Hi,eBuddy is available in more than 30 languages, thanks to our translators who volunteer to translate eBuddy. :-)Today it’s International Translation Day:  “The translation day was established in 1991 by the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (International Federation of Translators). The date of 30 September was chosen as it is the feast day of St. Jerome (347-420 AD), patron saint of translators, interpreters and librarians. The day celebrates and promotes translation as an essential activity in contemporary society – but one which too often remains invisible and ignored. Each year a particular theme, highlighting a different area of translation, is adopted” (source: http://www.worldaccent.com)That’s why we picked this day to put a spotlight on our translators.Here is a BIG THANK YOU for all of you 2354  translators who have helped translating eBuddy in your own language!Since we have so many translators  we are not able to mention everyone by name. But we want you to know that we are very happy to have a committed group of users at eBuddy who help translate our homepage and Messengers into languages from all over the world! :-DeBuddy Translations Team

Hi all,

We have just released a minor update of eBuddy Mobile Messenger: version 1.4.1. This version contains no major changes or sparkling new features, but it is definitely an improvement of the previous version. It will make chatting on eBuddy just that little bit smoother

First, we have been working on reducing memory usage. On some phones people would get ‘out of memory’ errors after some time, while using eBuddy. Or on SonyEricsson phones eBuddy would become unresponsive after a while. This should not happen anymore.

Second, we have been improving the support for all phones with a full keyboard, like the Nokia E71. Particularly the problems with the backspace key have been solved.

Finally, tons of small things have been improved that make chatting on eBuddy more reliable and easier.

To get this new version, go to http://get.ebuddy.com with your mobile phone. If you encounter any problems or want to suggest a new feature, place a comment or send an e-mail to feedback_j2me@ebuddy.com.

This is a big one… we’re officially announcing a partnership with one of the larger electronics companies in the world:
LG Electronics.

Our already immensely popular eBuddy Mobile Messenger, surpassing a whopping 20 million downloads last week, will be pre-installed on at least 1.5 million handsets in the Asia-Pacific area. To be more specific, that’s India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia,Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia.

No downloading, no installation, just start up the phone and you get instant access to eBuddy on any of these phones:

These are the LG Cookie (LG-KP500), LG Arena (LG-KM900), the LG-KS360 and the LG Renoir (LG-KC910i).

So we’re not starting with one, not with two, but with four phones.
And this is just a start, more phones will be announced soon.

If you’re in the Asia Pacific area: check out any of these phones, coming to a shop near you soon!

Cheers,

JJ

Hi everyone,

We just released a brand new version of our Mobile Messenger!

The most important new features include:

Most recent chats The majority of you have buddy lists of over 200 buddies. Try fitting all of them on a mobile phone screen… We added the new Most Recent Chats feature to make it easier for you to find the buddies you chat with the most. On the top of your buddy list you will see a green group labeled Most recent chats. You will always find the last 5 buddies you chatted with here. It is always up to date, so if you’re looking for that cool, new friend that you just started chatting with a lot, he or she will be at the top of your list.

Type directly in your chat We are pleased to announce a much requested feature: Type directly in your chat. Now, you can see in one screen what your buddy is saying and chat directly back. This way you can type so fast, your buddies won’t even notice you are on a mobile phone! You can enable this feature in settings.

Improved battery life

Typing directly in your chat screen means that you can chat faster. Now with improved battery life you can also chat longer and longer and longer! We always try to minimize the battery usage for Mobile Messenger. We focused extra attention on this release that so you can now have eBuddy powered on for long time without burning through so much phone battery.

We hope you like the new version! You can get it at http://get.ebuddy.com

We welcome your ideas on what to improve & add next so keep them coming! Reach us at feedback@ebuddy.com.

Happy chatting!
Vincent

Hi Everyone,
Hope you all enjoyed a great holiday season and that 2009 is your best year yet! eBuddy’s ringing in the New Year with a brand new version that includes many new features. Let me run you through them quickly.

Facebook Chat
Some of you might have noticed the Facebook logo on our homepage. We incorporated Facebook Chat in our client for a little while, but because of security issues raised by Facebook we were asked to remove it for the short term. The good news is that we are now working collaboratively with them to get Facebook Chat up and running again as soon as possible, so stay tuned a bit longer for Facebook Chat!

AIM, ICQ & Google Talk improvements
Our back-end team has been working on major improvements for AIM, ICQ and Google Talk. You’ll now receive fewer disconnects and experience better performance on these networks. When still you see something strange, report it via our Feedback.

eBuddy on your website
We receive loads of requests from people who want to spread the word about eBuddy by putting a log-in box on their own website. So, we’ve now created a log-in box that you can place directly on your blog, website or profile page. Look to the right of this page, it’s already there! –>
This enables your friends to quickly log-in to eBuddy and talk to you! Now how convenient is that?!?

Better Website
We’ve recently made some changes to the website to better explain who we are and what we do at eBuddy. We’ve also created a page where we explain all the benefits you receive when you create an eBuddy ID – and there are a lot!

Besides all these things, we’ve also fixed a large number of bugs and you’ll notice some minor interface adjustments designed to make eBuddy work even better.

More cool things coming soon, so stay tuned!

Yes, we are still here! It has been a long time since you heard something from us on this blog. We have been working really hard to fix some annoying issues that had been laying around for too long. As from today we serve a new version of eBuddy Web Messenger to all of you. Simply login via ebuddy.com and you get all the latest improvements, which include:

• Loading of your contact list is now twice as fast as before! This means no more waiting, especially when you have a lot of friends in your contact list.
• Many stability fixes, no longer your eBuddy gets disconnected for no reason or you can see users online who left the computer hours ago!
• Adding a network to your account has never been easier! We completely redesigned the way you add another account to your eBuddy, so it is less likely you make a mistake.
• Redesign of all popup windows! They were soooo 2007.
• New way of changing your name and custom status. Our user research showed that this actually annoyed you the most, so we changed it! Your name is most important, so it is displayed above your personal shout.
• New Help pages. We are not there yet, but we completely redid the Frequently Asked Questions page. It should now answer your most urgent and common questions (surprisingly).

We have many more improvements pending so stay tuned. In the meantime if you want to send your ideas or feedback, send us an email at feedback@ebuddy.com!

Enjoy the new version. Happy eBuddying!  (oh and don’t forget to watch the eBuddy video in the post below)

Hi everyone!

My name is Vincent and I am the new product manager of eBuddy’s Web Messenger. I just graduated and recently joined eBuddy. It is my job to voice the ideas and feedback that you, users of eBuddy, submit to us by turning them into cool new features of eBuddy. At the moment we have many great ideas which we will show you in the upcoming months. But first, the news of today…

I am happy to announce that we have released a brand new version of the web client, which now supports the ICQ chat network .

I still remember the days when I was in secondary school back in the 90-ies, when the Internet was a new and mysterious technology. We used really slow dial-up over the phone line, with the distinctive sounds while waiting for a connection. One of the really cool applications was ICQ, “I seek you”, which allowed me to send pop-up messages to my friends or even to chat with more than one of them at once. The first version of ICQ was actually developed in 1996, more than 11 years ago! For that time revolutionary: The first world-wide Instant Messaging application!

And now we have added this network to eBuddy, so you can also chat with your friends on eBuddy via ICQ! Besides the addition of the ICQ network we have also improved our Yahoo! connectivity and fixed a lot of minor issues.

Enjoy chatting on eBuddy and stay tuned for more improvements and new features!

Cheers!
Vincent.

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

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

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