Hi there!

Have you ever had the experience of working on something you’re really passionate about and love? Well, a few months ago I was given the challenge of working on “the best mobile chat experience on Earth” (that’s eBuddy, in case you’re wondering ), and the short story is… I’m loving it ! I’m mostly involved with our new-and-improved Lite Messenger. Yes, you read it correctly… we have just made the Lite Messenger (the one you can use straight from your phone’s browser (m.ebuddy.com) even better!

So, you’re saying to yourself, “Seriously, what’s really new?” Well, hang on to your hat; we’ve worked on quite a lot of cool new things to make your adventures with eBuddy even more fun and easy-to-use:

Contact list sorting

“So many friends… so little time.” So, if you have a lot of friends on your list, you can now select the following settings to improve browsing through that huge buddy list of yours:

Contact list search

We’ve also made it easier to find your friends quickly. There’s now a search link on top of your buddy list that you can use to search your entire list. For instance, go to the search, type in ‘foo’ and hit search – all buddies that have ‘foo’ in their name are listed, and you can chat with one or all of them.

Message time stamps

For all you curious types: Now you can see what time each message is sent and received in your chat screen. Simply go to the settings screen, enable it, select your time zone (e.g. ‘GMT+0100’ for Amsterdam), and you’re good to go! Don’t know your time zone? Look it up here: www.worldtimezone.com.

Active chat on top

The buddies that you’re chatting with are now always at the top of your buddy list, so you can quickly go back to chatting with them even if you step away for a moment.

Did-you-know?

… there are now notifications during log-in?

We want you to have the smoothest, best chat experience possible, so we’re now serving up tips and tricks for you after log-in.

iPhone

Using the Lite Messenger on the iPhone? We now have a pretty slick iPhone version (or at least we think so ), which is already discussed in a previous blog post.

Haven’t tried using the Lite Messenger on your mobile phone? Well “Carpe Diem (Seize the Day!)” because there’s no time like the present! Simply type m.ebuddy.com into your phone’s mobile browser and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to bookmark it!

We hope you like what we’ve done. So check it out, and don’t forget, feedback is always welcome and appreciated! You can share your thoughts on what we should add next by clicking on “Please let us know what you think”, after logging out on the Lite Messenger.

Happy messaging !
- Ivar

Posted in News, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging, Instant Messaging 40 Comments »

Hi everyone,

We are very excited to announce a brand new version of our Mobile Messenger! You can easily download it by opening your phone’s browser and going to get.ebuddy.com.

We launched the first version of the Mobile Messenger a year ago and you guys have now downloaded it over 5 million times! Big smiling faces @ eBuddy office . You’re also sending & receiving more than 1 billion messages per month on eBuddy mobile!!

We’re constantly reviewing your feedback on how to make the Mobile Messenger better. Here are the most requested features we’ve added in the latest version. (BTW it also got a brand new look since we heard some of you were a bit tired of the old one )

	Chat with all your friends, everywhere Keep all of your buddies from multiple IM accounts in one list: You have friends on both MSN and Yahoo? No problem. You can now chat with them all from your mobile. And even more networks will be supported soon…
	Set your avatar with your phone’s camera Share all the cool things you do in an easy way. Set your personal message and take a brand new display picture, directly from your phone’s camera.
	Reach your friends 24/7 We now support offline messaging. Want to talk to your buddy but he just went offline? Don’t worry; now you can send an offline message straight from your mobile. You can also receive offline messages. As soon as you login, you’ll receive all the messages that were sent to you when you were offline.
	Find the buddy you want We know you probably have a long buddylist with lots of contacts. That’s why the Mobile Messenger makes it very easy to find the buddy that you want to chat with most. Simply search the contact list by selecting a letter on your keypad and you can sort your contacts in any way you want.

We hope you like it! Looking forward to reading your feedback on feedback@ebuddy.com. Our team is already working hard on cool stuff for the next release, so keep your ideas coming on what should be included!

Now grab your phone and get the coolest eBuddy to date at get.ebuddy.com.

Enjoy mobile messaging for everyone everywhere!
Vincent

Posted in eBuddy 62 Comments »

We proudly present a brand new version of the eBuddy Lite Messenger for the iPhone and iPod Touch!

If you’re an iPhone 3G user you can now add eBuddy to your home screen by choosing Add to Home Screen from your browser. Enjoy eBuddy with everyone everywhere!

We’d love to hear what you think about this new version of the eBuddy Lite Messenger. Please send your feedback to feedback@ebuddy.com.

Now chat away on that cool iPhone of yours!

Posted in eBuddy 145 Comments »

As you might have noticed, we updated our interface once again. To improve your trusty chat client we take a long hard look at what you, the user, want and what makes sense from a design perspective.

There are many small fixes throughout the client, both visible and not, but the main enhancements are these:

Personal settings bar

We consolidated all the different network settings into one single entity that we call the personal settings bar, also known as the PSB. Lets take a look at what it looks like:

At the top of the PSB you can see and change your personal message, just clicking on it will enable you to edit it. This personal message is then set on all of your logged on networks. On the left of the personal message you can see and change your current status. Below the personal message you can see and change your display name.

On the right side there is a convenient indicator of network icons, showing you the current state of each of your accounts. Clicking on it will bring you to the settings of each account.

Custom Emoticons

For a long time we have had the ability to receive custom emoticons, now you can also send custom emoticons, a first for web based IM clients! We have added a few funny ones into the insert emoticon window for you to use now.

If you want to use custom emoticons you will need to sign up for an eBuddy ID. With an eBuddy ID you can easily bundle all your seperate accounts (MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, AOL and MySpace etc) into one single, easy to use, account.

Offline messages

We also improved our offline messages support, now available on pretty much all the networks.

All these features enable you to express yourselves even easier then before. Just change your personal message on all networks, send some custom emoticons to your friends and receive messages from friends that you just missed.

Posted in eBuddy 51 Comments »

As stated in a previous post, there is a new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger coming up.
We already have a few (say…over 500 ) beta testers that are testing and giving feedback and are quite enthusiastic. I wanted to show you this feedback mail that we got from a happy Beta tester:

Dear Ebuddy,

Regards,
Mick.

Thanks Mick! Of course, we also receive some issues that need to be solved. And some (though not many) of the old models are not supported anymore (or yet) with this one. Most notably the Motorola V3i, for which we accidentally sent out some invites. Oops.
Overall though, we get very positive feedback.

If you want to try the new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger in beta, so with some bugs, drop us a mail at feedback@ebuddy.com.

Cheers!

JJ

Posted in Mobile Beta, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging, Instant Messaging 49 Comments »

After many, many requests, we have just released offline messaging for Lite Messenger on m.ebuddy.com!

As of today, you can now send messages to your friends who are offline, direct from your mobile phone. To view your offline contacts in the Lite Messenger, simply go to settings and select “Show offlines”.

We know you spend a lot of time online, even if it’s not 24/7 yet . That’s why we now also support receiving offline messages. When you login to the Lite Messenger, you will immediately see the messages that were sent to you while you were offline.

We hope you like it, and as always, please keep those ideas coming!! You can share your thoughts on what we should add next by clicking on “Please let us know what you think”, after logging out on Lite Messenger.

Vincent

Posted in Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging 51 Comments »

Since so many people know eBuddy, but have never seen eBuddy in real life, here are some pictures of eBuddy.

Over here: working hard on a new Web version

And here: helping the Ajax Developers with a tough issue

Favorite pastime: sitting on Marjon’s lap

If not taking off with Lissa

This is a normal day at the office, but if you’re lucky, you might also catch a glimp of eBuddy outside the office:
usually breakdancing, base-jumping or just hanging out with some buddies

Posted in eBuddy 36 Comments »

As you might know, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger works on over 550 types of mobile phones.

And we’re cooking up a new version soon with a totally new look&feel and new features.
Here’s a sneak peak of the start screen…

It is quite a task to test the new eBuddy Mobile Messenger on a lot of phones, but unfortunately we can not test it on each single phone out there. That’s why we would like to ask for your help!

If you want to make sure that eBuddy works on your phone and if you want to help us by becoming an official beta tester, please send us an email to feedback@ebuddy.com providing

If we think there is a chance that eBuddy Mobile Messenger will work we’ll send you a version which will hopefully lead to us officially supporting your phone.
You will be the first to have the latest version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger on a particular model.

Next to this we are organising a user day at eBuddy HQ!
On April 21, 22 or 23, get a sneak preview of the latest eBuddy Mobile features, try some cool mobile phones and afterwards, relax on the eBuddy boat…
Let us know whether you or your buddies would like to join. Send an email to userday@ebuddy.com and tell us your:

We hope to hear from your soon!

JJ - eBuddy Mobile

Posted in Mobile Beta, Development, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging 23 Comments »

We launched our new eBuddy Lite Messenger a few months ago and asked you guys to share your thoughts on what features to add next. We received an enourmous amount of feedback and new ideas and decided to put you in the driver seat by implementing them. We added the most requested features in an update released today. The newly added features are: Attend conferences Join your MSN, YAHOO and AIM friends in conferences! You can now have group chats with many friends at once, just like our Web Messenger.

• Send buzzers
  We heard you like to send a wake-up call to your buddies every once and a while. Good luck to them; sending buzzers to your buddies just went mobile!
• Show email addresses in your buddylist
  Small screens and long funny screen names of your buddies? It can be challenging to keep up with who’s who on your mobile, but not anymore. Now, you can also display your contact list by email address. No more awkward moments where you realize you’re not talking to exactly the person you had in mind
• Close conversations
  This one is easy. You chat a lot and like to be clear on which chats are still live. Simply close the finished conversations and they will not longer be displayed on top of your list.
• More languages
  The Lite Messenger is now available in 26 languages!

Stay tuned for more improvements and some very cool features coming soon! In the meantime, enjoy chatting on your mobile at m.ebuddy.com!

Posted in Updates & Releases 37 Comments »

We’re very exited to announce an official partnership between eBuddy and AOL! This means we can now use all kinds of cool features from AOL to be integrated in the eBuddy Messengers.

This is all part of the OpenAIM initiative. Some interesting highlights:

Needless to say we’re very excited with the decision of AOL to go open, it will open up a lot of opportunities for us, so stay tuned to eBuddy.

Posted in eBuddy 19 Comments »