Did you know that you could organize your Xanga friends into groups?

http://www.xanga.com/private/friendsmain.aspx?view=managegroups

Well now you can choose one of those groups to use as your "buddy list" for chat!

If you choose a specific friends group, then only the folks in that group will be able to reach you through the chat bar - it's handy if you've got a bajillion friends or you just want to limit your chatting to a subset of your friends. And you can flip between different friends groups or flip back to, "Allow chat with all my friends," whenever you like.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

http://www.xanga.com/private/chatsettings.aspx

If you have ever ventured over to Xanga's "Recent Updates" page, you may have noticed a remarkable abundance of spam. It is possible there really are "Super Forex Trading Secrets!" to be found on Xanga... But barring the unlikely event that we've silenced legitimate purveyors, we are pleased to announce that the "Recent Updates" page is now almost completely spam free!

Why is this cool?

• Because spam is so not cool
• Because Recent Updates used to be a fun way to find random new blogs to read - now it is again!
• Because Recent Updates gives everyone on Xanga - even the newest bloggers with the smallest audiences - a chance to gain some new readers and friends

So if you're bored in these last few hours of work before Labor Day weekend (woohoo!), head on over to the new and improved "Recent Updates" and let us know what you think!

http://www.xanga.com/explore/recentupdates/

Note: due to the various filters and other algorithms applied to the page, Recent Updates does not include every update posted to Xanga (which would be too many for you to read anyway). It's more of a random selection of recent updates, some of which, we hope, you'll find fun to read!

EDIT: Wow, you guys are really chomping at the bit to try out the new IM toolbar! We were going to wait a while before turning this on, but so far it seems like most everyone just wants to try it out. So here goes... let us know what you think!

And remember, you can turn it off here:

http://www.xanga.com/private/chatsettings.aspx

P.S. We're working on a way for you to specify a friends group to use as your Xanga IM buddy list. That way, you can set it so that only certain friends can see you, while you hide from others (e.g. parents, exes, bosses, etc.).

Remember when we talked about looking into adding chat/IM to Xanga? Well we've made a lot of progress, and we're ready to test out an optional Xanga IM toolbar to the bottom of your Xanga sites!

The bar is powered by Meebo and will let you IM with your friends on Xanga.

While we prepare for the launch, we wanted to give people an opportunity to opt out of the IM toolbar completely. You can opt out here:

http://www.xanga.com/private/chatsettings.aspx

A few things to note:

• The toolbar comes with handy "share page" and facebook "like" options, in case you find something cool on Xanga that you want to share.
• The toolbar uses Xanga's built-in privacy controls and has some of its own. If one of your friends is bothering you over Xanga IM, you can block them through the bar (which just makes you appear signed out to them), block them through Xanga (which also takes them off your friends list, so they won't see you in the chat bar at all), de-friend them, or just sign out of chat - we wanted to make sure you had lots of control.
• In the future, we may be able to integrate in neat features like real-time alerts from your universal inbox! Looking into that...

Finally: the current Meebo toolbar doesn't support group chat, unfortunately. We've asked them about it, and they said they may have it by the end of the year! We'll be looking to add it as soon as it's available.

The IM toolbar beta will start soon. It's kind of difficult to test an instant messaging feature without having a lot of people in the beta though (otherwise, there'd be no one with whom to chat). So we're making the beta opt-out to make sure there are lots of users... but giving people some time to opt out now.

If you'd prefer not to IM with your friends on Xanga, please opt-out here!

http://www.xanga.com/private/chatsettings.aspx

Let us know what you think!

We've been tweaking the universal inbox on people's private pages, in response to your feedback!

1) We've increased the number of items on the universal feed from 15 to 20

We got this suggestion from several Xangans. The basic idea: since we're only displaying a snippet of the blog title, it's pretty easy to scan the feed and so there's room for more than 15.

So we inched the number of items on the page up to 20.  Let us know what you think!

2) We're removing ads from the private pages for premium users.

Xanga Premium allows members to hide ads on their public pages. Continue reading →

As promised, we're starting the final stretch of our upgrades to the new private page!
The new private page supports personal search, color and header customization, and a unified look – as well as clean up of the Private Messages, Friends Manager, and Profile Pics interfaces.

A few notes to highlight:

• If you are using the "Old Private Home" (the one that uses custom look and feel), nothing will change.  You will continue to be able to use your existing private page, with its custom look and feel.
• If you would rather stay on the un-upgraded private home page, we'll allow you to downgrade for a period of several weeks until the upgrade is finalized.

Other than that, we'll slowly start upgrading the private pages for everyone except users of the "old private home" (those will be left alone, although you can still try out the upgrade if you'd like).  We'll start with 25% of users for now.  If you're not included in the upgrade, you can upgrade yourself here!

We'd love to hear continued feedback on the upgraded private page, so let us know in the comments!

We're entering the final stretch of our upgrades to the new private page!  The new private pages now support personal search, customization, and a unified look.  They also include clean up of the Private Messages, Friends Manager, and Profile Pics interfaces.

A few notes for the final step in the process:

• If you are using the "Old Private Home", nothing will change.  You will continue to be able to use your existing private page, with its custom look and feel.
• If you haven't tried out the upgraded new private page, please try it out here!

Starting next week (July 19th), for users of our current default private page: we are going to start migrating users of our new private page over to the upgraded version.  If you would rather stay on the un-upgraded "new private page", we'll allow you to downgrade for a period of several weeks until the upgrade is finalized.

We'll keep cleaning up any issues and/or bug reports that come up.  We're targeting August 1 for making the upgraded new private pages the default!  Except of course, for users who prefer the ol' private pages with custom look and feel.  You'll just stay on that system as is.

We'd love to hear continued feedback on the upgraded private page, so let us know in the comments!

Thanks,
John

ps My wife is on Xanga and she swears by the old private home page.  So no worries from anyone concerned that we might pull support for that: even if we thought it was a good idea (we don't), my wife's continued love of the old private home page means that on a personal level... it will remain as an option.

We upgraded and cleaned up the profile pics manager for everyone!

• http://upload.xanga.com/profilepicsmain.aspx

I asked Marc to describe the changes, and he summed it up nicely: "everything is awesomer."  The uploading is more seamless, and the images can also be sorted in either grid or list form.

The profile fields page is also cleaned up, and almost all of the fields are now editable on one big page (rather than having to click into each individual section to edit it).

• http://www.xanga.com/profile/edit/profilemanager.aspx

There's a neat 0-100% number next to each profile module that tells you how many of the fields you've filed out.  For example, my books module is only 83% complete.  (I need a Favorite Quote - any suggestions?)  One last tweak: now you can add your own new metro on the fly, right inside the profile manager.

Anyway just part of our ongoing effort to cleanup and improve Xanga.  Let us know what you think!

- John

The Personal Search & Customizable Home Page updates we announced last week are now in expanded beta - available to all Xangans!

To try it out, just visit your account settings page:

• http://www.xanga.com/private/editaccount.aspx

And change your "Your Home" setting to "New Private Home Beta"

We've also:

• fixed a few bugs that some of you noticed in the premium-only beta from last week
• tweaked a few things based on initial feedback - e.g. moved the "Subscriptions" module higher and the "Blogrings" module lower on the private "Home" page, and
• made some updates to help these pages work a lot better in IE6 - if you are using IE6 and have *any* ability to upgrade to a newer browser, then please do yourself a favor and upgrade... if for some reason you can't upgrade your browser, then our sympathies are with you - we'll do what we can to help!

For a recap of all the goodies in this new beta, please check out our previous post:

Personal Search & Customizable Home Pages

We're still working on these pages (hence the "beta" status) and we are working on putting *all* the other private pages - except the "Old Private Home", of course - into this updated, customizable system. So if you come across a page that doesn't seem to fit the Beta, it just means it hasn't been upgraded yet. And if you notice any issues with the beta or have any general feedback about it, please leave a comment.

Thanks!
Marc

A few exciting announcements:

1. Personal Search is now on your private page! 

Now you can easily search all of your own posts, right from your private page... premium users can sneak a peek at the beta here:

• http://www.xanga.com/private/editaccount.aspx

Just change your "Your Home" setting, and click save... you'll see the new search module in the upper left of your private page.

2.Customizable Home Pages are in beta too!

You can easily customize your new private page to look fancy... kinda like custom look and feel used to work.  We've been dying to bring something like this back for a long time, so this is really exciting!

3. Private Messages Cleaned up

While cleaning up the private pages, we did a major overhaul of the private messages page.  A few highlights: Continue reading →

Sorry for all the recent site problems - last weekend we moved networks, and this weekend we moved hardware.  But now that we're on a new network and new hardware, the site should be much faster and more reliable!

Some details on the new hardware: we just bought a bunch of new servers:

• Database server - We bought a faster database with more RAM (72GB ram vs. 64gb with previous db).
• Photo Storage: The new photo storage has 128 terabytes of storage (vs. 75.6tb on the old system).

In addition to being faster and better, the new drives are also more reliable, have faster transfer speeds, and are also faster at reading/writing.  Also: the new hardware is smaller and uses less electricity as well.  All good developments for Xanga!

Transitioning to the new hardware was tougher than we thought, though.  So over the weekend, we had to turn off photo uploads to ease the transition... and some photos were intermittently flickering in and out while the images were copied over to the new servers.

Sorry for the lack of updates on that front - due to a communications mixup, I didn't realize that we'd have to turn off some photos during the transition until after it was done!

The transfer of all files should be complete, and photo uploads fully functional again!

How is the site working for you now - is it fast?  Everything working ok?  Please let us know!

John