Blog

Hello everyone,

You may have noticed that we’ve added a Feedback tab on the left of the window on Famiva, and on this blog. Use this link to tell us what features you’d like added to Famiva. If you’re feature gets enough requests, we’ll bump it up in the development queue.

Best wishes,
Famiva Team

Happy Father’s Day everyone! We are glad to announce our new product as a gift to all of you on Father’s Day. Introducing BabyBook.me, the life-like memory book and live journal, powered by Facebook, Twitter and Famiva!

See the video to learn more! Then create your book at http://babybook.me.

Enjoy,
Famiva Team

Dear users,

We hope you’re enjoying the new Famiva.com. We’ve added a new feature that will allow you to search for members from anywhere on the site. On the header, you’ll see a new search box. Start typing the name of the person to jump right to their profile.

We think this feature is particularly useful when you’re looking for someone’s contact information on a large family site. We hope you’ll find it useful as well.

- Famiva Team

The pre-upgrade tasks are going well. We have kept the live site up and running through the deployment window (2-6AM EST). It will remain up for the most part of the day, and will only be taken down during actual migration. The migration will only last a few minutes.

So enjoy your Famiva site as we setup the new one. Expect the switch over to occur later today.

- Famiva Team

We’re moving to a new infrastructure on Sunday, Nov 2nd. This move includes tons of updates to Famiva.com and new servers that will help us meet growing demand. To do that, we will need to shut down the current Famiva.com for a few hours on Sunday.

What to expect

Expect the site to be unavailable between 2AM to 6AM EST (that’s 7AM to 11AM UTC) on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008. This is a major upgrade, so things could be a little bumpy on Monday. All your data is secure and will be migrated without a hitch. Watch this blog post for updates.

On the upside, expect several nice enhancements to the site. Here’s a sneak peek at the new homepage:

If you have any questions or concerns, drop us a note here.

We are pleased to announce the release of slideshows. Now you can enjoy your family photos in beautiful full-screen slideshows. You can even view them in breathtaking 3D by installing a simple plugin.

Simply click on the “Slideshow” link under photos page to start the slideshow.

Slideshows are context aware, so you can view slideshows of specific albums, photos you’ve missed, by uploader, etc.

Enjoy!
- Famiva Team

Just released, new look and feel with brighter colors, cooler gradients and translucent menus! Also simplified the menu. Note: World map no longer has a top level menu, find it under Photos and People.

We hope you’re enjoying the updates to Famiva. As always, let us know how we’re doing.

Thanks,
- Famiva Team

We’ve added “alert on feedback.” With this feature, you’ll receive an email alert when someone comments on an item you post. For example, if you upload a photo and someone comments on it, you’ll know right away.

If for some reason you don’t like this, turn it off at http://famiva.com/site/alerts.

Hope you enjoy this feature.

We’ve just added a new view under Photos. You can now view photos organized by who uploaded them.

See who’s contributing all the photos, and do something nice for them!

Another minor improvement: stories without photos don’t show on the page when exploring by stories. To show all, and to drag and drop photos on any story, click “Organize.”

We’ve updated and reorganized the site to make the main menu more intuitive and convenient. Special thanks to Laura for the recommendations. Here’s a summary of the changes.

• Events have their own main menu. It is no longer shared with Stories.
• You can create new events and stories right from the main menu.
• Photos page has been updated to make “Organize” and upload actions more visible.
• Photo view modes, such as thumbnail, index, list, etc. have been made more obvious.
• Photos page is restructured for upcoming “explore by owner”, “explore by member”, and subject specific RSS feeds.

Enjoy! As always, keep the comments coming!

- Famiva Team