29

It has been a little while since our last major feature push, but the time is finally here. We’re announcing our new moderation tools today!

In the past an admin had to remove the entire history of a chat when they wanted to moderate content. As a result, one of the most requested features throughout the life of Envolve has been the ability to remove an individual chat message. This functionality is needed if a message is offensive, it violates a site’s terms of use, it accidentally reveals private information or a number of other reasons.

The latest additions to Envolve allow for fine grain control, like individual message removal, and also give administrators the ability to crowd-source moderation efforts and moderate after-the-fact.

How does it work?

Each new chat message now has a warning flag placed next to it:

When a user clicks on the flag Envolve displays a dialog that asks the user if they would like to warn the offending user:

The act of warning a user causes that message to be pushed into the new Flagged section in the Envolve backend.

From within this section a site owner can review the list of messages that have been flagged and the number of times they have been flagged. Using this information they can:

1. Delete the Message – The chat message will be instantly removed from the browsers of everyone currently looking at the conversation and it will not be displayed to new chatters who join the conversation.
2. Ban the User - If a user is deemed to be acting offensively the site owner can use his or her discretion and ban a user from the site. The complements our existing banning mechanism on the front-end but allows the site owner visibility into offenders after the conversation has moved on.

If you want to turn off this feature, we’ve also implemented the ability to do so. You can add enableModeration : false into your envoOptions. Complete details on how to do this can be found at the bottom of the developer options in our documentation.

We’re excited to get feedback on this new feature and hear what you think of it.

Happy Chatting!

24

Last night at 11PM Pacific Standard Time we took Envolve offline for scheduled maintenance. This took 6 hours longer than expected. We’re deeply sorry for the inconvenience this caused. We’ve taken steps to ensure this never happens again.

The purpose of this maintenance was to make Envolve faster and provide safer data storage for your chat conversations.

Our tests indicated this upgrade would take 30 minutes, unfortunately a misconfiguration in our new database resulted in unexpected and unacceptable delays.

During all future scheduled data migrations we will take the following steps to prevent this from happening again:
1) Thoroughly test all steps of the migration process on duplicate hardware before executing on our live machines.
2) Perform migrations in smaller increments, so that most services can remain operational during transfers.

Our apologies again and please feel free to reach out to me personally at james@envolve.com if you have any more questions.

Regards,

James Tamplin

CEO and Co-Founder

02

The Short Version:

We’re excited to end the year on 50,000 sites, a team of 4 and a big surprise coming in early 2012! We’ve had great external help this year and want to thank Y-Combinator, our advisors and our investors. Thank you!

The Long Version:

This year has been one of forward progress for Envolve. Looking back at the past 12 months we feel a sense of accomplishment at the milestones we’ve achieved and we are extremely grateful for the relationships we’ve built with our customers, our investors and our peers in the startup community.

Some of you may remember that 2010 wasn’t the best year, but that all changed in 2011.

The year began with a burst of growth that was connected to the release of our single sign on (SSO) feature in mid-December 2010. This feature allowed site owners to pass Envolve the names of their users. When a user logged in to their site, our chat system would automatically know the user’s name, display their picture and show a link to their profile.

Our growth continued into the spring with the addition of high profile Facebook games, VIP Society and Area Extreme, and high profile musicians, Blink 182 and Mindless Behavior. These additions helped fuel new sign ups: we added almost 2,000 sites in the month of January and we added almost 5,000 sites in December, bringing our grand total to 49,600 websites.

As we moved into summer, our pace of work increased dramatically as Y-Combinator’s Tuesday dinners got underway. Y-Combinator is an intense 3-month accelerator program that is widely regarded as the best early stage startup program. Two notable things happened during our time there, Vikrum joined us in July and we launched our API in August. Our API allowed site owners to customize Envolve more than ever before, it included the ability to group users, embed chats and much more. Overall our API pushed us closer to becoming the world’s most customizable chat system.

YC concluded with demo day on August 23rd and 24th. Here’s our presentation:

After demo day we raised seed money from some great Silicon Valley investors who have worked in, and founded, some of the most well known and respected companies in the valley. We’re excited to leverage their expertise to help us grow faster in 2012.

The remainder of the year has gone by incredibly quickly. We feel very fortunate to have Mike join us from Microsoft. He moved down from Redmond in October and has been hard at work making sure that our infrastructure continues to improve. Collectively we’re working to ensure that Envolve continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We have some extremely exciting announcements coming in 2012 and we can’t wait to share them with you. Be sure to follow us on Twitter to get all the details.

Happy chatting in 2012!

25

If you haven’t heard, Vidcaster is the easiest way to create your own personal video portal. In their own words:

“We provide easy-to-use and powerful building blocks to video content creators, we hope to free video producers to focus on the content … instead of technical and workflow logistics.”

The latest development for VidCaster is the ability to integrate other services into your video portal. In the video below Kieran Farr, CEO of Vidcaster, walks us through how to install Envolve on your VidCaster site.

Farr says: “In the near future we’re excited to offer trusted services like Envolve that can be installed through a simple one-click add-on. These will be especially exciting on our completely free YouTube-powered version of VidCaster.”

We’re excited at expanding Envolve’s reach across the web with VidCaster! Stay tuned for updates!

18

Envolve runs on the Joyent cloud. They’re similar to Amazon Web Services, except without the downtime. They’ve been great to us ever since we launched and we’re grateful for their care and attention.

They’ve recently featured us in a case-study about why we chose Joyent and which of their features we’re taking advantage of. You can read the case-study here.

Thanks Joyent!

Happy Chatting!

13

Envolve is focused on bringing online communities to life. As the owner or curator of an online community, you put an extraordinary amount of effort into making it an enjoyable place to hang out and participate.

Now you can get a little back from the efforts you put in. We’ve teamed up with Linqia.com to help online community leaders grow revenues and increase their visibility amongst brands globally.

Linqia will provide you engaging content such as videos, images and links from brands that is relevant to your community. You can then curate and share this content amongst your members and earn a decent amount to do so. Visit this link to learn more and get started:

www.linqia.com/for/?s=envolve

This program is currently in beta and limited to communities using Envolve’s chat. Get a sneak peek today.

16

We’ve just released an update to our Joomla plugin. We now have support for version 1.7. You can download the plugin and see complete instructions here.

We just made a screencast showing how to install our chat module on your Joomla 1.7 site. You can see it below:

15

After our developer API launch on Wednesday we threw our API into the ring this weekend at the HAPI Hack session hostest by TokBox. The event brought together developers from all over the bay area to pitch and hack on cool projects.

Things began at 10am on Sunday when 14 hackers made their project pitches and formed teams around their ideas.

About 30 sleepless hours later the hackers were ready to present. We saw an awesome number of pitches, including Morning Person, created by Bill Ma and Song Zheng, who won for the best Envolve implementation. Morning person is a social tool to get you up and running, it provides the day’s news and weather and the ability to chat about them. Here is Zac Bowling pitching HAPI Wall, a social homepage for conferences and events.

The API’s present that hackers could use were:

10

Today we’re announcing the release of our developer platform. These new features will allow chat to be integrated deeply into a site’s user experience. Now chat can be an integral part of your community, rather than an add-on.

Some of the new developer features include:

• Grouping – Users can be placed in groups with other users. Each user in a group will see the other members in their group in the “people here” list. Each user can be a member of multiple groups. For an example of this in action, check out VIP Society. Here they’ve created a concept called ‘families’. Each member of a family is able to see and communicate with other members of the same family.
• Embedded chats - Chats can now be embedded directly in the page. For an example, check this out.
• Programmatic creation of chats – For sites that require chats to be created on-the-fly, we’ve added the ability for site owners to generate chats as needed. This can be done by adding just a small piece of javascript to your webpage. These chats can be placed either in the toolbar or directly in a <div> on the page.
• Custom profile rollovers – Sites can customize their members profile rollovers specifically to their needs. To see this in action, place your mouse over a user’s name in the chat. For example, Empire avenue uses custom profile rollovers so that it is easy to see another member’s stock price.

Full documentation for our developer API is available here. We have ready-made libraries for Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, and Perl.

The developer features we are launching today will enable sites to create powerful real-time features for their communities. However, we have much more planned for the future including support for friend lists, mobile capabilities, full CSS customization, and much more! Please get in touch if you have suggestions or feedback.

In order to showcase our new features, we’ve created a couple of demonstration apps.

1) Envo.lv – This app lets you quickly layer a chat toolbar on any website. It demonstrates our grouping and programatic creation of chats.

2) Tagch.at – This is a better interface for Twitter hashtag chats. It uses our embedded chats.

We’re excited to see what developers build on our platform. Happy chatting!

10

After being live for almost a year we though we’d share some numbers of how Envolve has progressed. With out further ado, here is our first info graphic! Also available for download.