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

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!

As you can read in the post below, we recently launched the brand new eBuddy Lite Messenger to offer you the best chat experience on any mobile device. The Lite Messenger also works on the Sony Playstation Portable.

After the launch we received a lot of feedback that scrolling through your contact list was just too difficult… It only worked with the directional keys, but we now improved this . The most common way of scrolling, by pressing the square button and using the analog stick, now works with the eBuddy Lite Messenger.

We hope you like the improvement and please continue to tell us what you think!
Vincent

Thanks to all of you who have helped translating eBuddy in your own language the last couple of weeks! As of today, eBuddy is 100% fully translated in the following languages:

Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Swedish and Vietnamese.

And therefore I would like to give some special thanks a couple of translators who truly worked completely voluntary all day and night to complete their translations before the new release this week!

Blue-Cyber	Chinese and Japanese
B40166873 Horizon	Chinese
Gerasimos Kontos	Greek
Markos Chattari	Greek
Tejes	Hungarian
Mervi	Finnish
Pierre Cauchy	French
Marianna Medea	Italian
Andrea.admin	Italian
Eleonora Spizzamiglio	Italian
Lasse Jensen	Danish
Lone Dahlberg	Swedish
Fanny Forslind	Swedish

Also, Blue-Cyber made a very cool eBuddy Translator display picture and inspired our own designer Allan who created 6 cool eBuddy Translator Avatars for you as a small X-Mas gift …

Here’s one example, the others can be downloaded via the translation Wiki

To all of you who want to help us update and/or translate eBuddy in your own language, send me an email at translation@ebuddy.com with your name and language you wish to translate!

Merry X-Mas to you all!

Marc and Niels

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

We just added Google Talk to our Mobile Internet version. Our new Web Messenger already supported it, and now you can also chat with your Google Talk buddies on the road!

To check it out, just open the browser on your phone and go to:

m.ebuddy.com

We haven’t forgotten our PSP and Nintendo DS users: Google Talk is also ready to use for you! Just point your PSP or DS to the same address.

It is a beta version, so please let us know what you think on feedback@ebuddy.com!

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!

The second eBuddy Mobile User Day is a fact. Last week, we welcomed a group of enthusiastic Dutch eBuddy Mobile users to our HQ in Amsterdam.

The reason why we organize our User Days on such a regular basis is because we believe that a product needs to be shaped at your needs and not the other way around…

Our recently released Mobile Messenger and our Mobile Internet version therefore became subject to some very critical testing. I can not give you specific details about the findings, but some interesting improvements and ideas for both versions have risen and can be expected in a matter of time

After an intense afternoon of testing, we took our test-crew for a cruise around the famous Canals of Amsterdam. Luckily, the weather was great for the first time in a while and the American style pizza’s and traditional Dutch Heineken beers were well deserved!

The next user day will take place on Thursday the 2nd of August at our HQ so if you are around and would like to join please leave us a note here.

If you want to see all the pictures taken that day, visit our Flickr account here.

Gizmodo wrote a post about using the mobile eBuddy AIM client on the iPhone. Not too shabby! But you know us, we’ve always got something cooking…

As one of the developers on the new eBuddy multi-network client I’d like to introduce you to some features I really like. These are not the obvious ‘big’ new features of the client, like the fact you can log in with as many different accounts as you want. These are features you might not even notice if they weren’t pointed out. Nonetheless, I believe these features really enrich the user’s experience and hopefully even make you forget you’re actually still just visiting a website.

Design
First and foremost (and very noticable) is the fresh new design by Garbrand. We’ve lost the old eBuddy blue and got some cool white and grey in return. Colorful icons and shiny new buttons grace an interface that doesn’t get in your way. Can you tell I really like this design?

Resizable layout
The new client has been designed and built so it neatly fits just about any size you give your browser and use the available space more efficiently. Buttons and other key components are always in the same spot relative to the browser edges so it’s easier to find them when you resize your browser and resizing the window feels very smooth. Personally, I like to chat with a wide window because I often have many tabs open simultaneously. If you prefer a more narrow setup it’s completely up to you! It should look and feel good at almost any size.

Tabs

Every contact you’re chatting with gets its own tab, so you can chat with more people at the same time. These tabs have some subtle properties you might not notice. First of all and most noticable, they have an icon that indicates the network status of the contact you’re chatting with, so you can immediately see if the person is online, offline, busy or away. Another small feature is the automatic shortening of the contact’s display name in the tab so all the open tabs fit neatly in the window. If there’s ever too little text in the tab to see who you’re chatting with, hover the mouse pointer over the tab to get a little tooltip with the full name.

Filter

Every new feature is of course extensively tested on the eBuddy employees before we decide to leave it in permanently. One feature that was an immediate hit was the filter. Just enter a few characters and the contact list filters out all contacts whose account or display name don’t match. Our employees generally have rather long contact lists and multiple accounts online and it became clear very quickly to us this was a extremely useful tool if you want to find a particular contact.

The future
Of course we’ve still got an extensive list of features (both big and small) we want to deliver and the features that are already in have hardly been perfected. For instance, I’m not fully satisfied yet with the way tabs are sized and the filter could also be improved. I’m sure you can think of a few improvements, too. Please let us know! It’s a Beta and stuff might break occasionally but we’re totally committed to deliver the best user experience when it comes to Instant Messaging.