We’ve finally replaced our aging site with this shiny new one; we hope you like it! Apologies if it’s a bit rough around the edges, but we had to launch it sharpish due to the large amount of traffic we’re getting from Techcrunch and elsewhere today. I’ll tidy it up soon. Promise ; )

Following the success of Blog Friends V1, we again joined Luke and i-together to create a new app - Buzzspotr. Buzzspotr combines instant messaging and locations to enable you to quickly and easy see where the buzz is. The project was inspired by Lloyd Davis and Mike Butcher during the early days of starting the Social Media Cafe. As they are both avid users of twitter (like many of the Social Meda community in London), and they needed a way to organize gatherings of social media types, it was natural to combine twitter with Google Maps.

As the project progressed, it became clear it has a lot lot of potential, so Luke enlisted the input of Ofer Deshe from Flow Interactive to guide us in usability testing for a large group of bloggers. Whilst the interface is simple, the code is reasonably complex: on the front-end, we’ve almost entirely re-written Google’s map api from scratch; on the server-side we’ve deployed our in-house highly-scalable memcached “Kitteh” framework so the app can easily stand up to tens of thousands of users all from a single low-spec server.

We’ve been working with Luke Razzell from i-together for a few months now, supporting the Blog Friends facebook app with ongoing updates. With the app having been live for about 5 months now, we thought it’d be great to spruce things up a bit and take advantage of the latest features of facebook’s API.

Blog Friends V1 amounts to a significant re-write of the entire front-end along with major portions of the back-end. The app is now effectively a full-blown feed-reader, entirely within facebook, and is currently the most advanced facebook app we know of (or so our users tell us).

I’m beginning to think we’re getting a bit of a reputation for quick service! User-generated television network Sumo. tv approached us to produce a facebook application to coincide with a number of press releases…

… of course, being Christmas the obvious thing was to make an advent calendar application, giving us just a couple of days to design, test and release the app! Thanks to Adam from Sumo, we had a pretty open brief so Jof was able to design and illustrate the app in a day, with Gavin coding and testing it.

When Channel4 approached us, their goal was clear; their current blog system was causing them issues, and they needed to launch a new blog to coincide with their recent mission to reach out to their audience and get their thoughts about the future of Channel4. The blog solution had to share aesthetics with the existing C4 properties, and the hardware had to withstand tens of thousands of hits per hour during the peak periods. However - and here was the catch - it had to be launched from scratch in a week!

On Friday, Jof went into C4 and setup his laptop in their cafeteria. By the end of the day, he’d liaised with their design department and the other stakeholders, setup a server, installed wordpress, written the php templates and got the blog to the point the customer was happy with it. Over the weekend he tweaked the CSS/PHP and, after their approval, launched it the following Monday!

There’s few things I like doing more during the daytime than turning my hand to a bit of JavaScript, so when karaoke startup LuckyVoice asked us to create a rich interface to for their users to create their own singing lists, I had to accept.

Even with the aid of the mootools JavaScript library, this was a fairly hefty bit of work. Peter wanted an AJAX search; songs that could be added with double-click, drag and a button; re-ordering; animations… you name it. Oh, and it had to work in pretty much every known browser! Feel free to check out the live version at LuckyVoice Playlist.

It’s always great when a client comes back to you - and when they come back three times in a row it’s a sign you are doing something right for them!

Having happily worked with us before on their SingStatus and KaraokeDNA facebook apps, karaoke startup LuckyVoice had no hesitation hiring us again to help build their new website. This time, the design duties we passed to the highly capable hands of our friends Mark and Stephen from DisplayDigital, whilst we worked on a completely bespoke interface and CMS.

Normally, we’d recommend our customers a solution like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. However, on this occasion they needed something unique, that not only allowed the content to be edited, but also:

• Bulk-sending of custom-formatted emails, selectable and stylable from the CMS
• Connection with, and consolidation of, all their various different sources of email data via various API
• Sending of the emails via an API interface with Pure360 bulk email system

Ultimately, we wrote a complete CMS from the ground up!

As part of karaoke startup LuckyVoice’s latest marketing campaign, we were approached to produce another facebook app. This time, the brief was to produce an app that’d allow users to build identikit characters based on the karaoke songs they like to sing.

The app itself was fairly straightforward, but the real trick was making the identikit images… with about a billion different combinations, we decided to leave the task to our XCalibre servers via awesome open-source command-line image-editor ImageMagick. To get the images, we wrote scripts to subtract the various face components and add them together on the fly, creating truly horrifying hybrids ; )

A quick bit of facebook fun for karaoke startup LuckyVoice. Using LuckyVoice’s extensive song database, the app allows you to set your mood by choosing song lyrics. The app was designed and built in a couple of days.

Two weeks ago we were approached by Luke Razzell of i-together.com to create a new facebook application called Blog Friends. Luke’s goal was to make blog-reading and discovery easy… and yet the server-side aspects of filtering keywords against users’ social networks meant for tough server-side coding. So naturally we said yes!

The genius of the application was the social network filtering, but this presented a lot of serious challenges - especially for the servers.  Thankfully our friends at XCalibre came up trumps and supplied us with a dedicated database server along with a couple of beta elastic-computing “flexiscale” virtual servers.