Where’s Waldo? Exploring, of course

It has been a bloody long time since you’ve heard from us, hasn’t it? Some of you are probably thinking, “What’s been keeping them busy?”. But most of you have probably been going, “Where the duck have these guys disappeared and where the duck is my invite?”. 

Well, I know this sounds hilariously cliched, but we’ve been busy. Homescreen, from the very beginning, has been powered and managed by folks who have their own line of work. So they dedicate whatever little time in the day they can. That said, I believe I can speak for all of us when I say that Homescreen.me has been one of the most exciting things to happen to us lately. The response to the website has been terrific. We’ve received a huge number of emails and tweets, with both positive and negative feedback. Some of you, who got in early or were specially invited in, were kind enough to take time off to write some extremely detailed feedback about the website, so we couldn’t thank you enough for it. 

Exploring

We have been meticulously working on implementing the most requested feature on the site — the ability to find and explore new users and their homescreens. Today, we’re announcing exactly that.

A few days ago, I teased an image of the feature. It wasn’t a mockup but a screenshot of the actual feature, live on the site. We went through a lot of iterations of the design and features. Here’s one of our early mockups:

And here’s what made the cut

If you notice, we have implemented a Search — one where you can look up people using their names, usernames or twitter handle. Moreover, there are also rankings for Featured (Staff picks), Popular (based on number of views) users, along with the top 5 users who have just uploaded new homescreens.

Head on over to our Explore page to see it in action.

Email to Upload

We also launched another much-requested feature a while back, but never got around to announcing it. Since iOS devices do not have the ability to upload files from within the browser, we added the ability to simply email your homescreens to our server and it’ll be automatically added to your account. Every user gets his own, unique email address to which he can upload the screenshots. You can note down your unique email address from your “Account” page.

The body of the email becomes the description of your homescreen and we even automatically detect the device type (iPad/iPhone/iPhone 4) based on the resolution of the attached homescreen.

Pretty nifty, ehh?

A redesign in progress

Based on the tremendous feedback we have received in the last couple of months, we have undertaken an overhaul of the site. A few sneak previews of this new design are available here, here, here and here. We can’t promise a release date, but you can rest assured it’ll be live soon.

More Invites

We know that a huge number of you out there are waiting for invites. We’ve just given some Amphetamines to our server, so we’re about to send out our biggest batch of invites yet. Keep an eye on your inbox.

iPhone app

May… be…

French Invasion

We’re very happy to welcome Damien Erambert to our little team. The Explore page has his awesome efforts, and he’s already working his magic on some fabulous new things you’ll soon get to see.

Finally

Of course, if you’d like to get in touch with us, you can always email us —preshit@homescreen.me or contact@homescreen.me

ʘ‿ʘ

Let me begin this post by saying, “WE’RE STOKED!”

Homescreen.me began as a little side-project. We’re just four ordinary individuals, working hard at our daily jobs and spending whatever remaining time on this project. So when we announced our little baby on August 15th, 2010 (a week ago), we were expecting a few of you interested souls to request an invite and share your homescreens. But that wasn’t the case.

Within hours of going live, our server couldn’t take all the heat. What with all the hound-dogs trying to get a piece of the site. We watched in amazement as the spike went off the roof. I quickly added more resources and managed to cool it back down and began sending out invites to a select few people on our initial list. We were pretty much in disbelief. People started talking about it on Twitter and Facebook and the lucky ones who received the invites shared their brilliant homescreens too.

In the first 24 hours of going live, Homescreen.me received 36,000 pageviews from close to 11,000 unique visitors. It was unbelievable. We watched as homescreen.me links started flowing on twitter and people were discovering some excellent wallpapers and apps. This was huge for us. Possibly the best launch we’ve had.

The present state

Over the last 7 days, we’ve received some exceptional feedback from our users. And we thank you for that. We’ve been working hard streamlining the entire process — right from receiving the invite in your inbox to signing up and uploading your homescreens. We deployed bug fixes & minor improvements in the last few days, most of which probably went unnoticed.

One major thing we realized after looking at our analytical data was that over 40% of our new sign ups were coming from iOS devices. This posed a huge problem — Uploading. There was absolutely no way to upload Avatars or your homescreens from your iPhone or iPad. We noticed a lot of you signed up, but left the profiles empty or had to move to a Mac or PC to continue the process.

What’s next

We’ve been hearing some terrific feedback from you guys and we thank you for that. Based on the feedback that we’ve collected, and the discussions we’ve had in the team, we’re currently working on, or have already deployed some stellar features on the site.

1. Gravatars

We love Gravatars. If you sign up with an email address that’s listed in your Gravatar profile, you will not need to upload your Avatar to the site. Of course, you can override this by uploading your own. The option still exists in your account settings.

Status: Deployed

2. Email-to-Homescreen

This is the feature that’s our top priority right now. We want to make it super easy for you to upload and share your homescreens. So we’re building a feature wherein you can just email your homescreen’s screenshot to a unique address (just like Flickr, Twitpic, Tumblr or Posterous) and it’ll automatically show up on your profile.

Status: In Progress

3. A Refined Upload UI

Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been trying to streamline the process for you. As an example of what we’re trying to achieve, let’s take a look at uploading homescreens. Let’s just say, the current implementation isn’t up to the mark. After gauging user feedback, and our own thinking power, this is close to what it’ll look like once we’re done with it.

Status: In Progress

What lies ahead

Since the very beginning, we’ve wanted Homescreen.me to be a way to find some great wallpapers and apps and at the same time, know what your friends and idols are using on their devices. But we didn’t want to hold back the launch until we had everything covered — hence we’re still an invite-only beta. As it stands today, there is no way to find people on the site, unless you know their profile URL. Well, guess what! We’re bringing in an Explore feature. A great way to find people, the Explore page will feature the top users, latest users and some handpicked users by us.

What’s more? Community features. We’re still brainstorming about this one, so we’re not exactly sure how we’re going to implement it. But rest assured, you’ll be able to “Fav” your friend’s homescreen and know how many people have faved yours. But we don’t want to crowd the space with unnecessary features just because they exist or are possible.

We’re bursting with ideas, really. But these are ideas that we’re so unsure of, it’s best not to discuss them for reasons of commitment, or otherwise. You understand, right?

How can you help?

We love to hear feedback — both positive and negative. @reply us on twitter or send us an email at contact@homescreen.me with your comments. We’ve got a terrific support system set up at http://support.homescreen.me, so let us know if you need any help.

And we enjoy coffee. Coffee powers everything you see on the site, so help us make some awesome coffee. We’ve got some ad spots open on our iXyr Ad Network, so if you have a product you’d like to advertise or know someone who does, get in touch with us.