Planetary Scale LLC » Amidst

Recent Activity and Search Location Changes

andrew — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:40:32 +0000

I just rolled out a couple of quick changes to Amidst. The first is that your activity now shows up in your “Recent Activity” stream, along with that of your friends. Previously, it had just shown what your friends were doing. This brings things in line with what people have come to expect from services such as Twitter, and adds some context as to when things happened.

The second change is that the default location in the search box is now determined by Google the first time you use it. This is thanks to the handy ClientLocation object provided by the Google AJAX Loader, and should be accurate enough for your first location-centered search to work.

Oops.. amid.st DNS Mistake

andrew — Wed, 06 May 2009 08:48:29 +0000

While I was away for the weekend camping, I accidentally let the amid.st domain expire. I really shouldn’t have let this happen, and apologize to everyone who was affected. I renewed the domain today, so once the new domain information propagates everything should be back to normal.

Not only did Amidst go down, but Mappity Quakes didn’t work during the duration of the outage due to being served off of the amid.st domain. I’m sorry for the downtime and am really embarrassed that I let this happen.

Email Invitations and Follow Notifications

andrew — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:37:23 +0000

Since our soft launch of Amidst, I’ve been busy fixing bugs and adding user-requested features. Starting today, I’ll start blogging the new things we’ve added…

So, to start off, a minor but important feature has been added for inviting your friends via email. The emails are short, to the point, and will only be sent to an email address once.

Also, we now send an email notice when you follow them. Unlike Twitter, however, we only send this follow notification once. This avoids the awkward situation when you un-follow someone for a time, then re-follow them and they get an email which lets them know you haven’t been paying attention to them. We debated a bit between doing things this way or with a “pause” button, ala Merlin Mann’s suggestions. Ultimately, though, we think this is a pretty clean way to do it. It solves the problem without new UI, and prevents the downsides of the re-follow problem. Notifications can be turned off altogether in your settings.

More features are on the way soon!

(Soft) Launch Day

andrew — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:59:19 +0000

We pushed Amidst live today, removed the invitation wall, and asked Hacker News for their thoughts on the project. So far, the feedback has been incredibly helpful, and we’re really thankful for the constructive comments from the Hacker News community.

We intended today to be a bit of a soft-launch, to gauge people’s reactions, figure out the pain points, and learn what we needed to tweak, and so far that’s exactly how it’s working out. So, now I’m off to my favorite cafe to work on some of the many, many problems people found. Fun stuff.