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.
