Toluu Blog

We are excited to let you know that embedded YouTube videos can now be played right from Toluu feed pages. Now when viewing a feed that has a YouTube video embedded you can simply click play!

We have been finding more and more blogs that are embedding YouTube into their posts and so we decided it was a great time to get those videos playing on the Toluu feed pages.

We have just launched Twitter integration and a redesigned activity stream. You can now connect with your Twitter account so every time you add a new feed to Toluu, via the site or the bookmarklet, your friends on Twitter can know what great taste in blogs you have. We have also redesigned the activity stream to make it more scannable and give the important information more breathing room. There is also a new tab system that allows you to switch between the recent activity of you and your contacts, but also see the activity happening across the entire Toluu universe. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Twitter integration makes it super easy to share with your friends who are not on Toluu yet what new feeds you are finding interesting. One of the great bits about the Twitter integration is the ability to customize the message that gets sent to Twitter. Many services simply send a canned message, however we felt this wasn’t want people really wanted, what people really want is to have control over what is said on their Twitter stream. We are excited to see how you express yourselves with this feature. We have also added little details to the implementation such as checking that your Twitter username and password are correct before saving your settings, so there won’t be any head scratching as to why your activity isn’t showing up in your stream. 

After using the activity page on Toluu for the past month with real data we wanted to see if we could make it more readable. We wanted to put more focus on the important information and remove the visual clutter. We now use the full size avatar photos which makes it easier to at a glance see who has been recently active. We also made the activity entries themselves more balanced and legible. Adding the ability to see the activity across all of Toluu makes it possible for new users to get a better sense of what feeds are gaining traction as well as find individuals who they may want to add as a contact. 

With all of these new links being posted to Twitter we realized many of the people who would click on the links would not be Toluu users, and may have never heard of Toluu. Today we are also rolling out a feature that will help orient new visitors to Toluu. When unlogged in visitors land on a Toluu feed page they will see a simple module that will give them a 1 sentence explanation of Toluu as well as a way to get an invite. 

Needless to say, we are super excited about these new features and how they will help you share your activity better. Making it easier to discover new and interesting feeds as well as connect with your friends in new ways. Please try out the new functionality and leave a comment below with your thoughts we would love to hear what you think.

Every profile page on Toluu is now also an hCard. This gives you the freedom to utilize your profile information in the ways you want.

hCard is a microformat for identifying people in a programatic way. This means that your profile information: your name, nickname, avatar, and website are now portable.

As more and more sites allow users to import hCards to jump start account creation, like we do or Get Satisfaction does, Toluu can be a location you pull your data from.

We believe in Data Portability and the simple fact that you own your data. We are working to give you more ways of getting your data into Toluu and more ways of getting your data out of Toluu. hCard enabled profiles are one piece of the puzzle for Toluu.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for ways you would like us to accomplish this please feel free to leave a comment below.

The past 3 weeks have been absolutely amazing. Toluu went from a handful of friends and family to a place where oodles of people are discovering new and interesting feeds and people. Along the way we have done our best to make ourselves available on Twitter, email, and blogs. However we have been missing one crucial bit.

We were missing a dead simple feedback page. Today that changes.

We knew we neeeded easier way to send feedback and report bugs and had been working on such a page, but a blog post by Franklin Pettit ‘Beta Feedback should be much easier’ really lit a fire under us to get it released.

So this is what it looks like,

The new feedback page is given prominence in our top navigation so it is easily accessible and will be highlighted in blue for a while to really draw people’s attention to it. From the page you can select the type of feedback you would like to give and then type in your message; long or short.

We want to hear from even more of you! What do you like? What do you want? Are you having trouble with something? Is something kinda wonky? Anything and everything is encouraged. We have grown so quickly because of all of you, and we want to make sure you can get in touch with us.

We just rolled out an enhancement to the ‘Activity’ page, now you will see double the number of activity entries.

As our contact lists grow and people integrate Toluu into their daily routine there is a flurry of new activity taking place all the time. When coming back to the activity page, you told us how you could miss what your friends had just added or how you wanted to get back to an entry you had seen. We also felt the pain of the 10 item activity stream.

So we decided to make it better!

The seemingly simple change of upgrading from 10 items to 20 items was not quite so simple. We worked hard to ensure our infrastructure could handle doubling the load on one of our most popular pages. We are confident the changes will have little to no impact on the performance of your activity page.

We think this change will make it easier and faster to discover the great feeds and people your friends are finding on Toluu.

We are fulfilling the 2 most requested features to date; RSS feeds of activity and tighter feed reader integration.

Your activity stream is being liberated! We are now generating 2 RSS feeds for your activity. One is your activity on the site and the other is your activity plus your contact’s activity.

Now your Toluu activity; the feeds you add, the feeds you favorite, the people you connect with, is now completely portable. We expect many people will take this stream to places like FriendFeed or Socialthing. Simply plug it in like any other feed and your friends on these services will see what you are up to. The cool thing about the combined feed of your activity + contacts is this would be a great feed to your feed reader to keep up to date with what your friends are doing on Toluu without missing a beat. I have been using the feed this way and find it super useful.

Below is a screenshot of the full activity feed-

The next thing is tighter feed reader integration. We have heard from users, ‘I found and added a bunch of feeds on Toluu, how do I get them to my feed reader easily?’. We do have a really easy way to ‘Export’ your subscriptions, but this was not the best solution for daily use of the site. We knew we could do better.

Now, when you find an interesting feed on Toluu and click ‘+ Add Feed’ the feed will be automatically added to your Toluu account and to your feed reader of choice. All you do is pick your feed reader and from then on we take care of the rest.

We support services like Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo, Bloglines, Pageflakes, Newsgator, and Desktop readers. If your reader is not there you can always get the raw RSS by selecting Desktop Reader. And if you ever decide to change feed readers simply go into your account settings and switch your feed reader.

Adding the feed ‘louisgray’ to Toluu and then Google Reader

Adding feed to Google Reader

The account page where you can update your reader choice

This new streamlined flow gets us closer to closing the gap between Toluu and your feed reader.

Please let us know what you think of the new features and if you find any weirdness let us know.

(P.S. Logout then log back in to take advantage of the new feed reader integration)

Just a quick note, the site has been running from our new server system at our new DC for the past 24 hours now. We have been monitoring the load carefully, and are extremely pleased with the performance of the new system.

You should experience a snappier site due to this upgrade.

There are a few lingering issues related to the migration: some profile pics not displaying. We are working to correct these issues quickly.

Thanks so much for your continued support and feedback, keep it coming as it helps guide the product roadmap. Don’t tell anyone but… we are actually in development of the 2 most requested features right now! So keep your eyes peeled for those.

Tonight is the big night! We are going to be moving Toluu to a new datacenter and a new server infrastructure. The past few days have been remarkable and due to all the attention and new users the need arose to reassess our server and bandwidth needs. We are very excited about this as we expect it to dramatically increase performance and availability as we continue to grow in users and number of feeds.

We will be down during the transition, however we are doing everything we can to minimize this downtime.

See you on the other side!

We just sent out another batch of invites to Toluu this morning. We have been fixing reported bugs and are working on some cool new features and are ready for some more users.

Remember, when you join you are given a few invites to send to anyone you want. Invite your friends, alert your twitter followers, post them to your blog, they are yours to distribute. You can access your invites by going to toluu.com/invite when you are logged in.

We are doing our best to meet the demand for invites, but there are still many people, who have requested invites, who have not yet been sent their golden ticket. We are working to get everyone in as quickly as possible.

If you are looking for an invite please go to toluu.com/betainvite