Visualize The Difference

Thanks @evablue for putting together this diagram of the new UI updates. It makes the transition a little easier for anyone looking for things that might have been moved around a bit.

(Flickr Photo)

Shiny! New UI

Today we give Blip.fm a bit of a facelift. We’ve reworked the current feature set to make everything simpler, faster, and cleaner. There’s not a whole lot of *new* stuff in this update, but you’ll notice that all the existing functionality is just more refined.

Under the hood there’s a lot going on, and it’s getting us ready for a big set of new features we’ve already started working on. Here’s a partial list of what’s been changed:

• Simplified top-level menu to get you to the three main streams (everyone, your favorite DJs, and yours)
• Easy access to all your stats and pages at the top right of every page
• Continuous scrolling for each station (eventually it’ll be continuous play throughout the entire site)
• Easily pause / resume the blipstream (auto-update when new blips are available)
• Easily add and toggle social networks you send notifications to on a blip-by-blip basis
• Sort favorite djs and listeners by last blip, by date added, and alphabetically
• Bandwith-limited users can now easily skip video blips
• Improved profile page
• Improved site performance

We’ve been testing this new UI at our beta site http://beta.blip.fm and taking feedback from users (email beta@blip.fm). It’s been a great way to let everyone check out the changes and keep us in the loop regarding what work and what doesn’t. In fact, the system has had such a positive response that we’re going to continue to push new stuff out to http://beta.blip.fm and let interested parties bang on the wheels before pushing it live.

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback for this set of updates. We’ve gone through several rounds of changes and we’re pretty excited to let this loose on the masses. Don’t worry, we’re not taking any breathers either, we’ve already begun the next round of features. This next round is going to bring new features to both DJs and listeners.

Blip.fm Planning New SuperShop Experience

As a result of the recent unexpected closure of our merchandise partner, Blip.fm will be developing an even better store that will offer new services and fresh goodies sure to please blippers far and wide!

We apologize for the inconvenience this closure poses for those of you in the Bliposphere who currently have outstanding orders. We want to assure you that we are working very closely with our former partner to get your orders filled as soon as possible, or secure a 100% refund. We will be in touch with each of you over the coming days to give you a status report.

Though the circumstances were beyond our control, we take great pride in being responsive and supportive of you, our valued Blip.fm community members, and will take this opportunity to build an even better experience! We will keep you posted on when the new SuperShop will be launching.

If you have any questions about your order, you know where to reach us: support@blip.fm

Stay tuned and thanks for your patience!

The Blip.fm Team

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.

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