Toluu Blog

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!

The past week we have been re-architecting our matching system to make it dramatically faster. 

When we started Toluu the matching system ran on a small set of data and, like most code running against small sets of data, it ran very fast.  However, as Toluu has grown we have had to make changes. A few weeks back we optimized the way we accessed the data in the database, this sped up the process by 10x or so. But we knew this was only a patch.  

We then began on the work we just launched. We have moved to a much more scalable system that will last for many doublings in size of the userbase. 

We are so excited about these optimizations that we will be spending the rest of this week making optimizations across the rest of the site. These optimizations will lay the groundwork for a new set of features and our growing userbase. 

All I can say is wow. Yesterday was an amazing day for Toluu, you helped us shatter every metric we track.

We launched the new subscribers and popular tabs along with some other improvements early in the day and because of the fantastic posts written about the release, the Twitter and FriendFeed discussions, and the slew of new users, yesterday was remarkable. 

We had a record number of pageviews, visitors, signups, new feeds, connections made, invites requested, and time spent on the site. All I can say is thank you.

Thank you to everyone who wrote about us, everyone who requested an invite, everyone who took the time to join and explore, everyone who added new feeds, everyone who sent in feedback, and every one of our existing users who have made the site great.

Here is the coverage that sparked the fire yesterday:

F. Pettit- Toluu Feed Page & Speed Enhancements

Billy Fairchild- Toluu Rolls Out A Slew Of New Features

J. Phil- Toluu Just Got Better: New Feed Page Views and More!

Hutch Carpenter- Subscribe or Not? Toluu Just Got Better at Helping You Decide

Sarah in Tampa- Toluu Adds More Features, Helps You Decide How to Subscribe

Nathaniel Payne- Toluu has gotten even better

Corvida- Social Media Roundup: Toluu, FriendFeed, and Twhirl Updates

Tris Hussey- Toluu cranks up the speed and let’s you check if that feed is fresh

Today we get back to working on the next great new feature and fixing the new bugs you all have found. Every new user and every new feed helps make Toluu a more useful site. It is humbling to be apart of this.

We have just rolled out 2 new views to the feed pages; a way to see popular posts & a way to see who else subscribes to that feed. The goal of these new views is to give you another way to discover interesting feeds and people.

Now, when discovering a feed for the first time you can quickly know what the feed is really about, what makes it special. The popular view provides another layer of information that you can use in deciding if a feed is right for you.

Which takes us to the subscribers view. This view is super cool, because now you can actually see, on a feed level, who is reading it. Not only do we show you the avatars and names of the other Toluu users who subscribe, but we also show their 3 most recently added feeds. This provides a fantastic way to discover new people that you may want to add as a contact or find more feeds that these people find interesting too. 

In testing, we have already added discovered many new people and feeds that were a bit hidden. These 2 new views really provide a new view into the data and pivot points to explore.

Also in this release we have added the greatly requested date stamps, improved YouTube embed compatibility, improved the loading time of the contacts page by roughly 5x, and fixed some bugs surrounding the invitation page.

Please let us know what you think and keep the ideas and suggestions coming! 

Many of us subscribe to more feeds than we can handle each day, some people love the idea of just being inundated with new information all the time, while others would prefer a more streamlined approach. Whichever you prefer it, is likely that your RSS subscriptions have ballooned beyond what you can personally manage in a given day. RSS Reset proposes you wipe your slate clean and build your subscriptions up with only the feeds you really want to read- day in and day out.

The idea for RSS Reset was born by J. Phil and Corvida, who realized that many of the feeds they subscribed to were not really contributing to the conversation, so they decided to start fresh and follow a few simple rules, mainly

1) Use aggregations as a first line of filtering; think Friendfeed feeds or Techmeme.

2) Subscribe to as many small interesting blogs as possible.

3) Read rather than skim.

Both J. Phil and Corvida have reset their RSS feeds in Toluu so you can follow which feeds they subscribe to by adding them as contacts here and here.

If you would like to participate and need your feeds reset on Toluu just send me an email to caleb {at] toluu.com