Posted in News on January 19th, 2011 by catrific – Comments
Return 2 Me is a postcard community mail project started by dedicated DailyBooth user, Scott Moore. He created a thread on DailyBooth asking users to take a photo of themselves that he would turn into a postcard. After gathering the postcards, addressing them to himself, and adding postage, he is ready to place the postcards all over the world. They were shipped to 8 different states and 3 different countries: Switzerland, Ireland, and New Zealand.
The idea is for the postcards to be set in random places throughout cities and neighborhoods and returned back to Scott. On the back of the postcard it reads, “Please add something and return to me”.
He’s received many postcards already after just starting the project last week and is posting them on his DailyBooth account as well as Return 2 Me’s official website.
The idea is similar to that of Post Secret, which was a popular success that started back in 2005. The idea was that you wrote a secret on a postcard that you decorate, mail it in, then it would be posted online on Post Secret’s blog. Return 2 me seems like a fun and promising project that we look forward to following.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to announce that today we rolled out #dbv3, our biggest update in DailyBooth history.
It’s live…like literally right now. Go and have a nose around then let us know what you think in the comments.
Along with the obvious design and UI updates, there is a load of awesome new features to play with. I’ll outline some of the more awesome ones below.
Notifications!
Notifications are something that DailyBooth has needed for a long time. Up until now there was no way of knowing if someone commented on your picture unless you actually went to it and checked. Many comments on old photos were missed because there was no way of knowing they were there!
There is now a site-wide notifications bar that alerts you when anything happens that related to you.
Quilt view
We added this cool view to the profile pages so you can easily see the latest 50 pictures a user has taken at a glance. The quilt view is especially useful when you’re scrolling back in time, trying to find a specific picture from a few months ago.
Sticky comment bar
You no longer have to spend ages scrolling down on popular pictures to leave a comment. The new sticky comment bar is always visible so you can leave a comment from wherever you are in a thread!
Group messaging
You can now start private group conversations with your closest friends on DailyBooth. We’ve been playing with this internally for a few weeks now and it’s a lot of fun!
Free stickers!!!
*UPDATE* – We only had enough stickers to give away to the first 250 responses and we already have reached that limit. Thanks to everyone who was involved!!
To celebrate our launch, we’re giving away free DailyBooth #dbv3 stickers. Want a (super rare) sticker? Here’s what you have to do.
Take a picture of yourself showing the new logo in some creative way. You could draw it somewhere, make a sign or do something utterly wild and amazing that we can’t even think of.
Send out a tweet linking to this blog post.
Email hello@dailybooth.com with a link to your picture, a link to your tweet and include your address so we know where to send the sticker!
P.S. The first ever DailyBooth picture was taken 2 years and 3 days ago. I think this is a fitting update to celebrate its birth!
Posted in News on August 31st, 2010 by Jon Wheatley – Comments
We’re very excited to announce that we’re opening our DailyBooth API for private beta. DailyBooth is an active an engaged community. So far the majority of boothing has been from laptops but we want this to change.
We’re looking for the developers who are interested in creating apps on a number of platforms including:
Android
Blackberry
Palm WebOS
iPad
We’re looking for fun, well designed apps that allow boothing on the go, features including:
It’s finally here. Apple has just approved the long awaited dailybooth iPhone app! It’s out. Like, right now. Pull out your iPhone and search for “dailybooth” or grab it from iTunes. It’s free.
We’re all really excited about this. The front facing camera on the new iPhone 4 is absolutely perfect for boothing. You’ll be able to show your followers what you’re doing instantly, where ever you are. Bored on the bus? No problem! Whip out your iPhone and see what your dailybooth friends have been up to. Talking with someone but need to go to work? That’s fine! You can continue the conversation on the move.
We’ve been using the app internally for a few weeks and it changes everything.
But what does it do?!
Booth from anywhere!
Picture and text commenting.
Dashboard “everything” view.
Picture thread view.
Check your mentions.
That’s it for now but @mattn is hard at work adding more features. Soon anything you can do on the website you’ll be able to do in the app, including messaging.
Is there anything that you’d like to see in future versions? Anything we could improve? Please let us know what you think!
We will be taking DailyBooth down for a little while on Saturday at 3am EST. We don’t expect the site to be down more than an hour, but it is possible that DailyBooth could be down for slightly longer.
This downtime is for maintenance only and you will not notice any changes to the site afterwards. This should hopefully result in DailyBooth no longer having slow load times during peek hours.
For you technical people out there, this is what we are doing…
Basically, we are just modifying some of the database table structures. We will be modifying indexes to some of the larger database tables. We will also be implementing some new code which will allow us to archive some of the older dashboard entries, although still allowing users to access this information without removing it completely. This is something we must add simply because the size of a few database tables which have grown much larger than expected and will continue to grow.
DailyBooth user @jeff has just finished work on a sweet dailybooth dashboard widget for OSX. After downloading and installing it all you need to do is enter your dailybooth username when prompted.
The widget will then automatically update with the latest pictures from the people who you follow. It’s awesome! Thanks @jeff.
We’ve just launched email mobile uploads. You can now update your DailyBooth anywhere you are. If your phone has the capability to email pictures, you can email your picture to your DailyBooth email and it will automatically be added to your account!
You can add this feature via your settings page. You will then be given your email at the bottom and can modify your ‘pin’. Once you’ve modified your settings you can then email your pictures.
Don’t share your email with anyone otherwise they will be able to add pictures to your account without your approval. If this does happen for whatever reason, simply modify your pin within your account and they will no longer be able to add the pictures to your account.
The “DailyBooth Story” has been riddled with unexpected problems and interesting twists and turns. I figured it would be beneficial, for me if nothing else, to try and go back and document everything from coming up with the initial concept to launching a completed website. Hopefully other people will find this post useful.
The idea for dailybooth was coined a few days after I was laid off from a job I had at a web development company in Edinburgh. Everything happened quite quickly so I was frantically brainstorming some startup ideas that could potentially bring in some much needed money. DailyBooth (as it wasn’t yet known) was one of a list of ideas that was churned out in that brainstorming session.
The following is a conversation between me and @josh on December 1st, 2007.
I’d like to note that the distinct lack of punctuation and the numerous spelling mistakes is probably can viagra cause restless leg syndrome down to my excitement about said idea.
@josh isn’t known for his enthusiasm so I didn’t let his lack of it put me off.
The next logical step seemed to be to find a domain for this currently nameless project.
So yeah. DailyBooth was almost called “plurg.com”. That was the last time I asked @josh for domain name suggestions.
Brilliant, so I had a rough idea for a website and a domain. I needed a sweet design and then we were really in business. I pitched the concept of the site to my designer and friend @julek. Within minutes he’d punted out a concept.
This is a conversation with @Josh on December 2nd, 2007.
At the time, @Josh (being the teenage entrepreneurial genius that he is) had recently completed a sale of his main project. He liked the design and concept so much he agreed to put up some angel funding to support me in my time of need.
Over the next few weeks the DailyBooth concept slowly evolved to be way more social. It was becoming less of a novelty web app and more and more like a fully functional social network.
During this *transitional period* @Julek came up with quite a few design new design concepts.
After much thought and deliberation, this was the design we eventually decided on using.
As you can see by the date in this design concept, it’s now mid February. By now I’ve moved out of my flat in Edinburgh. After hopping around on friends sofas for a while I temporarily moved back into my mums house in the south of England and setup office in a cupboard. This cupboard was to be my home for the next few months.
Progress with dailybooth was painfully slow. The more I pushed the developer the slower things seemed to go. Deadline after deadline was missed and on my blog the progress of dailybooth became something of a joke.
Eventually in May 2008 we had a working version of the site. At the time I recorded a short screencast of version 0.5 which you can see below.
I wasn’t overly happy with it. All we had to show for a few months of hard work was an amazingly buggy prototype that had slowly drifted away from my initial vision of a simple, clean, usable website (Think what myspace is to facebook. Nobody wants to be a “myspace”).
Then something completely unprecedented happened. The lead developers’ band got signed. He was (incredibly quickly) touring Europe with his band and could not continue working on dailybooth. Great, I thought.
I was now left with a dilemma. Find someone else to finish off the work that had been done or completely start again. At this point the site was 95% complete. I could have quite easily hired another developer to finish it off but seeing as I wasn’t happy with the direction the site was going in I decided, rightly or wrongly, to completely start again.
I was lucky because at the time it just so happened that my other startup (grabup) had been acquired so I had a bit of money to play with. Josh was happy with me buying him out so I went ahead and did that.
This time I was going to make sure everything was done right. First thing I did was get some logos designed by my buddy Dache.
This time before @julek embarked on designing the new version of dailybooth we setup a screen casting session on vyew.com so I could see what’s happening and we’d be in contact the entire time. I’d highly recommend doing this.
The first screen-casting-design-session was so fun and worked so well that when the time for the second screen-casting-design-session came around I tweeted the vyew.com room link. Shortly after that people from twitter started coming in and offering helpful suggestions to myself and @Julek.
This is what we came up with (make a note of the file name).
A few months and countless headaches later (with help from @RyanAmos & @Dice), DailyBooth is ready to go.
So there you have it. Over a year behind schedule (you know you’re behind schedule when you have to renew the domain and you haven’t launched yet). I couldn’t be happier with how everything has turned out. All of the late nights and stress have been completely worth it.
Thanks everyone who has been involved in any way in the sites development. I truly hope you enjoy using DailyBooth as much as I do.
Update: In what has become true dailybooth style, things have been complicated right up until the end. This series of photos depicts the expect launch date, each time being “for reals this time!”. Something always came up.
Seconds away from the 4th “for reals!” launch, the dailybooth developer @RyanAmos’ internet and then power drops out.
It goes to show that however sure you are, something could always crop up.
Update: We’ve totally launched. Friday 13th of Feb @ 1am GMT. Below is a qik video of the hilariously anticlimactic launch. Now the real work can begin.
I’m @jonwheatley on twitter & @jon on dailybooth. I look forward to hearing your comments. viagra etc
You have all been an absolutely massive help and DailyBooth wouldn’t be the same without you guys. I figured the least I could do is to make a blog post about how awesome each of you are.
Karli was probably the first person to ever mess about with DailyBooth v1.0 and her constant involvement and great suggestions have been completely invaluable.
Thanks Dan for letting Dave borrow your computer to take this shot. Unfortunately for all of Dave’s awesome design skills he still doesn’t own a webcam. You need to get on that, man.
Ryan is *the* man. He is the technical mind behind DailyBooth and coded it completely from the ground up in under 30 minutes. He tells me he wasn’t even trying. What a badass.
Mike runs a massive website so I don’t know where he finds the time to mess about beta testing dailybooth. Still, somehow he finds a way and for that, I love him.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to announce that today we rolled out #dbv3, our biggest update in DailyBooth history.
