One of the metrics used in our industry is the one for users per engineer. Facebook is regularly communicating this ratio, and has also shared this ratio in comparison with other Giants in the industry. Facebook takes pride in having a pretty good ratio in this respect, and their VP of Technology, Jeff Rothschild, discusses this ratio in this Video (skip to the 3:25 mark) and he compares this to other companies:

Facebook	1.100.000
Google	190.000
Amazon	94.000
Microsoft	75.000

Since I was interested how this ratio is holding up for eBuddy, I calculated this over a few points in time.

When comparing this to Facebook, it seems we are not doing that bad, we even beat them!

So how come we can work so efficiently at eBuddy? We think this is because have been working with Scrum for the past 3 years. When we started adopting Scrum we quickly realized this was not just affecting the development team, but required a mind shift in the entire organisation.

Having an efficient development team is partly about having the right facilities. We have an environment where builds are created all the time, executing automated tests and informing the teams about the build status. Each team can continuously integrate their code on the development servers, and off course all the supporting tools are in place, e.g. issue tracking, wik’s etc.

But to be efficient is not only the process. When we work on a feature for 2 months but it is not going live any time soon, all the efficiency in the world can’t compensate for that. So it’s also about making choices. The teams need to be able to focus, since you can’t do everything at once. In close collaboration with the development team, the product owners make sure we are working on the right things and allowing the teams to focus. And off course the teams are working closely with the operations team to make sure we can roll out features smoothly and keep up the level of service to our users.

But what it really comes down to is the people, we have an amazing group of people, who really care about our users and try to improve our products every day!

Congrats team!

Niels

P.S. We have great confidence in our User to Engineer ratio, so we are hiring! We are looking for a Backend Java Developer, Mobile Java Developer and a Front-end Developer

 

Hi Everyone, 

We work very hard every day to deliver a great product and features to you – eBuddy users! So, we’re especially proud to announce that we’ve recently been named Best 3^rd Party IM for 2009 by About.com. 

About.com (a division of The New York Times Co.) asked readers to nominate their favorite IM clients in eight categories: Best IM Experience, Best Third-Party IM, Best Mac IM, Most Improved IM, Best IM Feature, Best Chat Rooms, Best IM Design (GUI) and Developer(s) of the Year.

More than 500 nominations from users around the globe were submitted, and after more than 160,339 votes were cast, eBuddy was named Best 3^rd Party IM in the second annual Best IM Awards honoring the best, brightest and most efficient IM clients of the year. 

Here’s what About.com had to say about eBuddy:
“This year’s winner of the Best Third-Party IM has rapidly made a name for themselves as the go-to web-based IM client for Internet users around the globe.  eBuddy, a new favorite around {our} office, offers one of the most exciting web-based IM experiences. From easy-to-use login and account set-up to a wealth of personalization options to the ease of having one single chat window with tabbed conversations, eBuddy has proven itself worthy of being named this year’s Best Third-Party IM.”   Check out all the winners! 

Thanks for all your support of eBuddy…we couldn’t do it without you! Happy Chatting!

Mindy

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

phone model

country

mobile operator

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:

Name, Age, Gender, City

Available on: (April 21, 22 and/or 23)

If you’re not available but are interested anyway: let us know! There are more user days coming up.

We hope to hear from your soon!

JJ - eBuddy Mobile

Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of our own eBuddy IDs. eBuddy IDs allow you to bundle multiple network accounts in one easy to remember username and password, a feature that plays very nicely with our multi network chat client.

Over the last few weeks we have been working full force on getting this feature out of the door and the result is actually quite nice. To create a new eBuddy ID simple click on the ‘Claim your free eBuddy ID’ link on the homepage and you will be transported to a simple signup form. After you create an eBuddy ID you can add all your favorite network accounts to it by using the same interface you have been using in earlier versions of the multi network chat client, so you should be up and running in no time.

(more…)

The development team behind the new eBuddy web messenger has been working for some time now to make this client our future flagship product. While we are working on this client we are usually focused on certain themes or sets of (new) features, like conferencing or the support of a new network. Since it’s a new client, features like this are usually quite visible for you, the end-user and you can follow the progress we are making if you log in regularly. However, this doesn’t mean we spend all our time on the creation and development of these new features. Recently we’ve been focused on improving the performance of our client.

Performance has always been an important theme in software development and in every project it means something different. In our case we decided we wanted to dive into three different areas: the contacts tree, the chat tabs and the chat editor. For each of these areas we wanted to greatly improve the responsiveness so users spend less time waiting and more time chatting.

In this blog post I’ll dive a little deeper in what our approach was for each of the problems to give you a little insight in the work behind what we feel is the best chat client on the web. Please let us know how you feel about our efforts.

(more…)

As we are aiming to phase out our legacy web IM products and replace them with our new Multi-Network client, we are steadily piling on the new features. Aims for the past iteration have been, as the title suggests, Drag & Drop and Group Management.

Group Management

Quite simply we have implemented the ability to add and remove groups to your contact list. Although this may seem very simple this took quite a bit of thought and work. You can put contacts from any account in a group you create, so you can finally have all your friends from all networks in a single group.

Drag & Drop

As an obvious companion to being able to add and remove groups we added the functionality to “Drag” contacts to a group and “Drop” them there. Again not a trivial addendum to the already extensive codebase, but we feel we have hit the nail right on the head, and hope you will all enjoy the ability to move your contacts around at will

Enough yapping, time for you to log in and get Dragging and Dropping!

If you find any bugs, or have any suggestions, please let us know at feedback@ebuddy.com

Dear users,

Great news today (as posted on TechCrunch): after a lot of hard work of the entire team, we added MySpace IM on our homepage for you to login to!

What does this mean? Well, if you use MySpace IM at this moment on your desktop at home, you can now do it all from work, school or while traveling. It also means that you don’t need to install anything on your pc and even Mac & Linux fans can use it!

So, now you can IM with your MySpace friends anytime, anywhere…just click here

Take it for a ride and leave a comment about what you like or don’t like. We appreciate any comment!

I really hope you all like it.

Already, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger works on over 300 types of mobiles.

Is yours not supported? .It is quite a task to test eBuddy Mobile Messenger on every mobile phone, let alone that differences in firmware may already cause difference in behavior on a single type of phone. I haven’t even started talking about different mobile operators with network glitches….

So if you have issues getting online and you want to make sure that eBuddy will work smoothly on your phone, please send us an email to feedback@ebuddy.com and mention your phone model, country, and mobile operator.

We’ll let you know if we think we can make it work and help you get online with eBuddy Mobile Messenger.

And of course… really helpful users will get rewarded with some unique eBuddy gadgets.

Hope to hear from you soon,

JJ

Following another iteration ending, we have just released a new version of our Multi Network Beta. Again we have taken your feedback to heart and have tried to make those changes that you most requested. As usual we are always bug-fixing and improving our product, and have done so as well this iteration. So on top of these below a list of the major features and improvements:

Google talk Support
Definitely very noteworthy is the introduction of Google Talk support. As this is the first time we will be offering this on any of our products, we hope you will enjoy using this on eBuddy. All standard GTalk functions are included, including uploading your own Avatar.

Improved text editor
Being a major point of feedback received from users, the text editor used to input text has been improved. This component has had a complete overhaul and is functioning a lot better than before. On top of improved performance we have resolved an issue with text styling dissapearing while typing, causing you to have to set it over and over again.

Performance
Again we’ve looked intensely at the performance. We believe we’ve made a big step forward this iteration. An issue with processor usage going through the roof while being logged in with more then two accounts has been resolved. This impacts not only the editor as discussed above but also improves general usability as a whole. As always, your feedback is much aprreciated, so if you have any, feel free to let us know here!

All this said, if you haven’t tried it yet, try our eBuddy Multi Network Beta now!

As some of you may have noticed, our Multi-Network Beta has just been updated. Armed with your feedback, we’ve used the previous period to improve on the Core functionality of the Beta. Our idea of quality over quantity if you may. Amongst numerous small bugfixes and glitches, here are some of the most noteworthy improvements:

No more getting disconnected
This was one of the largest feedback points you supplied us with. We have improved a lot - you should now be able to stay online for days on end

Automatic OS recognition for all Yes/No and Accept/Cancel buttons
After some internal Windows user vs. Mac user struggles, we came up with a brilliant solution: the client will automatically detect your Operating System and place the buttons accordingly. What does this mean? This means that on MacOSX all your Yes/Accept/OK buttons will be on the right side of the No/Cancel/Not OK buttons. And on Windows, you guessed it, it’s exactly the other way around.

Chat tab functionality improvements
We had some bugs involving the chat tabs not functioning properly. This included getting multiple chat tabs for the same buddy, getting blank chat tabs that didn’t render correctly, incorrect status icons in the tab and more.

Performance improvements
Although we’re not there yet, we’ve already solved quite a few performance issues. Annoying “Features” like 100% cpu usage after clicking certain OK buttons and while switching between tabs of the same account have been removed. More performance improvements to come in the next release.

Together with more bugfixes and improvements, we’re improving our Beta periodically. Next Up: Upload Avatar and receiving Custom emoticons. As you can see, your feedback definetely counts. So keep it coming!

So, surf to http://www.ebuddy.com/#ebuddy and try out our new Multi-Network Beta now!