IRC Channel (Updated)
For those who use IRC, feel free to pop along to irc.last.fm, channel #tweeklyfm and say hello. You are also welcome to ask support questions here too.
For those who use IRC, feel free to pop along to irc.last.fm, channel #tweeklyfm and say hello. You are also welcome to ask support questions here too.
If you sign in to your account on Tweekly.fm and go to your settings page you’ll notice two new items have appeared. These are ‘Referred By’ and ‘Referrer URL’. The ‘Referred By’ field will most likely be empty as this feature has only just been introduced. The ‘Referrer URL’ field is a special link you can share with friends, when recommending they sign up for the service. This will allow us to track who has been the most active in helping to spread the word about the site and helping us gain new users.
Word on the street is that at the end of August there will be a prize for who manages to find us the most new users. Could it be you?
I’ve removed the old news section from the welcome page. Its been replaced by a syndicated news source from our shiny tumblr blog. This will provide a better service to our end users and they will always see the latest news instead of stale news.
A major feature launch this week was the revival of the old ‘Publish Now’ feature although it works in a completely different way. All of our outgoing updates are now processed via a queuing system. By using a queue we’re able to limit the number of updates we’re pushing out in a better manner and for services like Twitter who have been having capacity issues, we can lower our output to help accommodate service issues.
Updates are pushed through the queue within two minutes on average. At peak times this may be slightly longer but its still a reasonable amount of time. We push thousands of updates out per day and trying to please everyone can be a difficult task - but we try our best to do so. The weekly updates are still pushed out using an older mechanism, and are not affected by the queue status.
Another major step for Tweekly this week has been that we will hit 40,000 users this afternoon, I’m expecting it to be around 5pm. I’ll post an update later with the lucky user who is our 40,000th.
Last but not least, we provide our services for free to end users. Using an ad-based model hasn’t worked too brilliant for helping to fund the service (even though there were some very kind people who have donated in the past to help us). Also, the development of the service is not funded or paid for, so it comes out of personal time. If you have any spare money that you would like to donate, then please do so at http://www.tweekly.fm/donate and help keep us going.
Scott. (@dordotky)
The highly popular feature from the old version of tweekly.fm was the ‘Publish Now’ feature that would allow you to post an update any time you wished. This feature has been pushed live this morning. You’ll find it on the right side menu after signing in.
As you can see, we have a new design and if you’re taken a look around you’ll notice that things look a lot different feature wise too. We are aiming to expand the capabilities of the system to better serve our 37,000+ users. We’re taking on lots of new users each day and slowly but surely ironing out the little bugs that eek their way into our service.
A change in how Last.fm accounts are handled has been implemented now and this affects all users. Every user of the service will now be required to confirm their Last.fm account by signing in via the Last.fm site which will then provide us with an access token for fetching your user data. This also means that we can now support protected users for Last.fm which has been a requested feature for a long time.
We’re currently looking at implementing more features to allow you to find both new music and new friends via our service. As part of providing a better service, there is now a separate contact page that can be used for any queries or questions and we aim to reply as fast as we possibly can do. There is the new Help Centre which will provide answers to common problems.
We’re also looking to be a little more transparent with our data too, we’re going to begin placing statistics on the site showing our most popular artists, users and tracks. Another feature soon to come will be a setting on your user account for your time zone which will allow you to choose a time frame for your weekly update to be posted in. We’ve found that some of our users would prefer their update to be posted at say 6pm local time, vs 6pm GMT. We will be providing updates for this within the next few weeks.
Hopefully you’ll all enjoy the better service and more productive site. If you find a bug or have any problems, then please do contact us and we’ll get right on it.
Scott.
Over the past two days we’ve been moving tweekly.fm over to a new server. This will be our permanent home for the foreseeable future. The changes that we’re slowly making to the services we provide will have a positive impact for all. We already now have better connectivity and capacity than we previously had which has resulted in the site being accessible all day long - even during the process of pushing tweets out.
We’re situated a lot closer geographically to the Twitter API so latency has dropped by nearly two thirds. Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out new features and a new design.
Until then, stay tuned and get excited, its going to be awesome!
