Lifeblob's World

Lifeblob’s vision: To be the social timeline service where you can get your life on a timeline and see how it intersects with your friends and family at various points in time.

Today, I am pleased to announce that we have moved one step closer to realizing our vision. For the past few months, we have been listening to your feedback and secretly working on a new version of lifeblob. This is the day when we bring it to life in front of your eyes.

Here is a 4-min screencast that will show you what lifeblob v 2.0 has to offer. I will cover the features in detail in subsequent blog posts.

We just got covered on techcrunch: read the complete coverage here

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.

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.