June 2007 Archives
Have you seen this message when visiting hi5 lately?
What's
this all about?
To help protect your privacy and the appearance of your hi5 profile, we recently made a change to the privacy setting for our comments feature to focus on Friends. Since keeping in touch with your friends is probably the most important reason you visit hi5, sending and receiving profile and photo comments is one of our most popular features. By focusing on comments from your immediate friends, we want to protect your privacy and give you more control over the appearance of your profile and photos. After all, if you can't trust your friends, who can you trust?!
We are committed to preventing and removing spam and unwanted comments from appearing on our member's profiles and photos, and this change is one example of our efforts. While we recommend automatically accepting comments from your immediate friends only, you can always change your privacy settings if you wish. If you only want to receive profile and photo comments from your immediate friends, you don't need to make any changes or do anything. Just continue enjoying hi5.
Thanks for visiting the Member Mashup - now go check out what your friends are doing on hi5!
I wanted to quickly mention a couple other new things
that'll be going out over the next week or so. One is something that a
lot of you have asked for; the ability to set more top friends and show
them all on your profile. The other is an updated profile page layout
that shows all 15 top friends and is organized a little differently.
So you'll now be able to select up to 15 friends in your top friends page, and I think you'll like the new page for organizing top friends as well. The new profile page layout displays all 15 of your top friends and is also more balanced -- we moved to an equal width 2-column layout with a large summary section at the top which gives us more flexibility and sets the stage for future improvements (can you say skins?). You shouldn't lose anything at all on your profile, but things will be organized a little differently. It may take some getting used to, but we think it looks a lot better.
Let us know what you think when you see it! Visit the How can we make Hi5 better group to leave us feedback.
It's
that time again; we're getting ready to roll out our latest release.
We're planning on putting it out to a few people this week and
launching it fully next week.
There's a bunch of other small stuff in this release, I'll post some more about that later, but the main focus is a brand new message center. A few months ago, we introduced Shouts as a way to send messages and content to groups of friends, a lot like our old Bulletin Board feature. But it seemed a little complicated to have to have separate mail folders and different looks for Messages and Shouts, so we decided to take it one step further and combine the two into one powerful mail feature.
So, the new message center will allow you to do everything you could do with Messages and Shouts in one. That means you can send messages to one friend or many friends, and you can use friend Circles to save lists of friends that you like to message often. And all of this will be available in one inbox.
There are a few new features too. One is the ability to Reply All, so if a friend of yours sends a message to all their friends, you can reply to everyone in the list. Along with Reply All, the new message center supports all the usual mail functions we had before: Reply, Forward, and Delete.
The other new feature is attachments. We added buttons in the compose message form to attach your favorite photos, music, and videos. And now, when you click the Share It! link anywhere on the site, we'll use this attachment feature to make it easy for you to share all kinds of content with your friends on hi5.
When we designed the new system, we copied all the messages from your old inbox for the last 30 days into the new message center so you can still see all of your recent inbox messages in the new message center. If you want to go back and see your older messages or sent messages, don't worry! We saved everything from your old message center, including sent messages, and you can get to it from a link in the left column of the new message center.
Hope you like the new look and features
of the message center when it comes out. As always, please let us know
what you think by leaving comments here, we welcome any feedback.
Right now we're #1 in Portugal, and we rank in the top ten sites in a dozen Central and South American countries. Our CEO said it best:
Hi5 honcho Yalamanchi says he believes the key to success in this business is welcoming the newcomers while still keeping your original target audience's interests at heart. That's a fine line to walk, and some seem to be doing it better than others.
About 30 people attended the June San Francisco Bay Area Postgres Users Group meeting on June 12th. The topic was all about how Hi5 scaled PostgreSQL on over fifty servers to become one of the top twenty web sites in the world. Paul Lindner (Architect) and Ram Gudavalli (Lead Engineer) from Hi5 covered:
- The overall architecture, Servers/Storage/Network
- PostgreSQL scaling and partitioning, table partitioning
- Profiling methodology
- Use of tools such as Slony, iBatis, memcached and more.
A lively pizza-fueled discussion continued well after the talk. Thanks to all those that came to visit -- we're sure to do more of these events.
We've worked with our networking and load balancing vendors to implement a somewhat permanent fix for this issue.
There was an error in our country database that made it difficult to register if you live in Maruitania. We've fixed that problem, so now all the people in Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, and Rosso can feel free to join in the fun! I just checked our search feature and found over 300 people, plus an active group on Hi5We clean up geopgraphic issues as they arise. If you see something that doesn't look right feel free to post it in the How Can we Make Hi5 Better Group.
-- Paul
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About This Archive
This page is an archive of entries from June 2007 listed from newest to oldest.
May 2007 is the previous archive.
July 2007 is the next archive.
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