Facebook and its rising popularity are very important to eBuddy: more and more people are using Facebook Chat to talk to their buddies, and we have been working very hard on improving our Facebook Chat support so all our users can enjoy a very reliable experience. That can be quite a challenge but fortunately Facebook organized a “Developer Garage” event last weekend in London to meet European developers. It was a very interesting opportunity, so I booked a flight and attended the event, which turned out to be an incredible weekend exceeding all my expectations.

Facebook is a big company, and with many big companies, boring guys in grey suits are never far away. Not so with Facebook: the atmosphere at the event was very casual - there was pizza, beer, and the friendly Facebook people were there to answer questions and see what some of the European developers made for their platform.

Later that evening Mark Zuckerberg walked into the venue, sporting his signature hoodie. As some of you may know: he’s the founder and CEO of Facebook, and he flew in all the way from California to meet us. I had seen him many times online, but seeing him in person and shaking his hand was a new experience: it’s not every day that you get to meet the person responsible for one of the world’s largest websites! He turned out to be a super nice guy, and I had a chance to sit down with him and explain some of the issues we had with Facebook on eBuddy Mobile. A bit later, I gave a presentation in front of the Facebook management team, highlighting our proposal for improving eBuddy. In the picture, you can see the presentation room! Mark and his team were very helpful and open to our questions and suggestions.

What does this mean to you? Soon, we will be able to offer you an even better Facebook experience on eBuddy! Please be patient while we put the final touches on it: it will be worth the wait! (And there’s another surprise, which we’ll tell you about later…)

Hot of the press, Apress has just released the book More Cool iPhone Projects.

Not only do they think eBuddy is one of those Cool projects, they actually asked our developers to contribute to the book. So our Backend Architect, Joost van de Wijgerd, and iPhone Developer, Arne de Vries, covered Push Notifications in the book. See their names on the cover of the book, how cool is that!

This interview is the first in a series to tell you more about the people that work hard every day to make sure you can chat with all your buddies on all your favorite networks.

Picking the first person to interview was a hard task, so we decided to start in alphabetical order and invited developer Arne de Vries to answer a few questions. Here is what he had to say:

So Arne, how about you tell us something about yourself?

I am 29 years old and come from a small town in the Netherlands called Wageningen. I studied at the University of Twente, where I graduated with a master’s degree in Telematics.

And what do you do at eBuddy?

I am an iPhone developer. Together with the iPhone team, I am responsible for developing and supporting both the eBuddy Messenger for iPhone and eBuddy Pro Messenger for iPhone apps.

How is that like?

I enjoy it very much. The iPhone is an interesting platform, being very user friendly and allowing for great user experience. It is pretty cool to be part of the development of a product that is used by millions of iPhone users around the world.

Do you have any hobbies?

Plenty! I am very much into sports and practice a lot of different ones. I used to be a snowboard instructor, and I also take cycling very seriously: A few weeks back I completed a 240 kilometers tour in a day, and have been training in order to attempt cycling from Amsterdam to Paris (508 kilometers/315 miles) in less than 24 hours.

That is very impressive! Is there time left for anything else?

Yes, actually. I also play the piano and the guitar, and love to ride around on my Ducati or in my work-in-progress 1982 Volkswagen Beetle.

Last but not least, can you share with the readers any upcoming features for the eBuddy for iPhone apps?

We are currently putting the last touches in the iOS4 support and we will be implementing Facebook Connect very soon. This will result in a much more reliable and secure connection with Facebook. We will also add a really cool Facebook-related feature, but since I can’t share any details about it you will have to wait and see!

Stay tuned to know more about other eBuddy employees!

Hi iPhone and iPod Touch users!

As you may have noticed, last week the 3.6 versions of both eBuddy Messenger and eBuddy Pro Messenger became available in the App Store!

We have a nice treat for the users of the free eBuddy for iPhone version: We increased Push Notifications from 2 hours to 12 hours! So now you can choose to stay online for 12 hours and receive notifications of new messages when you close the app.

In addition, this is what’s new for this version:

• - Improved connection stability & speed: The connection to eBuddy is now more stable and faster
• - Close a chat by swiping it in the ‘Chats’ screen
• - Close all open chats with one click of a button in the ‘Chats’ screen
• - Support for new languages such as French

Another nice feature is the newly added crash report system: When the app crashes, you will be given the opportunity to send us an e-mail with a crash report. Make sure to send all reports so we can fix any issues as soon as possible!

Unfortunately we’ve also had some hiccups in the last few days connecting to Facebook Chat, and setting your display picture & sending pictures didn’t always work for eBuddy Pro users ( our apologies!), but we worked very hard on solving these issues and it should be fine right now.

Hope you enjoy the update!

This week eBuddy reached yet another amazing achievement: Our most popular mobile app, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger, has been downloaded more than 50 million times from GetJar!

eBuddy is now second to Facebook in achieving the 50 million downloads mark on GetJar, the world’s largest cross platform app store.

We are very proud to announce such an achievement only 15 months after reaching the 10 million downloads mark and we thank all our users for making this possible!

eBuddy Web Messenger has evolved quickly over the past few weeks, after our big launch in April. We are constantly updating the Messenger with new functionality and bug fixes. Your feedback has been of great help in finding and solving issues! Thanks and keep them coming! Some of the changes are more obvious than others. I’ll explain some of the changes in this post.

Better notifications
In the most recent update, last week, we have introduced a new way of notifying you when a new message arrives. First, we have increased the volume for the sound we play. Still think it is too low? Simply click the speaker icon and a volume slider will appear, so you can adjust the volume to your needs. Secondly, we have improved the visual notifications. The tab which has a new message now flashes, making it even more obvious where to look for that new message. Finally, eBuddy now also plays sounds when it is in the background, so you don’t miss a message anymore when you are working on other things with eBuddy on the side.

More emoticons
The change that probably didn’t go unnoticed is the addion of more emoticons in the chat window. Instead of the 15 icons we used to have, you can now send almost every icon supported by MSN, Yahoo, Facebook or the other networks! Just click the smiley below the text editor and we show you all the emoticons that can be sent!

More reliable
A more under-the-hood change is optimizing eBuddy even more for slow connections. If you are on a shared Internet connection, for example in an Internet cafe or at school, it can happen that your connection drops for a few seconds or is very slow from time to time. With some technical tricks eBuddy now keeps you connected and you no longer get “Disconnected” errors.

Coming up…
Currently we are working on making eBuddy even more reliable and stable. Also we are working on a small, but very nice, addition for Google Chrome users, which will make you love eBuddy even more! Soon eBuddy will also be available in more languages, so you can use it in your own language. In short, stay tuned and you’ll see more changes appear in the coming weeks!

Cheers,
Vincent.