Making RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti 2.0

demandseth — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:28:22 +0100

We have some big news to share: This month we will be rolling out RSS Graffiti 2.0. This will be a major update, containing improvements that will expand the power and usability of the application. With this release you can expect an increase in speed and greater control over how & where your feeds are published. The RSS Graffiti team has been hard at work on this update, and when you see what’s in store, we think you’ll be just as excited as we are.

We will begin rolling out RSS Graffiti 2.0 on a purely opt-in basis, during which time users can continue using 1.9.6 if they so desire. If you have any questions about the coming 2.0 update, please leave a comment on this post. As always, if you are having any trouble using the application, direct your support questions to our GetSatisfaction.com forum.

A major new milestone: An exciting acquisition!

rousso — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:34:00 +0200

We’ve been using this blog mostly to talk about milestones. We can’t help it! It’s been such a crazy ride! Monthly active users are up to 1.300.000 already; total installed users are over 600.000 by now! Exciting stuff!

But here is one more new milestone that makes this ride amazing and goes beyond anything we could plan or hope for a few months ago!

Today, we announced that we have agreed to be purchased by Demand Media, one of the most innovative media companies around.

For us, this is great news, but if you’re wondering what this means for you, then this means that you will be getting more, faster.

If you like RSS Graffiti, you’ll love what we have been working on in the past several months. It’s going to be beyond cool! It’s beyond what’s out there today and beyond what me and Dimitris would ever be able to tackle on our own. Our friends at Demand Media are here with us today, rolling up their sleeves and working with us to build what we believe will be one of the best applications on the market for Facebook publishers. You’ll see lots of features we have been discussing with you rolling out much faster, plus more new exciting stuff that we will be unveiling in the coming months.

And there is more!

Dimitris and I will be remaining here in Luxembourg, working on the next version of the RSS Graffiti together with Demand Media and our U.S. based team.

This looks so promising!

Thanks again for sticking with us on this wild ride! We are looking forward to sharing more of our milestones with you in the future.

Milestones, milestones...

rousso — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:30:00 +0200

RSS Graffiti seems to be steadily doubling in size about every four months. We just passed the 300.000 active walls milestone. One third of those users joined us in the last three months. We are pretty excited about it! On the same day, today, we also passed the 1.000.000 MAU (monthly active users) milestone.

Ok; numbers are boring. But not when they mark milestones!

Talking about milestones, we crossed one more important milestone in RSS Graffiti today. But more on that, to come soon. Stay tuned!

Thank you everyone for your support!

200.000 Active Walls & counting

rousso — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:00:06 +0100

Just another 4 months after crossing the 100.000 active walls milestone, RSS Graffiti is doubling in size again: 200.000 Facebook Walls are now actively using RSS Graffiti to publish their updates to Facebook.

It’s even more amazing considering that just 8 months ago we crossed the 50.000 active walls milestone: 4X growth in 8 months. Add to that that CNN uses RSS Graffiti to publish it’s Breaking News on Facebook and you pretty much understand how overwhelming this growth feels to us.

The horizontal axis in the chart above counts the number of days since RSS Graffiti first launched on Facebook.The vertical axis counts the number of active Facebook Walls. By the way: we made this chart using the Google Chart API, which is kinda cool. Praise Google if you can see it or blame it if you can’t.

Footnote

Here is how we count growth in RSS Graffiti: People usually on Facebook count the number of Monthly Active Users (MAU). Facebook itself keeps track of this metric. RSS Graffiti currently has about 550.000 MAU. But that’s doesn’t matter too much for RSS Graffiti because it counts the number of Facebook users that get to interact with the application every month by either visiting its canvas page, or the application tab or use it to publish something on Facebook. It’s a good metric for games in Facebook for instance but not for apps like RSS Graffiti. What matters to us the most, is how many of the roughly 440.000 Facebook Walls on which RSS Graffiti is currently added, [how many of them] actually use the application to publish something every day. So we count how many of these walls actually have active feeds added to them and we call these walls “Active Walls”. And that’s what makes 200.000 Active Walls quite impressive.

Now we don’t want you to think that we wrote this whole story just to impress you (although it always feels nice to impress people). We write this to also share our deep appreciation for your support and to also thank you for all the motivation you provide us with, by using and spreading our application. Thank you!

A quick look back at 2010

rousso — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:37:17 +0100

Twenty ten was for us an exciting year. Although we didn’t actually do all the things we wanted to do during the year, we worked hard to evolve RSS Graffiti and we did watch it grow beyond our initial expectations.

As we enter 2011, 163.000 Facebook Walls actively use RSS Graffiti. Compared to the 7.000 active walls at the end of 2009, RSS Graffiti has seen a 20 fold increase during 2010.

What’s more impressive for us, is that over 100.000 of these walls belong to Fan Pages, which means that roughly 100.000 different brands actively use RSS Graffiti today to bring their news to Facebook. Among them we were happy to discover prominent brands like CNN and MTV or popular blogs like Engadget and Gizmondo.

Part of last year’s excitement also came from RSS Graffiti’s nomination as one of the five finalists for the “Best Social Media Service for Small Business” Award in the 4th Annual Mashable Awards. We didn’t get to win the award at the end, but the support from our users was overwhelming and very important for us.

During Q4 2010 we have been working hard to prepare our next major release, RSS Graffiti version 2.0, which we plan to launch in the coming weeks. Evolving an idea into a service is quite a challenge, especially when it’s being built on a rapidly evolving platform like the Facebook Platform.

Twenty-ten was also full of lessons learned and left quite a legacy for us to build upon; especially this amazing user-base that has developed during the past year. We are thankful for your support and we will keep doing our best to honor it.

Happy New Year!

RSS Graffiti 1.9.5 Beta released

rousso — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 04:02:00 +0100

We just released RSS Graffiti version 1.9.5 Beta. This version has heavy updates in the back-end but no visible changes in the user interface.

In a nut-shell, RSS Graffiti 1.9.5 Beta:

is faster,
is more stable,
is more scalable,
is a precursor to RSS Graffiti 2.0 and runs on its new back-end,
is not a feature release.

In more detail:

The processing engine now has a different architecture with improved scalability, flexibility and processing speed. This will allow RSS Graffiti to be less affected by the fast pace of growth of its user base and be able to adjust to increased demand faster.

This new engine also incorporates most of the changes that we had been working on for our next major release planned for January 2011. We are releasing these updates as we prepare for the release of version 2.0 to ease the transition and also have a better chance to monitor the new engine in real life scenarios before everything starts depending on it.

This release also coincides with an upgrade in infrastructure. The new hardware we are running on is also key to the flexibility and scalability we were recently seeking but it is also a much needed upgrade as stress on our previous infrastructure has lately caused a number of unexpected outages. The new server currently need less than 7% of their capacity to do the same job our previous infrastructure was doing running at 60% of its capacity.

As a result we decreased the minimum processing interval back to 10 minutes.

Our plans are to keep working on RSS Graffiti 2.0 and release it as soon as possible, in January 2011.

Upcoming release tonight

rousso — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:02:35 +0100

While preparing for launching RSS Graffiti version 2.0 in January, we will be making an intermediate release today.

Although tonight’s release will be bringing RSS Graffiti very close to version 2.0, you will neither notice any differences in the user interface, nor will you be getting any new features tonight.

So here are the important things that we will be deploying tonight:

Pack-up all the updates and hot-fixes we had deployed since version 1.9.0 Beta into a single release.
Adjust the RSS Graffiti’s database and code-base to run with our new processing engine.
Deploy more new servers to cope with the increased demand.

The past few weeks we repeatedly run into server issues due to heavy load as another 50.000 active walls have been added to our systems during the past two months, bringing the total number of Facebook Walls on which RSS Graffiti is publishing today to 150.000 and the number of feeds being published on those walls to 240.000. That’s a big number of walls and feeds to check and publish every few minutes.

To allow our servers to cope with their workload we increased a few days ago the minimum waiting time in the processing queue to 15 minutes (from 10 minutes). This means that no target is currently processed more often than 4 times per hour which in turn takes some load off of our current servers.

We have been preparing and testing our new servers for the past couple of weeks and we will be switching to them tonight during the new release.

We are going to do our best to minimize the down-time during this release. So, talk to you later!

The road ahead

rousso — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:31:02 +0100

We’ve been quiet for a while working for our next milestone. Our last release was in early August. That was version 1.9.0 Beta, in which we had packed a lot of new features. Since then, RSS Graffiti has doubled its user base yet again in less than four months. We were publishing on 70.000 active walls back in August 2010. Now we are publishing in over 140.000 walls and expect to grow over 160.000 active walls by the end of the year.

So here is what lays ahead in our plans. We have been working on RSS Graffiti version 2.0. So, the next release is planned to be a major one. Our effort was to finalize it before the end of 2010 but we decided to postpone the release until after Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Before releasing RSS Graffiti 2.0 we plan to do two or three intermediate releases during the next three weeks. These will prepare our systems for the release of version 2.0. During this time we will also be changing the architecture in our data center and add more servers at the same time so that it can handle the growth of our user-base.

I didn’t give you any details on what the core of RSS Graffiti 2.0 will be but I did that on purpose. All I’ll tell you for now, is that it’s going to be just one new feature, but a very important one. If everything goes well with this release we will be able to shift our focus on a number of other features and improvements we have been requested by many of you and hopefully establish RSS Graffiti as a leading service in its space.

Hang on and wish us luck! We are grateful for your warm support!

"RSS Graffiti just passed 100.000 targets!"

rousso — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:29:00 +0200

“RSS Graffiti just passed 100.000 targets!”

- Just 4 months after crossing the 50.000 active targets (Facebook walls) milestone, RSS Graffiti doubles in size again. Today it publishes over 170.000 feeds on the walls of (roughly) 27.000 Profiles, 65.000 Fan Pages, 8.000 Groups, 800 Applications and 100 Events across Facebook!

Facebook Groups can now publish on their own wall [NEW]

rousso — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:03:00 +0200

RSS Graffiti was possibly the first application to support publishing of RSS/Atom feeds on Facebook Groups early this year. Nevertheless as our users know, unlike Fan Pages, Facebook Groups could not write on their own wall so the identity of a user was always used to publish all posts.

Well, not anymore!

RSS Graffiti 1.9.0.x Beta allows you to use the Group’s identity to publish on the Group’s wall just as you do with your Fan Pages.

Apart from a cool feature to have this feature will also have a positive impact on the known Facebook limits imposed to Facebook Users (the well known and notorious Facebook Error 341 “feed request limit exceeded”). Since you will no longer have to use your own identity to publish on your Groups, you are going to be saving on your limit, so it will also be less likely that you hit the limit.

So how do you set this up?

Piece of cake! We have a new feature we call “Publish on behalf of”. So go to RSS Graffiti App, select your Facebook Group’s tab on the left-hand column, open the feed you want to edit and click on the “More” Tab in the editor. You’ll find the “Publish on behalf of” setting there.

In the drop-down you can choose to publish on behalf of yourself, or on behalf of the Group itself. That’s it. Save the Feed and you are done. Next time the Group’s feeds are processed posts will be made using the Group’s identity (assuming you selected it in the drop-down of course).

Enjoy!

RSS Graffiti 1.9.0 Beta released

rousso — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:41:00 +0200

We just released the latest version of RSS Graffiti. which apart from a lot of excitement (at least to us as developers), brings on some interesting features that are quite new (and possibly still unique) in Facebook.

We’ll give you a short intro on what’s in this new version and we will follow up with a more extensive feature list and more details on specific features.

Publish on Application Profile’s wall.
Publish on your Event Page’s wall.
“Publish on behalf of” (this can be huge).
Twitter oAuth safely connects your twitter accounts.
Auto discover and post pictures from Tweets posted via: TwitPic, TweetPhoto, PikChur, TwitGoo, YFrog and PickTor.
Auto-convert links in Tweets to Facebook Post Attachments.
Auto-exclude Tweets sent by Facebook’s Twitter app.
Twitter and Bit.ly accounts are now per user rather than per target (wall).
Add multiple Twitter and Bit.ly accounts once, use them everywhere.
Choose Twitter / Bit.ly accounts per feed or per target. Mix them as you like.
New Application Settings tab for managing global settings.
Revamped Feed Editors.
Limit the number of posts per cycle at the feed and the page level.
Customizable Source URL in Feeds.
Simplified permissions management.
All links posted to Facebook are now shortened with Bit.ly.
Ability to temporarily pause/resume publishing an entire wall or specific feeds.
Improved handling of Business Accounts.
Numerous bug fixes & performance optimizations
Lot’s of other small stuff that make RSS Graffiti shine under the hood as it glooms (*wishful thinking*) from the outside ;-)

There are quite a lot of things still to improve and even more things that we want to add in the future. We are already aware of a number of small annoyances here and there and we will be working in the coming days to iron them out. But we have put a lot of hard work in this version and really couldn’t wait any longer before we shared it with you. So please keep you feedback coming. Our goal now is to do frequent small releases to fix all pending issues of this release and then move on to greater goals.

Thankful for your support,
The RSS Graffiti Team

Publish on Facebook Application Profiles

rousso — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:55:00 +0200

For a long time, almost every application developer on Facebook was looking for a way to push RSS Feeds on their Facebook Application Profile Pages. We’ve been looking for ways to implement this for a long time too, but finally we have the solution built in RSS Graffiti 1.9.0 Beta.

We are so excited about it, we are writing this first blog post right after the release of RSS Graffiti 1.9.0 Beta, just to see this blog post get picked-up and posted on our wall!

"RSS Graffiti has just passed 50.000 targets!"

rousso — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:38:11 +0200

“RSS Graffiti has just passed 50.000 targets!”

- RSS Graffiti launched 8 months ago. Today it serves over 12.000 Facebook Profiles, over 32.000 Fan Pages and over 4.000 Facebook Groups, publishing on them stories from 85.000 feeds every 5-6 minutes!

Updates in the processing engine

rousso — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:07:52 +0100

We just released version 1.8.5 Beta of RSS Graffiti.

The focus of this version was the processing engine. What was wrong with it? It inexplicably slow.

RSS Graffiti started on September 2009 and has been working like a charm since then. Of course there are always things to improve or problems to solve. But mostly everything was smooth as far as the application itself was concerned. Until, one day, growth caught up with us. Since the beginning we had set the background processing engine to adjust its performance automatically so that all feeds are processed every 10 minutes. That seemed like a reasonable number given the circumstances.

But since RSS Graffiti has been doubling its users every month or so, at some point we realized that the processing engine could not keep up, So the 10 minute update cycle started getting bigger and bigger. On the 1st of December 2009, RSS Graffiti processing engine was running at 10 minute cycles and was processing all the 5.000 active targets (roughly 8.000 feeds) that were using the application at that time. (In RSS Graffiti terminology a “target” is the equivalent of a “wall” in Facebook).

By the end of 2009 the active targets were 7.000 and the processing cycle had climbed up to 20 minutes. This did not make much sense. We tried to adjust the various settings we had in place for that but it was obvious there was a bottleneck somewhere. Christmas holidays setback any efforts for 3 weeks and by the end of January 2010 RSS Graffiti has grown to 13.000 active targets (over 20.000 feeds). Processing cycle had climbed up to 40 minutes. 40 minutes was still much less than the usual hourly checks other similar applications do, but still it was way to far from our 10 minute goal.

We had to do something about it fast. It has been months since we were discussing improvements on the processing engine but we now had to go about them fast and figure out where the bottleneck was.

To cut a long story short, the problem was in the database server. We tried quite a few tricks for 6 days (nights actually) and we came up with a solution that was released today in version 1.8.5 Beta.

Processing cycle is now back down to 4 minutes and we know we can maintain our 10 minute performance goal without adding any new hardware until RSS Graffiti reaches roughly 50.000 active targets. After that our current hardware will run out of capacity, but don’t fear. The application is designed to run on an infinite number of servers which can simply be added to the data center and just play. We estimate that if we don’t do any further performance optimizations in the processing engine we will need a server for every 50.000 active targets.

So, for the moment this issue seems to be behind us. It’s now time to focus on more exciting things! We will first fix some pending issues that have been reported by our users in the past weeks. Then we move on to add a Facebook Tab feature to RSS Graffiti. We really have big expectations from the RSS Graffiti tab and we are eager to start working on it. But we will talk about these plans as the time comes.

We’ll keep in touch!

FaceBook Action Links Policy Changed.

dkomis — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:07:32 +0100

As we recently discovered the hard way (reading complaints of RSS Graffiti users), Facebook has changed its policy about Story Action Links to the stricter.

In short, only one custom Action Link is now allowed to be added to each story published on a wall and it can be up to 25 characters long in text. Any further Action Links submitted by applications will be ignored. This is applied immediately and is effective for all Stream Stories, new and old ones. Any previous stories published by applications will only show one Action Link, (whichever was first in the list), regardless of how many where originally included and there is no way to change that. Furthermore application developers are advised not to try to add further action links within the body or title part of stories.

We were a bit surprised to discover this change because if there was any announcement on this change we certainly must have missed it. It sure affects most Facebook applications possibly much more than it affects RSS Graffiti.

After this change, we did not have much choice left for RSS Graffiti. We had to choose between “Share” and “Full Story” as our one and only custom Action Link. And since there was already a way to direct the users to the full story by clicking on the story’s title or thumbnail, we picked “Share”. By the way we really do believe that a “Share” action link should have be added by Facebook together with the Like/Unlike action links and we really do look forward for Facebook to natively supporting this feature.

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the stories already posted, because we had submitted “Share” as the last Action Link, to make it more prominent. This link has now disappeared after this Facebook policy update.

Following you can find a short description of the new Action Links policy on Facebook as it appears on the developers WiKi…

Action Link Guidelines

Please observe the following guidelines for using action links in your Feed stories.

An action link is a succinct verb phrase that describes a contextual action.
- OK: “Become a fan”
- Not OK: “Are you a fan of Radiohead?”
An action link must start with a verb.
Each action link can contain only one verb.
- OK: “Watch the video”
- Not OK: “Watch the video and win a prize”
Action links cannot be deceptive.
Action links should not include unnecessary punctuation or formatting characters.
- Not OK: “Watch the video!!”
- Not OK: “Watch the video (you will love it)”
- Not OK: “[ Join Us! ]”
As a rule of thumb, action links should be 3 words or less.
Do not include calls to action in the Feed story body or headline.
A Feed story can contain only one action link with a max of 25 characters.

Hello World!

rousso — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:20:52 +0200

We are setting up the team blog of RSS Graffiti. Adding Disqus comments and Get Satisfaction widgets.

The plan is talk about the RSS Graffiti team adventures here and share whatever other useful but relevant thing we come about while developing this application and trying to turn into something useful for everybody.

Stay tuned.