Yes, we finally have a feed from the Development Team for you to enjoy. Like all our feeds it's only available in RSS at the moment but ATOM support is on the ever-growing wish-list for a future release. We figured that others in the industry with similar interests might be interested to hear what's going on 'in the trenches' here at faces.com since the Management Team speak a different language to us if you know what I mean.
 
On the other hand our Development Team doesn't use phrases like "business model traction", "vertical integration", "pure play" or "monetizing the long tail" unless we are trying to sell an idea to upper management and therefore need to speak in terms they understand. However the team does have a good mix of skills and experience, and interesting enough - languages. That's speaking languages as well as programming languages. Sometimes our team meetings feels like a UN council !
 
 
Anyway that's all for now. If you desperately want to see a particular feature on the site please drop us a line and we'll consider it. Other than that...Enjoy!
 
P.S. if you are partial to writing long posts you will MOST DEFINITELY enjoy the save-before-you-publish button in the blog post editor! It's saved our bacon a number of times already.

Generally speaking monolithic updates (a whole bunch of changes at once) are to be avoided since it makes testing that much harder and you don't get early feedback, but when a business decision is made to overhaul the feature set, the site cosmetics, and the underlying business model employed by the website it is difficult to do progressive releases since you can't have one part of the website looking different to others, and you don't want to lose features while you "re-skin".

Accordingly, when our team sat down many months ago and decided to make radical changes we knew we had to fork our code and get cracking on all the changes we'd agree on. Those brainstorming sessions lead to a bunch of nifty features being proposed that would benefit our users and make the site sooooo much better. We prioritised these and set a schedule for what was to go out in the 'initial' release of the new version and what could wait until future releases. The developers later regreted giving management so many cool ideas since, you guess it - management wanted them all, and they wanted them all in a hurry. That's where good expectation management comes into play.    Based on the feedback of our members and on our personal experiences, our developers were also keen to make more use of AJAX techniques to make the site much easier to use. It's a careful balancing act between biting off too much to chew and getting the site deployed before you have grand children.  We also knew that we would be in for more testing at the end of the coding phase since so many items were overhauled but we knew it had to be done and it would be worth it in the end. When you see the finished product I hope you agree with us on that ! 

Alleleujah... To coin a software development term, we have reached "code complete" for the initial release of our revamped website.

Now for the testing !!!

Since the number of changes is significant and wide-reaching we know that automated unit testing and integration testing are not going to be sufficient. The main objective with the site changes was to add several features, mainly TuneFeed, but also to make the site way easier to use. Given this, manual testing of the UI elements and the standard - how do I say this - "challenged-user" testing was going to be a significant part of the rollout process. We kept a lid on the changes until this process was done to a reasonable degree. Some people call it User Acceptance Testing but it's known by another term to the technical guys Yes let's admit it, it should NOT be a minimum requirement of the website that users have a PhD in Computer Science, a mega-high speed internet connection, and a penchant for user-interface design to figure out how to use a particular feature. Hence it's very beneficial to expose your site to a bunch of users who fit into your target demographic - if you know what that is.

Of course the best feedback comes from real users hence it is advisable to do progressive releases and to guage the reaction of your users. This is a practice adopted by many large players including Google, and it is a deployment strategy that we also believe in, but in this particular case we wanted to make sure we had the user experience in a much better state than it was in before.    

To celebrate the recent release of a major new version of the Faces.com website the technical team shuffled down to a local Japanese restaurant for a well deserved launch party.

The technical team had toiled for many months to implement a number of significant changes that management and the creative design team had passed on to them, so when it was finally released everyone was ready to celebrate this milestone.

A number of guys hadn't experienced a guenuine japanese meal, so it was left to a member of management to do all the ordering for the party of 10. That created a bit of apprehension from those that have less adventurous palettes, but it turned out that we all had a feast on sushi, sashimi with wasabi and soy, California rolls, eel, terikayi chicken, seaweed salad, tofu, edamame, tempura prawns, terikayi beef, steamed rice, miso soup, eggplant and a few other as yet unspecified dishes. The most common question heard around the table was "What exactly is that?"

Plenty of Asahi was flowing so it was great that we had a private dining booth. I'm sure the restaurant management were also glad we were cordoned off from the other diners in the restaurant so they weren't subjected to our casual banter that slowly increased in volume.

Naturally we took along a few digital cameras to record this moment in history. How much food can you fit onto one table...

http://customerservice.faces.com/Slideshows/725685/3/

And everyone made it to work the next day. Great work team!

Hope you all like the new photos display. I think we have improved the usability of the default display page by showing photos and thumbnails in an html display, rather than straight to flash.

If you still want to see the photos in a flash slideshow, just click the slideshow button.

This might not look like a big change, but if you are familiar with code there is a lot that makes this all work! Congrats to the dev team again

 The development team at faces.com has released the first set of Geo-Tag functionality.  A Geo-Tag is like a normal tag, but it contains the latitude, longitude and, in some cases, the altitude of something - in this case, a Photo.  You can see these Geo-Tags appearing in some of the faces.com pages, most notably in the Slideshow display page.

Currently, there is only one way for faces.com users to save location information for a photo as a Geo-Tag.   The process requires the following:

- The original photo must be in a JPEG format

- The photo must have GPS co-ordinates saved in the EXIF information of the photo.

If you are a faces.com user, and have photos like this, upload them now, and Geo-Tags will be created for you, automatically.  You can then follow the links to view your photos in Google Earth and Google Maps, right where you took them.

If your photos don't have this information (sadly, most don't), then stay tuned because the faces.com development team is working on ways you can Geo-Tag any photo.

Some advanced digital cameras have GPS receivers built into them, and will automatically save the location when the photo is taken.  If you do not have a camera of this type, there are various software packages available which will do this for you, either as a manual input of the co-ordinates, or by importing information from another GPS device.

This is just the beginning of the exciting changes around Geographical tagging, coming soon to the faces.com website.

Developers : You can now write applications to utilize the faces.com API for Geo-Tagging.  See the details at http://www.faces.com/Edit/API/GettingStarted.aspx