Friday Update

Pushed a couple fun things out.

• Search: Discover rooms geared toward your interests using the search bar
• Tags: Room owners can now tag their rooms to be discovered in search!
• Visits: We now track visitors, and unique visitors. You can see them in the upper-right corner of your room

Also, we fixed the problem where playlists would get wiped every time we pushed. You should see that in effect soon.

Have a good weekend,

~mrchess

EDIT: The fix to not wipe playlists won't be out till Monday

Quick Update

Gotta be quick with the blog. Lot's of work to do.

Yesterday we tried some new architecture... didn't work so well so we reverted.

We also pushed a few changes:

• Settings now in its own dialog
• You can now write your description in a rich-text editor.
• Force Unique: You can now force playlist videos to be only unique
• Force Duration: You can now force videos to only be a specific duration
• Colored Mods: Mods are now dark red. Color customization coming soon.
• Delete Videos: You can now delete your own videos you add to the playlist
• Delete Wall: You can now delete your own wall posts

I'll be trying to update the blog more often now that I have more time.

Cheers,

mrchess

Today's Update

What's New:

• Wall - A place where you can just leave random comments! (cliche, but they can be fun)
• Leaderboard - Calculates the scores of the entire playlist

And of course bugs, stability and internal fixes, and some UI updates.

FYI or those you who are not interested in these new options, there will be an update coming up where we allow room owners to have more control over the room (only registered members can participate, rules like that), and also a section where you can turn these modules ON or OFF. The tabs also defaults to original synchtube (with Search first) so you can just ignore the new features as well if you are not interested in them.

cheers,

~mrchess

Synchtube TV is back!

Thanks to our architecture change we are excited to announce that Synchtube TV, which initially debuted almost 10 months ago, is now back!

What is TV?

TV is a mode that FULLY automates a room allowing it to function without a leader!

How does it work?

The leader clicks the "Enable TV" button. This will lock the playlist and cause the room to continually repeat the playlist until a moderator or room owner disables TV mode.

When in TV mode, the room will play the playlist repeatedly and the media will be continued to be synchronized.

Why is this useful?

• TV mode is useful for leaders who need to leave when there are no moderators around to "take over". You can put the room in TV mode and leave with the peace of mind that the room will be safe until someone can take over.
  
  
• TV mode is also useful for individual room owners who want to run rooms without being around. You can set up a station for your personal blog/website, set TV on, and just leave!
  
  
• TV mode is just useful in general to relieve you of leader stress -- you don't have to worry about losing or having a leader.

Future of TV?

One direction we are headed in is allowing rooms to become individual TV stations, letting rooms have set times to play videos, just like a real TV station. More on this later...

We will also be starting to implement analytics features so you can track the popularity of your room.

TV is still highly experimental so all feedback or suggestions is great appreciated. Please leave any feedback in the comments section -- we read it all.

I know I'm in the blog all the time, but I would also like to give a shout to the co-founder of synchtube, lucidrains, who devised the new architecture and algorithms that improves synching and makes TV possible.

Thanks all.

~mrchess

Extra:

Here is an excerpt of the original TV debut 10 months ago. Pardon the corniness. :)

synchtube TV (beta)

Create your own TV station that streams YouTube videos in real-time. synchtube TV allows you to set up a playlist as if you were broadcasting it as a TV station to the world. People can join

your TV station, watch simultaniously, and chat!

Promote your blog/YouTube Channel/website

• Imagine creating a lounge area with streaming YouTube media be it music or videos where users of similiar interest can come and hang out. Wait, stop imagining! You can do it now with synchtube TV! We hope synchtube TV can be used to supplement your website of choice to further develop your online communities

Create a radio station

• Not into video? Why not create a radio station to broadcast your favorite music. Live personal playlists are so much nicer than anything Pandora can offer.

Not your average synchtube room

• synchtube TV requires NO LEADER. Like real television, content will continue to play regardless if people are viewing or not. Your content will also loop indefinitely -- once it hits the end of your program, it will go back to the beginning of the program.

Today's Update

• Fixed loading of old playlists
• Fixed importing playlists
• Fixed various bugs including a dangerous XSS bug (thanks Binaryheap)

• Added thumbs up down (currently does not save... yet)
• Added username next to video when you add a video (currently does not save... yet)

• Removed individual update bars

New? Any thoughts?

We've got a couple things cooking for new features and stability, but we were also wondering what everyone else wanted.

So I just ask the question:

What can we build for your rooms to make them a better experience?

mrchess

Ads... oh no?

Hey guys.

If you haven't noticed, ads are now on synchtube.

Before anyone flips out I just wanted to say that right now synchtube is a giant hole in our pockets and we need to at least try to break even. That being said, while we did put ads up, we tried to put them up in the most non-invasive way because we all know how annyoing ads can be.

In addition they are closeable, so you can always just click them away!

We also added some "Sponsor" ads on our frontpage. I know a lot of people were interested in giving us donations. We priced the frontpage ones pretty cheap ($20 for 30 days) so please check those out if you are still interested :).

Thanks!

mrchess