May 26

A couple of weeks ago both Facebook and Twitter held their respective developer conferences announcing new features, services and changes to their platforms. This post is about how those changes will affect you and Expono. Hint: It’s all for the better.

Twitter Changes

Twitter is going to drop support for third-party services accessing your account using only username and password. Third-party services will be forced to use OAuth to authenticate themselves, this is a good thing as it provides much better security for your Twitter account in regards to third-party services accessing it. Expono already today support both types of authentication. However, everyone who uses Twitter username and password on Expono today need to change to use OAuth instead. We will remove support for username/password authentication in the next update, planned May 30th. Twitter will remove this support for all third-party services on June 30th.

Facebook Changes

Facebook announced a complete new API based on the Open Graph protocol with lots of good news that will affect all users on Expono to the better. We are going to rewrite Expono’s Facebook integration to support these new cool features. Support for the new API will be rolled out in two separate updates where the goal of the first one is to make sure the current integration works seamlessly when Facebook shutdown their old API on June 1st. The second update will expand Expono’s Facebook support and bring the experience much closer to what we have envisioned which is a much tighter integration between photos on Facebook and Expono, and hopefully we can achieve true portable privacy between the systems. If you experience any oddities after June 1st, please, let us know.

UPDATE (2010-05-27)
Facebook won’t be able to meet the June 1st deadline. The new roll out date for the new data permissions feature will be June 30th. A link to Facebook’s announcement can be found here.

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Nov 30

The last two months we have been hiding in a cave that we call “The Dev Cave”. This cave cuts off all external communication. We have to physically go outside to answer support requests, write blog posts etc. That is why it has been rather quiet on the blog. Some of you have probably seen an update or two on Twitter, but even more so on Getsatisfaction, our support home, where we try to be quite active.

Ok, so what has been going on? We have been building some great stuff! Here are some highlights:

  • 700M+ people around the globe can log right in. No signup necessary. We support Google Account, Windows Live ID, Facebook, Twitter among others.
  • Improved Sharing (we are not done here, but it’s still an improvement). People you share to can browse around better, download photos, and most importantly they can comment, rate, and favorite photos without having to signup at all!
  • Open Profiles. Everyone has a profile (not only users), featuring comments, favorites, photos of…
  • Twitter OAuth Support. We talked about it. Now it’s implemented.
  • New language: Simplified Chinese
  • Slightly improved user profile pages.
  • API Updates. Please, check the dev pages.
  • Security improvements.
  • General tweaks here and there (better album titles)
  • Bugfixes (date bug fixed)

Stay put for a more detailed blog post about what this “under the hood” update means for the future.

The Update / Server Downtime

We are going to have a rather big update on Tuesday. It’s been a while since last time. Last update was in mid September. This update requires server re-configuration which means that Expono will be down for a short period of time on Tuesday, login will also be disabled for a couple of hours while we run a few tests. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience this may cause for you.

“Thanksgiving Sale” 40% Discount on Expono PLUS Accounts. Ends in less than 24 Hours!
We want to remind you that today is the last day you can purchase an Expono PLUS account with a 40% discount.

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