Another week, another milestone!

We just reached 3 million downloads in the Nokia Ovi Store! Thank you to everybody that made it possible!

Have a Nokia and don’t have eBuddy on it yet? Follow this link to the Ovi and download it now!

In addition, Nokia is giving out free phones to Ovi Store members this month! Click on here to take part! But hurry, the competition ends on the 30th of August!

It seems like yesterday when reached 250,000 fans on our Facebook page.

Now, less than 6 months later, we are delighted to announce that we have reached 500,000 fans on the eBuddy Facebook page!

Thank you to all our fans for making our Facebook presence such a success!

PS: Not a fan yet? Visit www.facebook.com/ebuddy and be a part of it too!

eBuddy Web Messenger has just been updated with some awesome new features! We’ve made a lot under-the-hood changes, but also added a couple of awesome new features.

YouTube
First addition is the YouTube player. If one of your buddies sends you a YouTube link, you can now immediately play the video in eBuddy. So no need to click the link, wait for Youtube to load… Just instantly play the video in eBuddy! We have also added this kind of functionality for DailyMotion videos and Flickr pictures. We will be adding more sites soon.

Slow connections
Second, we noticed that the performance of eBuddy on slow connections was up for improvement, and so we improved it. This required quite some under-the-hood work. You will now have a more stable connection to eBuddy and less “You have been disconnected” messages.

Notifications
A shortcoming of eBuddy Web Messenger has always been the lack of those small notifications on the bottom right of your screen if someone just came online or sent you a message. Well, we’ve got good news. If you use eBuddy in a recent version of Google Chrome browser, it is possible to enable these kind of notifications! In eBuddy, go to Settings, General and enable ‘Dekstop Notifications’. This is just a first version which will be improved soon, but we couldn’t wait to show it to you. Unfortunatley this is not available in other browsers yet.

Facebook
Those of you using Facebook Chat with eBuddy surely noticed that it wasn’t great lately. You experienced login issues, lost messages and other misery. That’s why we have updated Facebook Chat as well. With the new way of connecting to Facebook (with the official Facebook Connect) the login process is much more reliable, as well as the chat itself.

All in all quite a list of improvements, hope you like them!

Cheers,
Vincent

More details on how to enable the Notifications here: (more…)

Hi!

Good news for iPhone & iPod Touch users who use Facebook Chat on eBuddy : An update of our application is available in the App Store, with much improved connectivity & reliability for Facebook Chat!

The ’secret sauce’ we use is Facebook Connect, the official and secure way of connecting to Facebook. As an existing Facebook user you’ll be asked to upgrade to this new connection method when you launch eBuddy after updating to the latest version.

We’ve posted more info on Facebook Connect in a previous blog post: Facebook Chat updated on iPhone & Android.

Also in this update we’ve included support for iOS 4 multitasking. You can now easily switch between eBuddy and other apps instantly by double-clicking on the Home button on your iPod Touch 3G, iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4.

Last but not least, we’ve also added high-resolution images for a picture-perfect experience on the beautiful new iPhone 4 Retina Display .

So what’s the full list of changes in this version?
- New and improved connectivity & reliability for Facebook Chat
- iOS4 multitasking: Switch between eBuddy and other apps instantly
- High-resolution images for the Retina Display on iPhone 4
- Many smaller improvements & bug fixes

Hope you enjoy this latest eBuddy update!

Ivar

Brand new versions of eBuddy for iPhone (both Free and Pro) and eBuddy for Android have just been released. The biggest change in both versions is that we now use Facebook Connect to log you in to Facebook Chat. This is a major milestone for us and makes chatting on Facebook a lot more reliable.

Facebook Chat
Recently you may have noticed various errors when logging in to Facebook Chat. For example eBuddy told you that your password was incorrect or that your login was not allowed. These should now be resolved after you install the latest version from the AppStore or Market.

Permissions
When you first start the application eBuddy will ask you to connect your eBuddyID account with your Facebook account. You will only have to do this once.

After typing your Facebook username and password in the first screen, you will be prompted to allow eBuddy access to various Facebook permissions. You need to allow them all to chat on Facebook. Here is what we need them for.

Access my basic information - In order to display your Facebook profile picture and the names & pictures of your friends we need access to some basic information from your Facebook profile.

Access my data anytime - We ask this so you only have to supply your Facebook username and password once. We will not access your profile when you are not online on eBuddy. Without this permission, you will have to type your Facebook username & password every time you start eBuddy.

Access Facebook Chat - This is required to actually enable you to chat on Facebook Chat.

What else is new
Our iPhone version now has improved support for iOS4 & the iPhone 4. Multitasking support has been improved and we made some changes to take advantage of the superb high-resolution display of the iPhone 4. We will tell you more about that in a couple of days on this blog.

The Android version also includes various bugfixes and stability fixes, which improve the overall experience of the application.

I hope you find this new updates useful. If you experience any problems with them contact feedback_iphone@ebuddy.com for problems with iPhone or feedback_android@ebuddy.com for problems with Android.

Yeah! We’ve made it to the final! I’m not sure if you are aware, but eBuddy is a Dutch company located in Amsterdam, so we are all very excited and proud that our boys made it to the final of the FIFA World Cup soccer.

Over the last month we’ve noticed that you also liked watching the games. Instead of sticking to eBuddy and chatting with your friends, you go out and watch the matches! And of course, while watching the match, there is nothing but attention to the match and no chatting on eBuddy.

Take for example the match Holland played against Brazil on Friday July 2nd. The match started at 4.00pm European Time, with halftime at 4.45pm, second half start at 5.00pm and final whistle at 5.45pm.

An hour before the match we already noticed that less people started eBuddy to chat with, and that amount dropped during the first half. However, during half time, Brazil was leading 0-1 then, we saw a very short increase in usage of eBuddy (on our mobile products this increase was huge). Catching up on the developments in the first half. But it was even more clear at the end of the second half, the usage of eBuddy almost doubled immediately after the final whistle! Everyone just rushed to eBuddy to discuss the match with their friends.

Just one match to go and then we will know who the next World Champion will be. And don’t forget to shout “Hup Holland Hup!” while watching the final Sunday!

A few weeks back we were happy to share that eBuddy had been downloaded 1 million times in the Nokia Ovi Store.

Now, not even 5 weeks later, we are delighted to announce that we have reached 2 million downloads in the Ovi Store!

Nokia’s official blog, Nokia Conversations, caught up with eBuddy’s CEO Jan-Joost “JJ” Rueb to discuss eBuddy’s success and its rising popularity in the Ovi Store. You can read the article here.

We would like to thank all our users for making this achievement possible, and stay tuned for the next million!

eBuddy was chosen as a finalist for the most prestigious category of the 2010 Gettie Awards!

The Gettie Awards are presented by GetJar, one of the world’s biggest app stores, where eBuddy has recently reached the 50 million downloads mark. The Gettie is described as the premier event designed to showcase the world’s most successful and innovative apps.

eBuddy will run for the Gettie Award, the award’s main prize. Thank you to everybody who visited the Gettie Awards website and nominated eBuddy, we couldn’t have done it without you!

Winners will be announced during the awards ceremony on July the 12th!

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!