The Jive.ly Blog

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our site for our users - we’ve adapted our front page to be faster-loading, more informative and simple to use.

What you’ll get from our new homepage:

1. A fresh look at the networks we support
2. A simple, easy-to use sign up right on the front page
3. A sleek new login form

This is all part of a push to make Jively more usable and responsive for our users - watch this space for new updates!

Martin

Jive.ly is a broadcast platform to share what you see around you, and in endeavoring to fulfill our mission we have extended our supported social networks from two to a whopping nine.

You can now extend your media and posts across your WordPress blog, LiveJournal blog, Blogger account, Flickr, YoutTube, Jaiku and Facebook.

Now updating your account with images can automatically add them to your photostream, share them with your facebook palls or post embedded content directly to your LiveJournal and Blogger accounts. We’ve tried to make integration as seamless and sensible as possible to ensure your content gets as far and wide as possible.

We hope you enjoy the upgrade!

Thanks,

Martin

Thats right - Jively now has an API that we’re actually telling everyone about (there’s been a secret, hidden one that has been around since the beginning - but we’ve scrapped it and started afresh)

Jively’s new API is essentially a small, simple, JSON-based RESTful service that allows developers to retrieve, search and send updates into the Jively universe, including attached media.

For everyone’s convenience - we’ve also put together a python-based wrapper for the API for download here

If you’re interested in developing for the wrapper, or indeed creating a PHP, Ruby or .Net library - give us a bell at martin [dot] buhr [at] jive.lyand we’ll be glad to help!

I hope you enjoy the new bag of tricks - please let me know if there’s functions you’d like to see implemented or antyhing that’s going horribly wrong!

The jively API docs can be found here

Or take a look at the wrapper library (python) here

Jively has launched a fresh design and new features - we’ve moved server and hardened our setup - with any luck, we’ve improved the user experience and made the service a lot more friendly.

The new design is courtesy of our new designer Andy Shaw, you can find him on Jively or on twitter, whatever takes your fancy

Some of our latest improvements to the service include:

1. New super friendly design
2. Fuller support for MMS messages - if you’re on Verizon, Three UK or Vodafone UK you can just send an MMS into your secret email account and it will be displayed in full
3. Quicktime support - now you can upload those .mov files
4. Efficiency improvements - this for techies only, but we’re hosting all uploaded media with Amazon Cloudfront, so now video streaming will be faster and more direct, in fact the whole site is now ‘cloudified’ so we’ve got load improvements all round
5. We’ve expanded the FAQ - more answers, less confusion!

We hope you enjoy the new site, upload your pics, tell your friends - hook up your twitter account and get Jivin’!

Martin Buhr

In the busy metropolitan offices of Jively we’ve been hard at work figuring out new and better ways to improve the service. In order to improve our support for users with non-email-enabled mobile camera phones, we are extending our MMS support to allow full MMS functionality (i.e. you mms it in, we publish what yopu post, no more of this ‘mobile roar’ business).

In order to get this all working, and working worldwide - we need your help.

If you would like to see your carrier supported, simply send an MMS to mms@wotiki.com for analysis - we’ll rip apart your message and make sure we add support for it to our site.

Carriers currently supported:

1. Hutchison 3G (Three) - UK
2. Verizon wireless (USA) - tentative

(Guess which network I’m on?)

Thanks,

Martin

We’ve been hard at work improving Jively’s stability and speed - along with culling some bugs that were occuring with media uploads. One of the major changes is switching to a new server architecture, which should bring major speed improvements.

Change list:

1. Media uploads - quicktime, 3gp, avi and mp4 now fully supported
2. Media uploads - errors with obscure file names and upper/lowercase issues now resolved
3. Added support for linked media embedding (e.g. embedding a linked image from another site)
4. Emails - should not display bounced replies
5. Improved email support - replies and forwards now cut off quoted text - cleaner updates for all

We are feverishly working on a fresh new design, which should  be live within the next few weeks.

Thanks to everyone who tested the nails out of the system - we managed to identify several areas of improvement which we are integrating into the code base - expect more upgrades over the next few days!

Enjoy the service and watch this space,

Martin

Yesterday’s overwhelming interest in Jively brought out a great selection of bugs which had slipped under the radar - thankfull, many new improvements have been implemented:

1. The email parser has been cleaned up - you can now reply directly to emails sent from Jively and other users without having to worry about signatures and other garbage being included in the email
2. Bounces should be handled now - no more wierd and random messages in your feed!
3. The video transcoder has been fixed, we noticed some problems when dealing with odd filenames - all gone now…

we’re working haerd to improve the site every day - we have a new designer who has kindly offered to join the team and put together a fresher, less gothic look (I make no appologies - I am a developer and my design skills are moot)

More updates comming soon - watch this space.

Thanks again for all the support and to all the testers out there who gave feedback!

–Martin

Thanks to Mike Butcher - who gave Jively it’s first release on TechCrunch in a post entitled “Jive.ly - a one-man attempt to better Twitter?” - thanks for the props (and we’d just like to mention that those bugs he mentions have been removed now - good thing we’re still in Beta, right?)

on a personal note - I’ve always wanted to have a site mentioned on TC - so thnks guys!

- Martin

Jive.ly is now in full beta - and we’re giving away 100 invitations to the first people that direct message us @jively on twitter - just send us your email address and we’ll send you an invite!

Every user that signs up will get 15 invitations so you can invite your friends!

Some of the things you can do with Jively:

1. Update your posts from your mobile via email or MMS - include images, video or just plaintext and the site will make it avaialble online.
2. Update your Tumblr and Twitter accounts from your jively feed - any media you send will be linked to in your posts
3. Set up notifications for search terms you are interested in - just search for something and click ‘add notification’ to set up a notification (new feature)

Any bugs you run into - please let us know!

Thanks,

Martin

Here we’re going to be posting regular updates on new features, the latest happenings and rants about what is going on with Jively.

At the moment: very much a work in progress as we near the Alpha stage of testing (yes, we’ll be inviting users! yay!). With any luck (and if our servers survive) we’ll begin testing sometime next month - I’m thoroughtly looking forward to getting it all up and running.

If you’re interested in an account - dm  me on twitter (@lonelycode) and we’ll see what we can sort out…