us an email. we would love to hear from you!

601

2007-04-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

Tonight, BS achieved a new milestone of 601 users as of this writing.

In the last 48 hours, we've had 75 new registrations and 125 shout outs. In the last three months, we've been able to acquire about 1400 registrations.

When I look across the various profiles on the system, I can tell that people are making connections. It's something that Yim and I talk about all the time and it is genuinely exciting. The site has a long way to go (we need to make money so we can at least break even and get our own server - the site crashed 3x last week for hours on end thanks to site5's awful uptime), nonetheless Yim and I are on a mission to create a phenomenon: to unite the 200M active IM connections at any point in time into the most dynamic social application the Internet has seen yet.

So 601 users seems very far away from that; yet "In dreams, begin responsibility."

Thanks everyone for keeping the dream alive.