recent new features and changes

Moby has been through a lot of changes.

In the last month the traffic to the website has been almost doubled again.

We have been focussing on:

- more scaling and performance issues

- extending the user experience and features

- making some money to take care of the growing development, mainenance and hosting costs

Scaling and performance

Because of some celebrity usage our servers had to deal with enourmous spikes in traffic. On average 1-2% of the Twitter followers of a user clicks on the Moby-link within the first few minutes it gets published. For users with more than 500k followers this means between 10.000 – 20.000 will visit our servers instantly. You can’t really scale that if gradually (firing up new Amazon instances (servers) take 2-5 minutes)

We designed a solution for this. Whenever we receive a new posting we check our database to see how many followers this user has. Based on the numbers we launch the instances and when these are up and running we post the message to Twitter. Neat ey?

Features and user experience

We added our app store for the API developers. This means if you use our API in your application or service, you will also have a possibility to promote your service on Moby.

We launched our Friend Connect. With this you can easily find out which of your friends on your social websites also use Moby and see their activity on Moby immediately as well…

We launched the Moby Activity stream. All your activity and that of your friends will be listed there.

We added the possibility to add platforms and services to groups. This will enable our users to post to specific platforms using the hashtag.

We developed a backchannel view for users and groups, and also a totally designable version for our Pro users (events and companies)

We added favorites. If you really like a posting, you can just click the heart above the posting and it gets added to your favorites list.

What’s next?

We are introducing more views. Besides the list view for postings right now there is the grid view, giving you a quick overview of what you, your friends or group has been up to.

I’m really excited about the upcoming map views, placing your postings (or trails) directly on a map.

Also on the business side a lot has happened:

- we are about to release two co-branded Moby iPhone apps for TMF and NUfoto and currently talking to a lot of other platforms.

- we supplied many events, parties and businesses with branded back channels and are still expanding the functionality

- we’re nominated and shortlisted for a Techcrunch Europe award for the best Mobile Application

And last but definitely not least, we launched Moby the Movie! The movie shows that we’ve been shooting and sharing since the beginning of time… watch it!