The past few months have brought hundreds of thousands of new users to Blip.fm. In fact, we are currently doubling the number of DJs every 10 weeks. Thanks to your efforts, we have rocketed up the charts on all the definitive website ranking sites and continue to see people stick around Blip.fm for DJ sessions way longer than most other social networks. Fortunately, we’ve been able to bolster our infrastructure to keep ahead of the new traffic and we will continue to make improvements along the way.
Today, Papa’s got a new bag of tricks. What tricks? Well, for starters we’ve just increased the number of songs in the song catalog by more than double, with even more to come. Yep, there’s a whole lot more stuff to blip. We’ve partnered with imeem to deliver all the full-length tracks they offer. And, because imeem stores all of the songs on their own super fast servers, you’ll see far less “unavailable” tracks from now on. You don’t have to do anything different, Blip.fm will pretty much behave the same as it always has; you search for music, preview and select a song just like before, but there’s just a whole lot more music to choose from.
The other big update is the addition of Ping.fm in the external services. Which effectively means we’ve added about 30 new social networking sites you can broadcast to. Ping.fm is like the swiss army knife of updating social networks. You set it up once and from then on it’ll update all your accounts with one post. You can automatically post blips to facebook, myspace, imeem, identi.ca, and all of these other sites. Just sign up over at Ping.fm, set up all the accounts you want to broadcast to, and add the external account in your Blip.fm settings. Happy broadcasting, blippers.
Some of you might also notice that we’ve changed “props to give” to “credits”. There’s a good reason for this: it was confusing. It was hard to explain the difference between props given to you and props to give. So, now you have props and credits. You use one credit to give props, and the person getting props also gets one credit. When you invite someone to sign up, you get a credit, etc. See? Simpler, right? OK, maybe there’s another reason for the change in nomenclature, but you’ll have to wait for that one.
Finally, there’s a long list of bugs and updates that are like candy sprinkles to make things even sweeter.
- New badges for 5,000, 10,000, and 25,000 listeners
- Cleaned up the UI just a bit
- Less short clips in the search results
- Fixed the playlist player for Windows users
- Last.fm correctly shows last 10 scrobbles again
- Changing account info on external services correctly verifies the info
- More less-interesting-but-good bug fixes
We’re always working to improve the service. Keep the feedback coming, we’re here all day looking at the computer screen and your emails give us a nice little break, and sometimes a good laugh.
Cheers,
-ian
