Treemo Blog

This past weekend was Arts Corps’ 7 Annual Festa del Arte - their annual fund raising event. Arts Corps is a Seattle Non-profit that teaches arts of all types - visual, dance, poetry, and digital photography and much, much more. They set up after school programs all over King County (Seattle and area), Washington.

This was my second time at the event and it is not only a great time with lots of great people, but truly inspirational to see such a healthy non-profit doing such great things. Arts Corps has some great funders from Boeing to Starbucks, to Bill and Melinda Gates, to the Allen Foundation to the Kirlin Foundation and many more and many individuals. Their budget continues to grow and their programs are in constant and growing demand. They are expanding as fast as they can…

Treemo has been a partner of Arts Corps for more than a year- we help start their digital photography classes. We helped get them donated digital cameras and we ended up buying them several digital cameras for their classes moving forward. Students post their photos and videos on Treemo - when their classrooms allow outside browsing.

Here is a video of 18 year old poet Jenna Whittington talking about ‘art’:

Here is a video of some ‘hip hop’ dancing of Arts Corps students and teachers:

It’s been far too long since the last post.

What have we been working on? What is going on?

We’ve been seeing increased and increased usage of the site in the last few months which has been great. We took the time to go back and do some really unexciting optimizations to make Treemo continue to hum under increased load. That took a while, but we’re really happy with the outcome - we’d rather continue to roll out new features, but sometimes you have to back and make things in the backend better.

We also recently updated our Etiquette Policy. This update lays out in more detail what kind of content we will allow and don’t allow. We have recently brought on a couple of mobile partners who need us to abide by this rule set. With that said, we also now have 24/7 content moderation. We’re still working out the kinks of this system, so if you see some of your content is being deleted or ‘flagged’ please email us and we will re-review and if need be, re-post.

We have some new features coming very soon, so check back soon and thanks for your support.

Hey all. After a holiday break, we are back with another release and more features.

We rolled out a release a couple days ago, but we’re so good at it, you didn’t even know. We are starting to release more frequently, with less new features, so we can continue to get out new stuff more quickly.

We now support streaming for mobile video on a bunch of phones, especially Sprint devices. We now offer users the option to either ‘download’ or ’stream’ video. Some videos you are going to want to stream because they are large and you don’t want to save them to memory while some videos, you may want to download and keep a copy on your phone for quick viewing. We now support both.

Block user is now implemented. If you find somone on the site that you don’t really want to hear from, you can block them. They won’t be allowed to comment on your videos, photos, etc and they also can’t  private message you.

We launched a couple other minor features and a bunch of bug fixes that you probably didn’t notice.

We have some other big things brewing here but we’ll save that for another day.

We are continuing to build out our platform with the mission of ‘any content, any time, any where.’ We hope you are enjoying the service and please send on any and all feedback.

If you use our upload by email feature you may have noticed some misbehaving over the past few hours. We’re sorry about that. It’s sorted out now.

Details

Uploads by email were negatively affected by yesterday’s push.  If you sent an email to your upload email address after 4:30 pm PST yesterday (in other timezones) you may not have seen your upload until today.

The good news is that they were only delayed, not lost. All uploads have been processed and are available in your channel. Any uploads from now on should be processed at the normal speedy pace.

A note to the frustrated: If you tried uploading multiple times you might have ended up with duplicates in your channel. We tried to detect them, but we can’t be 100% sure that we got them all. You might want to give your recent items a quick once over.

In conclusion. We’re sorry about the delay. Thanks for bearing with us.

We just rolled out a very big release for us. We made some quite big architectural changes that our users won’t notice, but behind the scenes are rather large.

Here is the top level list of features and changes:

We added a ’subscribe’ button to every users’ channel. There are three ways users can subscribe to other user channels; via email, via SMS or through RSS. Everytime a user uploads a file, they are sent an email, sms or standard RSS updates. We are excited about this feature especially for the implications on the mobile application. A user can upload a multimedia file (video, photo, audio or text) and if they’re friends are subscribed to their channel via SMS, they will  get a message and see the new content in ‘real time.’ This  innovation, where a user uploads a video and is made available instantly on mobile phones, is not available anywhere else and we are excited to have our users start playing with it.

We changed our ‘logged out’ home page with a simpler message, ‘Your videos, your photos, anytime, anywhere.’ We also added featured content on the home page so people can see some of the great content our users have contributed to the site.

We cleaned up design across the site, still getting to those last pages that need design attention. This will hopefully make for better ease of use and navigation.

We added better share functions. We now allow users to customize the message and send to a users’ mobile phone number.

There are some other smaller features, but those are the biggest.

We now will take a bit of a break for the holidays and come back and continue to add more features. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks - have a great Holiday Season!

Our friends over at Groovy Green, did an interview with us about Treemo. Groovy Green is green lifestyle and educational web site on all things green. Please read the whole article, you will be graded if you missed any of the main points.

Also, in light of the Verizon/YouTube deal that was announced last week, GigaOm,did an article on alternatives to YouTube, which we were hightlighted. Check it out here.

We’re working diligently on the .5 release and hoping to get it out very soon. I can’t tell you what great features we will be launching, but the innovations keep coming here.

Here is a fun post for you all.

Have a great thankful day.

Peace!

Last night we pushed out our .4 release of Treemo. We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, tweaked some design and added ‘TreemoTXT‘ - our new innovative SMS feature. We just made publishing any media type anytime, anywhere even better.

Users can now SMS to Treemo (873366) and get right to our mobile application. Users can text ‘username’ to 873366 and will be taken directly to that user’s channel of content. Currently, our ’shortcode’ - our six digit number for text messaging (873366) is live on Cingular and Sprint and will be launching on other carriers soon. For more information, visit our ‘My Mobile‘ page. You can also text ‘recent’ for recent items, ‘featured’ and others. We will be adding more commands in future releases.

We know of no other application where you can upload any digital media form - video, photo, audio or text and it’s instantly available on the web or your mobile phone - one text message away, instantly. We transcode your video for the phone or the web, optimize your photos, convert your audio on the fly and right away. We make mobile video publishing a reality - just upload from the web or from your mobile phone, its done.

Other enhancements are a new ‘featured‘ page that has a new, improved design and some tools for us to feature content more easily. We improved our RSS feeds - we now have support for more readers and enclosures (photos) should be working on all major readers. We revamped the ‘My Mobile‘ page - now has information on TreemoTXT and a live simulator to what our mobile application looks like. We also made a couple minor fixes to our flash video/audio player. Lastly, we made our mandatory, ‘press‘ page which includes some of the press we’ve received over the last year.

Publishing Policy Changes:

We instituted a new rule for publishing content to the web. Users who create accounts on their mobile phone are required to come to our website, give their email address and login, before we will post their content publicly to the web site. Mobile users’ content will appear in their channels on the web and mobile right away, but will only appear on the ‘recent’ page on the mobile application going forward.

We are in the process of editing our Terms of Service to be stricter in terms of overt sexual content and conduct and trafficking of pornagraphy through the Treemo site. Our goal is to provide a safe place to share content, with your friends and family privately, or publicly. We are continuing our goal of promoting freedom of expression, but with this expression, comes responsibility. We want all our users to express themselves but users need to be sensitive to other users. Our goal is to be a postive force in the community.

In the last few weeks, we also have launched our second digital photography class with Arts Corps. We have another 10 or so students who are learning digital photography and posting photos to Treemo. Treemo donated more than 10 digital cameras to this cause.

We appreciate any feedback on this update or any other comments.

Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and futurist, says that worldchanging.com is “the most important web site on the planet.”  Ignore the fallacious leap in logic here, but doesn’t that make their book the most important book on the planet?  And wouldn’t that make their book tour the most important book tour on the planet?  If so, then how could you possibly justify not attending?  Don’t know what Worldchanging is?  The Worldchanging Manifesto begins:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.

So it makes sense that their book falls along a similar line:

Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.

The book tour isn’t just about promoting the book, either:

In each place, we’ll be giving talks and parties to celebrate not only the book, but also the local community of people and organizations who are engaged in worldchanging work. Each event will also feature brief introductory remarks from people we respect and admire. The point is to create an avenue for spotlighting and connecting worldchangers and worldchanging things…and most importantly, to meet one another and have a great time.

Worldchanging and Treemo each have a global reach, but they both call the Emerald City home. That’s why Worldchanging is kicking off their tour in the beautiful city of Seattle. If you’ll be in the area this Saturday, stop by and check it out. Don’t forget to take a lot of pictures or make some videos and upload them to Treemo! =)

With Halloween comes the beginning of handing out candy and good cheer all around it seems. We at Treemo have not handed out any kind of treats to our faithful users, but that is about to change as we prepare to bring on the swag..

We need some help or at least I do on what we should be handing out.. should we do the normal t-shirts, stickers, buttons, posters, airplane tickets to the launch party, postcards, beanies or what?

Please pass on suggestions!