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Transcoding video

Have you noticed anything different on Twango? Click here, see what's different. Yes, that's right, we're transcoding videos now! What that means is that we are now taking your videos and converting them into FLVs (FLash Video), and displaying them in such a way that they just start playing on Twango.

We're in the middle of transcoding all the videos that we've had since we launched (350 of them, give or take a few). We'll start transcoding them as they come in after this batch process is complete.

Sorry, site was down longer than expected

You know what we need? We need a full-time network administrator working for us. Anyone interested?

Why, you ask? It turns out (according to our subnet cheat sheet) that we pigeon-holed ourselves into a very limited number of machines when we set up our production network. We found this out when we tried adding another machine to the network and found that it didn't work. Scrounging around for the answer, we figured out that we needed to change the subnet mask of all of our machines.

Philip and I came up with a plan of attack. He and Randy would head over to our colo and I would remote desktop into the machines to change their subnet masks. Those of you who know networking are probably already groaning but... changing the subnet remotely should not have been considered an option at all. Doing so disconnected me from the machines so I was stuck in some middle state, unable to configure the machines and bring the site back up! Philip and Randy had to deal with it on site.

A bit relieved that that task was off of my shoulder (it's nerve-wracking; you don't know if you're going to bring the entire site down or not), I went back to work, implementing the kick butt features that we're about to roll out. I get a call from Philip after several minutes, asking me to try hitting our site. It didn't work. He called me a few minutes later, asking me to try again. It didn't work. After a few more calls, Philip and Randy finally figured out the problem and we got Twango back up again... except, we can't VPN (remotely connect) into the machines anymore.

That last issue hasn't been fixed yet but we're working hard on it. Fortunately, it doesn't affect Twango for all you Twangons (Twangonese? Twangoeuros?) so you're all good to enjoy the goodness of Twango while we figure out the problem.

UW Career Fair

Here we are at our very first career fair. Stuck in an admittedly undesirable corner, we're going to have to draw in people with the irresistable allure of Twango. Updates to come throughout the day!

Update: Yikes!  We're overwhelmed by the response to Twango!  People are totally jazzed on it and especially mobile uploading.  We were taking pictures of people with our cameraphones talking to the Twangueros and they'd see thier image in a channel moments later.  Too cool!

Update 2: Tired, sleepy, and exhausted. That's how I (Don) feel right now. What a blast we had today at the fair though! Met a lot of cool people, gave away our bottle openers and t-shirts left and right, and demoed the heck out of Twango. We've got a mountain of resumes to look through and the people we've talked to are all very promising. Good day overall.

Twango has launched!

It's official: Twango has gone from alpha to beta! No more surveys, no more cookies... Twango is fully public. Check out all the features we've built in, see how easy it is to manage, maintain and share your media, browse the most popular channels. Rest assured that even though we've launched and we're very happy about our site, we will constantly seek to improve the service, by listening to our customers and iterating this puppy to death!

"No more dreaded alpha cookies," Randy gleefully exclaims. "It's public BETA!!!"

Constrained no more!

Twango has just become a ton more awesome. Did you ever feel constrained by the paltry 250MB we had initially offered? Well, feel constrained no more! We now give you 250MB each month! So get busy, upload those pictures and videos that you've been holding back, you have the capacity to do so now!

-- Don

Drag-drop uploader

Having to upload one file at a time bumming you out? It did me, too. But now, I don't need to go through this pain, I can now use the handy dandy drag-drop uploader that we have on our upload page!  So easy! We're still working out some kinks and it doesn't work in some browsers (namely, Firefox on the Mac and browsers other than Internet Explorer that have old versions of Java) but give it a try! It makes your life easier, I promise.

Go here to give it a shot.

- Don

Delete account functionality completed

Twango members should now be able to successfully delete their accounts with one smooth and simple click.    There were a lot of nasty bugs and pitfalls that had to be fixed in order to get to this point (and there may still be undiscovered problems resulting from extreme, exotic and unforeseen usage cases) but the delete account functionality is ready to be exposed to the world.   Of course, since Twango is so ridiculously good and there aren't enough adjectives in the dictionary to describe how wonderful it is, no one will ever want to delete their account anyway so it won't even matter.   

- Jie