Tworl-a-blog!

Okay, so we didin’t forget about the things we mentioned in the first “Planned Site Upgrades” post… There have been a few unforeseen issues that have caused us some major delays (and headaches) in regards to changing the way that the chats are initiated. Anyway, I just wanted to say that we haven’t forgot about it, and the seeming lack of updates over the past week is really a result of the amount of time those updates have been taking.

In other news, we’re planning on upgrading the whole method of accepting a chat, probably sometime later today. The basic insipiration is this: we got some requests to add a feature to allow members to more easily keep track of links to tworl chats that they’ve initiated in case you accidentally close the AIM window, or somehow just lose the link. We also received some requests to be able to look at a tworl chat info page for a chat that you’ve been invited to without actually “accepting” it.

So basically, this is what’s going to happen once these changes are up: in order to “accept” a chat, you will have to actually click an “accept this chat” button on the tworl chat info page (this is if you’ve been tworled… if you were the person that initiated the tworl chat, it is assumed that you’ve accepted the chat). Additionally, all of your ‘unaccepted’ tworls, meaning any tworl in which you are a participant and both people have not accepted, will appear in your tworl history for 24 hours. After 24 hours, if both people haven’t accepted it, it will be automatically deleted.

-chad

Hey all, I just added a small little box to the chat information page that basically reminds you to log in if you’re one of the two people shown on the page if you want to be able to accept the conversation, rate the other person, or see all the contact information (which is hidden unless you’re logged in as one of the two members whose chat you’re looking at). Okay that’s all for now.

-chad

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

-chad

Something weird has been going on with internet explorer… It’s been giving some of our users a “Cannot Load Page. Operation Aborted” error message on some of the pages of tworl. We think we identified what was causing this problem and resolved it, but if anyone is still having problems, please let us know and we’ll try to fix it asap.

I also optimized a bunch of our pages so hopefully they’ll load a little faster than they used to.
-chad

I upgraded the “Invite” page so that it looks a little less like an eyesore, and a little more like a page that you’d actually want to use to invite some of your friends to Tworl. Besides just looking a little nicer, it also allows you to preview the message your sending to your friends before you send it.

Other then that, we’ve actually been working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes… more ajax is on its way, and we’re still working on the new method of starting Tworl chats that we mentioned in the “Planned Site Upgrades” below. Yes, we are behind, but we’re trying. If only we didn’t have “real” jobs to go to too.

-chad

Ahh, so it’s been a few days since I’ve written here. I bet all two of you that read this were probably starting to wonder what’s going on… anyway, it’s kind of ironic that the reason that I haven’t been writing here is because we’ve been working really hard to improve the site based on the feedback we’ve received. I think the major change I just made is pretty obvious to everyone… the main page has a whole lot more stuff on it. You may have also noticed that over the past few days your chat information pages and your member profile pages have gone through slight tweeks. Yes, we are constantly working on the site even if we aren’t blogging about it.

We still have one more major change coming up real soon… I ‘ve already written about what we plan on doing in one of the previous posts titiled “Planned Site Upgrades” I believe. Anyway, we thought these upgrades would come about a little bit faster than they have, but never fear, they’re coming soon…

-chad

So I guess now that we’ve put in some ajax features on the chat information page, we’re looking more and more like a true web 2.0 site. Honestly, part of me still doesn’t really know what “web 2.0″ means exactly, but I figure if I throw the buzz word out there I’ll sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand… The “unresponsive” button and the member rating forms on the chat details page are now ajax-enhanced. Basically, no more pop-ups when you try to do either of these things; instead of a window popping up after you click on the unresponsive button, the button will shake its booty and then disappear. Simple as that. Pretty much the same thing goes for the member rating form–click thumbs up or thumbs down and the button will do a little dance and then disappear. Additionally, all the data in that left column will now auto-update without you havining to refresh the page. In other words, when the other person accepts your conversation, the page you’re seeing will automtically update to tell you this without you having to refresh the page.

So that’s pretty much it for now… We still have a whole bunch of other things in the works. One last thing: a big thanks to “amberella007″ and “None of Many” for helping us test out the new AJAX features. If we were an actual startup and had any kind of money, I’d probably buy them a drink .

-chad

If you are age 36 or over, the chat details page was always showing you as age 36… Jay fixed the error, and it should now be displaying your age properly (sorry to those of you that enjoyed being stuck at 36 ). Thanks to Jeff at bigblueball.com for the heads up.

-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….

There was a small bug in the “manage my account screennames” page–when you tried to delete a screenname, sometimes it worked, and sometimes it gave you a really weird error. It should be fixed now. Apologies to anyone that was inconvenienced by this bug. Thanks everyone for your feedback, we really appreciate it.

-chad