Ever since Al Gore took that fateful trip up the ladder in An Inconvenient Truth we here at radius have been thinking of ways to do our part to combat the crisis of Global Warming.  To that end we compiled this list of things you can do within radius to help out.  Don’t believe those pundits that say it’s only about China and India.  You too can make a difference!

Top 5 things to lower your Carbon Footprint on radiusIM

5.  Log in to AIM and MSN on radius instead of having to load yet another application on your PC.  Your computer will work a whole lot less!

4.  Use IM slang like LOL as often as possible to keep those IMs short.  Shorter messages save energy.

3.  Fill out your profile so users don’t have to ask you things like ASL and burn through yet more carbon.

2.  Use our newly launched group chat (click the IM bubbles on the top of the friend list) to IM all your friends at once.  The more, the merrier and the greener.

1.  Use the new background color changer we launched this week in the general tab of the settings window.  You can make your background all black and save a TON of energy!

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The past several months at radius have been all about improving the website. We’ve spent countless hours on several really big projects to bring you new features, improve the speed of the site and make the community more friendly.

You’ve all returned the favor with record usage and growing the community to nearly 2 million registered users. Here’s a brief summary of all the goodness we’ve rolled out recently.

New Profiles: Many of you have been asking for better profiles and a place to make your own so we rolled out some cool new pages for every user. It’s got your pics, friends, info and of course a map so your friends know where you are. Check out the page for our friendly radiusOffice user. Even more improvements like bigger pics and richer info about users is coming soon.

Better Community: As with any social website, care needs to be taken to make sure the community remains friendly and has the right privacy features in place. We’ve taken big steps in this area to ensure radius remains a cool place to IM and meet new people. The feedback here has been really positive.

The Big Move: With all the new users our old home was getting a little snug so we started shopping around for a new home for the radius servers. After a long search we found a great place that is going to give us plenty of room to grow, but an even better benefit was a big increase in speed due to some fancy new technology. Many of you have reached out and let us know how much faster the site is these days. Thanks for noticing!

There’s a whole lot more, but we just wanted to share with everyone a bit of how we’re spending our time at radius. Look for some other big improvements really soon and thanks again for all the support. As always keep the feedback coming.

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So you’re addicted to Facebook? You’re not alone. Say hello to the radiusIM Facebook App. It takes all the cool features of radius and puts them right inside Facebook. The best part is that it automatically adds any of your Facebook friends who also use radiusIM, so you can IM them and see where they are. And you get the added bonus of the widget in your profile.

Be sure to link your existing account when loging in through Facebook so there’s no need to re-enter your AIM/MSN accounts etc. Check it out and let us know what you think.

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Al tener muchos visitantes de habla hispana en nuestra página, decidimos brindar el servicio ahora en Español. Muchas de las cosas están traducidas, pero si ven algo en inglés por favor háganoslo saber. Ahora el mundo de habla hispana puede disfrutar mas de radius!

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We’ve made the map a lot more fun this week by adding the ‘me’ bubble. It makes sharing your location with your friends a whole lot easier. All you have to do is drag and drop it to wherever you want to place yourself. You can also just type in an address by clicking the address link and then click the map at the new location to place yourself there.

Saving your favorite locations is also easier. Just click the globe icon and choose ’save current location.’ The next time you click the globe you’ll see it listed there along with any other locations you choose to save.

Let us know how you like it.

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Some of you may have noticed that a few new treats entered the friend list this week. We’ve been working hard on some of your big requests and now they’ve arrived.

First, you’ll see that an icon shows up now for friends that have gone idle. And on the AIM network you can see how long your friends have been online. The big one, though, is nicknames on MSN. The days of long email addresses in the friend list are over.

We’ve also made some nice login improvements that will make getting on the site much faster.

Hope everyone enjoys the new features.

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Now that you’ve eaten all your chocolates and enjoyed your lovely roses, here’s a ‘very nice’ gift from radius. This release has three very cool features you’ve all been asking for.

First off, we wired radius so you can see when your friends on AIM, MSN and Yahoo are receiving IMs on their mobile phones. Always good info to know when you’re about to send a message. Check out Borat below. He’s continuing his world tour, but still receiving IMs on his phone.

Next, we’ve spruced up the IM logs window and fixed some logging bugs. It’s way slicker and has full text search capability. So, start logging those IMs. All you have to do is go to the settings window and check the ‘log all my IMs’ box. You can get to those logs by clicking the logs icon shown below as well as right clicking on a friend and selecting ’show log.’

Lastly, you can now save your password. So, the next time you visit radius, you’ll be automatically logged in. Just click the save password box and you’ll be IMing that much faster.

Thanks for all the support and let us know if you have any ideas to make radius even better.

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Our last release a few weeks ago was pretty huge and today we offer up even more love. This release marks a big step towards enhancing our IM feature set with a really sweet Friend Overlay. Mousing over your friends now loads an overlay featuring the user’s pic, their distance away from you (radius friends), status and any away messages. You’ll also see that nicknames are coming very soon too!

Along with the overlay we’ve fixed some bugs and further improved stability. And if you’re here, you noticed that we have a blog link on the page now. So check back often and post some comments so we can get more feedback.

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It’s release time again and since we didn’t want to steal Apple’s iPhone thunder we waited until MacWorld was over to announce the great new stuff. This time around we focused on a new look and feel, usability and more speed.

Highlights:

SPEED! We’ve been working hard to optimize the application over the past few weeks. You’ll notice a big improvement in performance. Everything from logging in to messaging has been souped-up.

Wide is the new square! We love the whole widescreen revolution so we made some changes to the map window to give it that slick HD look. You’ll also notice a new toolbar on the map window and friend list. Be sure to click on the cool new icons to get the most out of radiusIM.

You can now IM Anyone. Click the IM Anyone icon in the Friend List and it will launch a window where you can type in an IM username on any network and send them an IM.

A new and improved Status Bar. The Status Bar now has colored indicators so you know what state you’re in and the text entry box for editing your custom messages is much easier to use.

There’s more great stuff on the way so keep an eye out and be sure to let us know what you’d like to see in the app by clicking the feedback link.

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We spent the last few weeks polishing off our latest release which went live on the 25th. It’s got some great new stuff that adds speed, stability and some cool new features.

Highlights:

The Messaging Windows are MUCH faster and have some slick new features. The grey title bar now has an icon to remind you what network you’re messaging on and you can size the pane where you type messages by dragging the three dots.

The application is much more stable in general and you’ll see some big improvements in keeping your connection alive.

There are some new graphics in the friend list and reliability of AIM away messages is much better.

There’s also a cool new ‘Zoom to Location’ feature. Right click (CTRL+click on Safari) on a picture in the grid and you can select ‘Zoom to Location.’ This will zoom the map right to the location of that person. Give it a whirl, it’s really cool.

And a slew of bug fixes to make using radius much easier.

The next release will be in a week or two and include:

MORE SPEED! We’re making some changes to the app which will make it run much faster..especially in IE.

Some tweaks to the look and feel. With each new release we take a fresh look at the app and think of ways to make it easier to use. Look for some new graphics that should make things more intuitive.

Improved support for ICQ and Jabber.

Thanks again for the support and PLEASE pass along some feedback by clicking the feedback link

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