MatchMakr! uses the “Wisdom of Crowds” to find potential matches. This is how it works: you get shown one viibee member and three potential matches for that member. Simply click on the one that you think matches best. Once enough members are of the same opinion viibee will introduce the members to each other.
Why does this work? It is scientifically proven over and over that couples are of similar attractiveness. Indeed, you might have experienced that seeing couples of very different attractiveness on the street makes you think “this will not work out”. Humans are very skilled in assessing good matches!

What’s more: making matches with viibee’s MatchMakr! is just plain fun. Give it a try!

Here’s viibee on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/337062238

Here’s viibee on Friendster: http://widgets.friendster.com/alwaysviibee

So now people on Facebook can video date with people on MySpace, Friendster or viibee.com all via the unique viibee video dating network!

Also, we’ve been working overtime to further broaden the user reach by allowing our users to have photos as well as videos in their profile!

viibee - online dating is fun again!

We have also updated viibee.com. You can now simply click “yes, I am interested” on someone you like. The person will see that you are interested and can vote “yes”, “no” or “maybe” on you. Mind you, you will show up on the home page and get people interested only if you have recorded a video….

Guten Tag, Deutschland, Oesterreich und Schweiz!

It took us 3 guys just from yesterday morning to right now (i.e. 2 days) to do the WHOLE internationalization and localization, including extraction of strings, all translations, server-side modifications, email translations, language switch in client, localized content, etc etc.

I am seriously proud to be part of this team.

I know we should have seen this in our testings… so the only thing we can say is sorry for the troubles and thanks for the patience.

Resources:

• A blog post on lessrain.com (says it happens only with HTTPS but it also seems to happen with HTTP)
• A post I wrote a while ago when i had troubles downloading files in IE over HTTPS (which is why i should have known… )
• Microsoft Help and Support

We just did the final touches like the über-cool screencast (thanks, Pascal) and fixed the very last bugs (I hope). Now, let the games begin.

1. Remove unused content. Easy, I know. But for some models we still relied on the default to_xml() method which includes about every attribute. Use the :only or :exclude options to remove unused elements.
2. Flatten hierarchy. Remove unused nested elements.
3. Move child elements to attributes. This works as long as the child elements do not represent complex/nested data
4. Shorten names of elements and attributes.
5. And, of course, we added mod_deflate to our Apache

That’s it. Following these simple steps significantly reduced the amount of transferred data, server load was decreased and - most important - the client responds faster to user interaction.

But Ryan’s point is of interest. It is that the “R” really stands for improved and useful user interface. We wholeheartedly agree. That’s why we have spent an awful lot of time on designing viibee’s user interface. And for the most part we took things out again: mostly animations that were cool to play with, but did not increase the value for the user. So we ended up with just the animations were we could truthfully say “this animation makes it easier for the user to understand why the screen changed form state 1 to state 2″ or “this animation makes it easier to understand the state of the application” or similar.