Tworl-a-blog!

As some of you may have already noticed, we recently re-launched tworl with a whole new look and a whole lot of new features. We’ve spent months listening to your feedback and re-engineering everything behind the scenes… and this is the long-awaited result! Everything about the site looks and feels different, and you’ll notice a whole bunch of new features, including enhanced mashup data for every tworl chat (even retroactive to your old chats), a more advanced rating system, a smoother process of initiating tworl chats, and many, many more.

As you can inevitably expect with any kind of software, however, the downside of a major overhaul is always the re-introduction of new bugs. So if you notice anything going awry with the site, please don’t hesitate to let us know by using the “contact” link in the footer of each page on the site.

But anyway, this site update took us freakin forever to finish, so hopefully you all will enjoy it. Now that I think about it, this change to the site is so monumental that I should probably send some sort of newsletter out to let everyone know. Or I could just wait for the 3 people that read this blog to spread the word. If I understand it correctly, if 3 people each tell 3 people, who then tell 3 more people and so on, everyone will know about the site update by about 2015. Yeah, so I’m going to go build a newsletter thingy. For the 3 of you that will be responding to my newlsetter with a “i knew that already”, i apologize.

-chad

We made an additional 1,000 beta testing accounts available again today. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

-chad

Okay folks, we have big plans for the site over the next week or so. The site will be undergoing heavy upgrading on Thursday night (07/20) from 11:00PM - Midnight PST, as well some times on Friday and Saturday that are still TBD. We will post a message here in the blog when we know the exact times for Friday and Saturday, and will also post a big warning box on the main page of the site to remind you of the upgrades.

So for those of you that are curious, here is the major change we will be implementing:

• After the Tworl search engine has found a match, when you click the “Start Tworl Chat!” button, it will no longer pop up a window in your AIM program with a tworl chat invitation message to send. Instead, when you press the button, one of our Tworl bots will create a 3-person AIM chat session, send an invitation to you and to the person you are tworling, and then remove itself from the chat.

There are several advantages to doing things this way:

1. No more browser/AIM client compatibility issues! Because we send both people the chat invitation via instant messenger, you won’t have to worry about not having a client that supports AIM browser links. This means that once these changes are in place, we will be able to support Gaim, Trillian, and any other AIM client you may be using.
2. This is the first step towards supporting other chat networks such as Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, and even Skype. These upgrades will help us lay the framework we need for supporting these networks. Hopefully once these upgrades are complete, we will be adding support for other clients shortly after.
3. It allows us to protect your privacy even more by ensuring that people don’t try to spim you with fake tworl chat invitations…. Once these changes are made, you will know an authentic Tworl chat invitation because it will come from a designated tworl bot, not a random user. This is very important to us–we are always looking for ways to enhance our member privacy protection.

In the mean time, if anyone has any questions, comments, or objections, please feel free to drop us a line by emailing us at admin@tworl.com, using the feedback form (the link is in the footer of the site), or by just leaving a comment on this blog entry. We will send a newsletter out to everyone once the changes are complete (I guess that means we should implement a newsletter feature this weekend too). Thanks. We hope these changes enhance your experience at Tworl.

-chad

P.S. We will also be adding lots more ajax throughout the site! For those of you that aren’t nerdy cool enough to know what ajax is, it is basically the technology that allows you to dynamically change the contents of a page without refreshing it… Think gmail or the way you can drag google maps. Hey, wait a second, are you even allowed to do a “P.S.” on a blog? Hmm….

Whoo hooo! Okay, so jay and i finally got a reasonable version of Tworl ready for a limited public beta testing. Hopefully it’s not too much like my apartment, which is full of bugs. I’ll add a counter to the create account page within the next few days to show how many beta accounts are left before we close it off. In the mean time, please sign up if you’re interested in trying out the site!

As a random side note, we also got these tworl CANdoms to give out. Obviously I’m a biased opinion here, but these things are frekin hilarious. We’ll send them out as a sort of thank you to the first 250 people that sign up for a beta testing account… or maybe it should be a “sorry for the bugs, please still use our site because we’re in the process of fixing them” present. Oh well, either way i guess. practice safe sipping !

-chad