Weekly Twitter Updates 2009-08-31

• @kidfiction yes, use quotes and +/- in blip.fm searches to get more accurate results in reply to kidfiction #
• We just realized we didn’t have an ‘official’ Blip.fm user. Fixed that… http://blip.fm/blipfm #

FoxyTunes Adds Blip.fm Player

Yahoo! has released a major update to FoxyTunes that, among a host of other new features, now supports Blip.fm playback. FoxyTunes is a FireFox add-on that controls a variety of music players including iTunes, Last.fm, Pandora, and even YouTube directly from the browser status bar. It allows you to listen to your music while browsing other sites, without the need to switch to the player to change the track or find out what’s currently playing.

What’s got us excited about the latest release is the addition of Blip.fm as a music player. Now you can control any Blip.fm stream from the toolbar, without hunting for the tab that’s playing the music. The FoxyTunes add-on supports all the standard playback options you would expect, like play, pause, next and volume control (yes, they even beat us to a volume slider).

In addition to playback, this release of FoxyTunes lets you update your status on Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo! with the currently playing track. It doesn’t support posting to Blip.fm yet, but you can bet we’ll be working with their team to get that added in the near future.

The FoxyTunes team has done a great job adding an extra layer of information about the currently playing track that makes this add-on indispensable. A compact breakaway information window tells you the artist and title, along with album art (when available), and contextual menus for “Search” and “Explore”.  These menus get you quick access to search results, lyrics, and FoxyTunes’ own mashup artist page containing Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and a ton of other stuff. Ahem, this page is obviously lacking “recent blips” by the artists… something we shall hope to remedy.

Download FoxyTunes and check it out. Also make sure to send feedback to let them know how you like the Blip.fm support. Their development team (like us) thrives on comments, so let ‘er rip.

Weekly Twitter Updates 2009-08-24

• FoxyTunes now supports Blip.fm: http://www.foxytunes.com/ #
• New shirts in the SuperShop! https://store.blip.fm and PLEASE send us photos of you wearing your gear so we can replace our product phautos. #
• @Timebuilder Try clearing out your cache, we just updated some of the code in reply to Timebuilder #
• Go nuts! #
• We’re close! Hang in there… sorry for the long delay #
• Backing up, updating, checking, then we come back online #
• @kopper Those RSS feeds will be fixed after tonight’s update in reply to kopper #
• @ratherfancy I’ve added you to the DM optout list. in reply to ratherfancy #

Weekly Twitter Updates 2009-08-17

• Just for kicks I’ve started a Fluid.app (http://fluidapp.com) userscript for Blip.fm: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55507 #
• Whoops, just fixed the Growl notifications: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55507 #
• Network issues at our ISP ate causing the site to be unreachable. #
• We’ll be having about 1hr of downtime tonight. This one is nothing special, a few bug fixes and adding additional servers to help w/ load. #
• @BrianGreene Probably at 11 PM Pacific, but we’ll confirm and announce it a few hours before. in reply to BrianGreene #
• Maintenance tonight at 12am Pacific. Shouldn’t be more than 1hr. #
• Maintenance delayed until tomorrow. We’re going to improve some monitoring tools in the meantime. Keep on blippin’ through the night #

Zombies in the Matrix

A little unplanned maintenance to take care of this evening. We should be back online in just a few minutes.

Wow, you guys blip a LOT. We tracked the problem back to a corrupt table in the master database that stores all the blips that people post. Don’t worry, they’re safe, but due to the total number of blips it takes a while to get things back in order.

We’re already planning some changes that will keep the site up in case of failures like these, but as luck would have it we got hit with the ghost in the machine just a few days before we had planned to move over to the new setup.

If anyone is interested in the more nerdy side of running things, I plan to write a series of posts about the kind of hurdles and pitfalls you might run into when you’re building an internet company. There seems to be a common path from initial release through to scale that you don’t find out about until you’re dealing with it.

-ian