radiusIM the Blog

Radius goes ‘green’

John — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:20:11 +0000

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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Radius gets a lot of love

John — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:06:25 +0000

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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1 Million New Friends

John — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:49:49 +0000

It’s been about a year and a half now since the first IM was sent on radius. In this time our novel notion of Social IM has grown into an amazing online community of 1 million members. Passing this milestone means a great deal to us and makes all these months of hard work so worth it. The experience we get these days surfing the world of radius and making new friends every day is really remarkable.

We can’t thank all 1 Million of you enough for making radius what it is today. That next million is around the corner and we’ll be here making sure everyone continues to have a great time IMing on radiusIM.

As always, reach out to us with thoughts about the site. Your help and feedback is what keeps us going in the right direction.

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And there goes 200k!

Zohar — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:56:17 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since we posted, but for good reason. We’ve been working hard keeping up with all the growth we’ve been experiencing. Our last post announced 100k users and now we’re over 200k just a few weeks later!

It’s been a pretty amazing few weeks and we’re all really energized. Rest assured that we’ve got some great new features rolling out very soon to keep all you new users happy. As always, be sure to let us know what you’d like to see next.

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100k!

John — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:37:28 +0000

radiusIM.com just passed 100,000 users, and 20,000 of those signed up in the past four weeks alone. So where is all this recent growth coming from? Well, after some big technology improvements we recently rolled out a mechanism for inviting friends via email. radiusIM users now invite over 35,000 friends to join radius every day! These emails are having a huge impact and the growth rate keeps accelerating.

It’s been a really exciting year for us and the coming months will likely be even more exciting. A big thanks to all the users out there for making this such a great experience for us.

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Why I’m Not Buying the iPod Touch

Marc — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:04:46 +0000

160GB Classic, 16GB Touch, 8GB iPhone. With Apple gift-card money to burn, I’ve been agonizing over which to get since I left work today. They all pretty much cost the same so that’s not a differentiator.

The iPhone by far has the coolest feature-set. Built-in speaker, built-in camera + everything the Touch has (not to mention that I could use it as a phone if I wasn’t so afraid to break-up with Sprint).

The Touch is almost everything I was hoping for, but it fell pretty far short on space and it doesn’t have Bluetooth syncing or headphones. I was all about it at first ’cause I think the interface is so cool, and then I saw the accessories that the Apple Store proposed…

One of the accessories they show is the “FM Radio Remote”. You plug your earphones into it and you plug it into your ipod. It lets you control your iPod (fast-forward, rewind, volume, etc). This made me start to think about how I will use the iPod most - to listen to tunes. I’m the guy that will need to skip a song or pause often - how easy is that to do on a touch screen? I don’t see any buttons on the side of the thing. So maybe I’ll get that remote too - oh, it’s not compatible with the iPod Touch.

Now that I already started to think about what I use the iPod for most (listening to tunes), I started to doubt how much utility I would really get out of having a web browser on there or a wireless iTunes store. I’m sure they’d be really cool for a second, but I probably wouldn’t use too often. Watching videos? Maybe, but it’s still a relatively small screen compared to my laptop and TV, and not a ton larger then the iPod Classic screen.

I checked out the demos of the iPod Classic interface on Apple’s website. It looks really slick. They did a very nice job with the Coverflow interface, the search interface and even the games. I bet it will prove more durable in the long run as well. The touch screen is still new. Will you have to touch it 5 times to get it to do what you want a year from now?

So the space thing is what really tips the scale for me now. I have over 80GB of music. I’ve owned 5 and 10GB iPod models before and I’ve always had to pick and choose what I take with me. The idea of being able to automatically sync my whole library is very appealing to me and I’m psyched that I have that option.

I’m sure I’ll look at all the iPod Touches on the subway and wish I had one. Just like I wish I had the iPhone. I guess I just need to wait for those devices to be a little more practical.

Apple, if you read this, here’s what would have swayed me to embrace the touch:
- Wireless synch with my iTunes library
- Wireless remote so I can skip songs, change volume or pause the music while moving about
- At least double the current space offerings
- Physical Skip/Volume/Pause buttons on the device

Oh yeah, and I swear this wasn’t part of the decision - I can get the Classic tomorrow!

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radiusIM Hits Facebook!

John — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:14:13 +0000

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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Se habla Español

John — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:23:49 +0000

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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It’s all about ‘me’

John — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 03:43:15 +0000

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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Network Upgrades

John — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:22:17 +0000

We’re going to upgrade our network to help us handle more people on the site. Popularity is good thing!

We’ll have to take a little downtime, though. The site will be down on Friday July 6th from 6:00 PM EST to 8:00 PM EST. Sorry for the inconvenience and be sure to check back in after we’re done.

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