Forbidden territory beyond the edges

One of the complaints that we often hear about timeline navigation is that it lets you get into areas where posts don’t exist.

So if you are one of those who have been bugged with empty spaces while moving around your timeline or when you jump to another timeline, rejoice. With today’s release, the area on the timeline beyond the edge posts ( the first and the last post that occur on the timeline ) is forbidden and thou shalt not be allowed to venture there.

Yes, this does mean that if you are scrolling your timeline, it will stop scrolling after you have reached its beginning or the end. And this also means that when you jump to another timeline, you will at least see the latest post on that timeline in front of you.

Coming soon:

One feature that we have been toying around with is having a compressed timeline. Simply put, this means that we automatically figure out areas where posts don’t exist and compress them, so that you never get into an area that does not have posts.

The upside is pretty clear, but the downside of doing this is that you lose continuity in time, which means that you will no longer be able to visually interpret how much time passed between two posts.

If you are a lifeblob user, we would love to hear if you would like to see a compressed timeline or not. A simple yes/no in the comments should suffice.

April 28, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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Click that back button

I’ve never been happier announcing a feature, and this one surely deserves dollops of cheers. Yes, finally you can use the back button on your browser and get your timeline back to its previous state.

However, this feature is available to an exclusive club of our users, the ones that are using:

  • Firefox 2.x
  • Firefox 3.x
  • Safari 3.x

I feel bad for our users on IE, but Internet Explorer did not let us do this without getting into massive performance issues, so we finally had to ignore it in the best interest of our users.

On the brigher side, if you are on IE, you now have another reason to switch to a real browser :).

April 26, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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More usability enhancements

You are the final judge of our service and we really appreciate all the feedback we have received - without your help, identifying these issues would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Some of the usability enhancements that we pushed out today:

  • Single Click to Open the Post : We heard you - you don’t like clicking twice to open a post so we now have the posts opening up with a single click.
  • Refresh Comments: Added a refresh comments button in the maximized post view. Now you can click this button to see the new comments that have made their way into the post.
  • New Hidden Post Icon: The older icon did not stand out, so we changed it to a bigger brighter icon. Hidden posts now show up as bright green arrows on top of the date bar. The brightness of the green color is an indicator of the density of hidden posts in that area. The arrows are only indicators and cannot be clicked to view a post - we are working on it.
  • People You May Know: Don’t like people getting added to your friends list without your authorization ? With this release, automatic addition of people to friends list has been replaced with a section in the sidebar that shows our recommendations of people you may know. If you find someone familiar there, follow the link and add them as a friend.

April 23, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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Exciting ways to discover people and information

Today, we turned on a very exciting feature, something we ourselves have been really eager to use.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would remember from our previous post how timelines for tags and places allow you to slice and dice your life on various axes. In addition, place and tag timelines are also a very powerful means of discovering new people and new pieces of information - read on to learn more.

When you add a tag or place to your post, your post also becomes a part of these tag/place timelines and implicitly establishes a connection between you, the tag and the place. If you look at tags as the representation of your interests ( like trekking, gardening ) and places as the locations you are associated with, you will notice that tags and place timelines are natural and powerful reserves of information centered around certain interests or certain places. So next time you are seeking trekking enthusiasts in Bangalore, you know what timelines to look at.

Coming back to the feature we launched, you will now see a list of top places and tags in the sidebar on your right. How does it help ?

  • On your timeline, this makes it really easy to access tag/place timelines that interest you the most.
  • On someone else’s timeline, this becomes a way to discover their interests and explore more about them.

Here is a screenshot of the new sidebar:

Note: Only tags and places from public posts are shown in the sidebar. This is done in order to protect the privacy of our users.

April 22, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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Adding more colors to life

You have been using lifeblob for over a month, have a lot of posts and can’t find out which ones are private and which ones are not ?

OR

You imported your flickr / picasa / blog to your timeline and want to know where the posts on your timeline were sourced from ?

If you ever had these questions, we have the perfect answer for you. We just added more colors to your life ( aka timeline ) to make things better for you. Your posts now show up in one of three colors, determined by the privacy level of the post:

  • Red means private / visible only to you
  • Green means public / visible to everyone
  • Gray means participants / visible to participants

For the posts that have been created by using the BlogImporter or PhotoImporter, we have also added an icon to indicate the service from where the post was sourced.

Check out the screenshot below for a sample ( click to enlarge ):

PS: Thanks to our friend Varalu for the suggestion.

April 21, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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Performance Improvements

Our team is a stickler for performance, especially when it comes to services like Lifeblob that are meant to provide a desktop application like usability. Last week, we made a couple of improvements to enhance your experience of browsing the timeline:

  • We bunched up multiple images into css sprites ( simply put, one image file with multiple images ). This reduces 49 image requests that we made earlier to 1 and makes the timeline loading considerably faster.
  • We moved external integrations like google maps to load just in time for their use. This defers ~84KB of javascript library downloads and significantly reduces the time taken for the timeline to load.
  • We revamped the display engine that shows your posts on the timeline and also decides which posts get the opportunity to be shown. You will notice a significant decrease in the response time when you scroll or zoom the timeline ( If you are an IE6 user, you will notice a HUGE difference ).
  • We pre-fetch the javascript libraries that are required to render the timeline even before you are logged in. That way, by the time you login, we have most of the libraries ready to go.

I hope these changes will make it more fun for you to browse timelines. If you are looking for best practices in speeding up your website, do check out this post at Yahoo Developer Network.

April 15, 2008 · Filed Under Features

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Friend Finder Launched

Friend finder makes it really easy for you to find your friends that are already using lifeblob or invite your friends to join you on lifeblob. Here is how it works:

  • Open the friend finder by clicking the “Build your network with your address book” link above the top navigation bar or by clicking the “Invite Friends” link next to your profile photo.

  • Choose the email account that contains your address book. If you would like to import address books from more than one service, simply run the friend finder again. We currently support gmail and yahoo address books.

  • Once you have chosen the service, you will be asked to enter the credentials for authenticating with the service. We do not store your email id and password in our system.
  • Well, thats it ! And a list pops up that shows all your friends that are already using Lifeblob.

Simple, isn’t it. So run the friend finder and connect with your friends.

April 11, 2008 · Filed Under Features, Release

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Firefox 3 and Safari Support

This week, we extended our browser support to include Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Safari 3.1 ( Windows only ). Lifeblob is now supported to run on the following browsers:

  • Firefox 3 Beta
  • FireFox 2.x
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Safari 3.1 ( Windows Only )

Our team was pleasantly surprised when we first used lifeblob on Firefox 3. Firefox 2.x has undoubtedly been the best browser for Ajax applications like lifeblob, and Firefox 3 takes that experience a few notches higher with the performance enhancements in their beta 5 release. Read the mozilla release notes if you are interested in the details.

April 3, 2008 · Filed Under Release

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