Toluu Blog

There was a bug that was causing the ‘Delete feeds’ option in ‘Account’, to fail. We have fixed this bug so you will now be able to delete all of your feeds.

It is a new year, and many users are starting their feed lists from scratch. Maybe you want to as well?

You may have noticed that the blog has been awfully quiet the past month. We have been focused on building some great new things for Toluu that require more time to develop than some features we have done in the past.

Know that we continue to make bug fixes, invite new users, and answer emails. We are simply being quiet about what we are working on. We think you will like it when it is released

Just a quick note. We have introduced the ability for you to clear your feeds.

If you accidently uploaded the wrong feed list, or have made huge changes to your list, or you just want to start over, this new functionality will allow you to do just that.

The new functionality can be found by going to ‘Account’. Be careful deleting your feeds, since we can’t recover them.

Things have been quiet on the blog as we have been heads down on some major new functionality. We continue to make small bug fixes and talk with all of you via email, Twitter and FriendFeed.

I can tell you that the new functionality has been our most requested feature and in testing it is pretty darn cool. 

More details next week!

As we mentioned last week, we have been focusing on the details of the site; making the experience of using Toluu better for both new and long time users. I wanted to share just a few of the items we have just fixed.

Twitter Ampersand  Issue- When adding a feed whose title included an ampersand (&) posting to Twitter would go screwy, it would drop characters and the URL in the tweet. This has been fixed

Adding Self as Contact- Sometimes when trying to add someone as a contact the system would instead add you as a contact. This has been fixed.

Avatar Upload Error- Some users where getting errors or seeing blank profile images when they uploaded a new avatar. This has been fixed.

These are just a few of the items we have been fixing this week. Thank you to everyone who let us know about them and providing useful info about how and when they cropped up for you. Please continue to send in your feedback, we love hearing from you!

We have been fixing bugs and improving the matching system to degrade gracefully if you have no matches or we have not calculated your matches yet. 

We know how annoying it can be when a site leaves you hanging, unsure of what has happened. We think the changes we have made will alleviate that anxiety. 

Hopefully you won’t even see the new screens, but some of you will, and that is why we built them. We believe that building logic and screens that help you understand what is happening is super important.

We are going to continue to improve the details of the site for the next week or so, because details matter.

We have just rolled out a new feature that makes it easier to decide if a feed will be of interest to you. Now, when you hover over a feed anywhere on the site, a small tooltip will popup with the feed title and 5 recent posts from the feed. These post titles are clickable and link directly to the post on the source blog.

These new quick tool tips are available anywhere a feed appears on the site, the activity page, match page, feed lists, profiles, and the feed subscribers view.

We decided to build in this functionality when we found ourselves skipping by checking out a feed because we didn’t want to wait for the page to load or have to hit the back button. Since we weren’t always willing to take a risk on a feed to see if it might be cool, we thought you might be doing the same thing. 

We think this new functionality will spark more exploration and discovery since you don’t even have to click through to the feeds to see if the feed is interesting. Simply hover.

We just pushed some improvements to the site. We have been working on strengthening our system; improving speed, improving security, and improving error handling.

The speed improvements we made to the matching system over the past few weeks have laid the groundwork to a more universal caching system. We have sped up the entire site while reducing the load on our system which will allow us to scale better.

In the security department we have implemented systems that prevent the hundred of thousands of feeds that we display from causing harm to our system. We are now guarded against 1,000’s of different types of HTML attacks. You shouldn’t notice any change at all, which is exactly the point.

Last but not least, we have made improvements to our error display and logging system. In the past, you might have experienced an error, but only been presented with a blank page. We have now built a custom error page and logging system that alert us the moment anytime an error occurs on the site. This means we will be able to fix bugs even faster and improve the experience of using Toluu.

We have just launched a re-aligned ‘Match’ page with a cleaner UI and greater functionality. We have also made updates to ‘Contacts’ and feed ‘Subscribers’.

We recently made major changes to the architecture of matching to make it load dramatically faster. Today we have made design and functionality improvements. The new design is simpler and cleaner which should make it easier to hone in on the people and feeds that matter to you. 

We have also introduced 3 filtering options. Now you can see your matches based on when they joined Toluu. Filtering by ‘This Month’ or ‘This Week’ shows only users who have joined in that period who match with you, surfacing fresh feeds and people. This makes matches more useful for users with many feeds or those who have been with us since the beginning.

Also new with ‘Matches’ is the ability to add a user as a contact in-line. Many of you asked for it and we listened. No more clicking through to a user’s profile to add them as a contact!

We also revamped the ‘Contacts’ view with the new UI conventions and in-line contact adding functionality. We also now show how many contacts you have.

Not to be left out, the feed ‘Subscribers’ view got some love too, it now has in-line contact functionality too.

We hope you find these improvements useful and they help you find more interesting people and feeds!