Google Loves Muziboo
Today I was checking logs for muziboo and I found a visit for the keyword “upload music” … I checked and found out that this was not a paid visit. I checked on google and found that Muziboo is result 47 of 19,200,000. This is pretty neat as upload music is a very competitive keyword and a few months back, we were not even in the top 200 results.
Sachin Bansal from flipkart later pointed out to me that Muziboo ranks number one in Google India results (pages for India) out of 98,900 results beating quite a few popular websites ….
Thanks Google …. we love you too!
Caffeine Coated Valentine
Well Valentine’s day came and went but left lot of sweet memories for us and a lot of Muziboo users. Particularly for Vikram and Shourya who with their band members gave a great musical evening to all those present in Brew ha ha
DJ Deepak covered parts of the event on video and here it is for you (thanks to him)
We met a lot of other Muzibians too: Ishwary, Jijin, Vasu and others. Thank you guys for coming over … hope to see you again
Muziboo presents its first gig!
It was definitely a great moment for us when it was finalised that Muziboo would arrange for a gig with its bands in Brew Haha cafe on the 14th of Feb, in the context of Valentine’s day. ‘Grubby Halo’ Vikram JS and ‘Unkown River’ Shourya Sarcar came forward immediately to participate. It is the first of the kind for Muziboo and we definitely plan to have more of such gigs, jam-ups and workshops in the future. As we are stationed in Bangalore, this has kicked off from this place. We would be more than willing to help in arranging or co-ordinating such events for outsiders too. Do drop in at Brewhaha, if you are in Bangalore and all your thoughts and inputs on such offline meet-ups will be appreciated! P.S :Venue and other detailsBrew Haha cafeNear JNC,Koramangala,Bangalore. Date & Time : 14th Feb ‘08, 7 - 8.30 pm.
Sidebar gone! (well almost)
We have been talking to a lot of people lately and seeing our logs and analytics and what we found out was that the sidebar that you see after logging in was not being used that much .. and
a. it was taking up a lot of space
b. It was a little confusing …
c. The layout would change everytime you login and logout
So we have retired the sidebar and you will see it only when you go to my home tab (and yes .. the home is now known as the my home .. as its not just any home .. its your home)
To reach your scribbles etc quickly, we have a link to your scribbles on the top bar (neat logout etc) …
Do let us know what you guys think!
New Muziboo Design: Day 1
Finally after a couple of months of brainstorming and work, rolled out our new design last night. Its fun to see how your months of work can change the look of the site completely in just a few minutes. I guess Abhinav was the first user to see the fresh new Muziboo look and also the first few bugs 
The day was quite interesting as lots of people told me what they felt about the new design. A large number of people actually liked the design and a few users did not. There were a good number of replies to my posts in lounge and questions on muziboo. Some folks even wrote to me in my scribble block expressing what they feel about this new design.
It was also quite interesting to see some of the decisions we made having the desired effect .. things like more users searching for their kind of music and discovering music by tags etc. These were some of the things we surely want picking up in Muziboo so that everyone can find the music they would wanna listen to. Same holds good for the way we feel groups should work. Nithya has already written about it here
I spent most of the evening today fixing some issues with the new design. The “remember me” bug has been fixed and you can now stay logged in for two weeks if you want to. There were a couple of other bug fixes that should make a few more things consistent and more usable. As I said in the discussions, next few weeks, we will be fixing a lot of stuff and improving the flow and usability to make this design a really cool one. If you have any feedback or issues, please do let me know and I will make sure its fixed quickly
Have fun
Prateek
Old Muziboo is retiring
If you were trying to reach Muziboo.com and have landed here then it means that we are retiring old Muziboo .. don’t worry we will be back in less than an hour with a fresh new Muziboo
Happy Waiting
Muziboo Team
Goodbye Mussawer!
Today Nithya and I went to a few colleges to participate in the NEN Eweek 08 celebrations. When we came back and checked Muziboo we read the post by Aka Ali about Mussawer leaving us all. He died today. We were shocked. We simply could not believe what we read. Mussawer was one of our early users and I had exchanged quite a few scribbles and many orkut scraps with him. He would always signoff his messages with the line “Always Stay Happy” and I found it very very sweet. I feel it is unfair that young men like him should die but we can’t help but accept God’s decisions ….Here is a song from him that I really liked
The song is called Tou Mila and Mussawer had uploaded it about a month back … suddenly feels so long back … Please join me in praying for him and wishing that his soul rests in peace … may he live long through his music
Prateek & Nithya
Muziboo Interface Redesign
When we launched Muziboo.com, we wanted to get the website up and running really quickly so that we can see the initial user reaction and understand our market better. In retrospect, I think it was a good move as that gave us good insights into what people look for, how our service can be different and it also helped us build a strong community. I was (am) inspired by the getting real book and Muziboo was a true getting real project. We got the website up in about a month since we hit upon the idea and in about two months, more than 100 people were using the service.
However in order to get the service up and running quickly, we could not spend too much time on the interface. We did make sure that the service is usable and the design is not so cluttered but the design did not have a long life. We have already reached a point where our users feel we need a new redesign. As I wrote in one of the earlier post, we have been thinking/working on the new design for almost last two months and its finally almost ready. We have had a great discussion at Muziboo.com about what features to add and we have added a few of those in the current release and will be adding more over the next month or so. The design should go live sometime next week and we are quite sure that it will be a visual treat apart from being much more usable than the current one.
As an early peep, I will put a few screenshots from the new design here and let everyone comment on it
Barry wonderbrawl
That sure is a weird name for a song title! or so i thought when i casually clicked to listen to wonderbrawl for the very first time, a few hours after the upload.For a second or two it made me wonder if it was the original Wonderwall number…phew, i slowly started crinking the corners of my mouth and half way through the song smiling real wide and by the time it ended I was really laughing out loud!!. Thats “Wonderbrawl”!! and it definitely lives up to its description,”A mad mix of Wonderwall”
Prateek and myself got to know that Barry(Bharat) sings in Bangalore in Opus on its Karaoke nights and this was reason enough for us to make a trip to that place and we insisted he sings Wonderbrawl…I swear he is a good showman and he just doesnt sing it, he PERFORMS it. Guys, if you ever have a chance dont miss it
Muziboo: The Journey so far (Part 2)
Part 1 of the series can be found here
Around November of 2007, we took a small break to visit Mumbai. We decided to club this with a Muziboo Mumbai Users Meet and finally we met three of our users, Nagesh, Ashwyn and Sooraj there .. it was certainly fun as Nagesh has been a very encouraging user right from the day he stumbled upon Muziboo. Nagesh runs a very popular music community himself called RadioIdli. Mumbai meet was great fun even though we could not meet a lot of people due to the diwali time. Below is a picture from the meet
After coming back from Mumbai, we attended the Barcamp Bangalore, 5th Edition. Barcamp was the first time we talked to so many people about Muziboo and we even conduted a session on online community building in India. There was a lot of discussion on blogging in barcamp and several bloggers mentioned us after that. We saw a lot of the barcampers signing up and even uploading .. most notably Sandil, Joseph, Prasanth. Below is one of the great songs from Joseph from the movie Om Shanti Om. We met Shourya in barcamp (an early Muziboo user). In fact Shourya was kind to shoot a video of me talking about Muziboo and host it on his blog
Barcamp gave us lots of good insights and we made some changes to our song page based on the recommendations people gave us. To our suprise and ofcourse delight, our activity went up a lot of the barcamp .. especially in terms of comments. It was around the same time that we increased the upload cap from 2 songs a day to 10 songs a day and that caused the music on Muziboo to double in just two months. Even before we attended the barcamp, we had been thinking of doing a redesign .. but after barcamp we knew that this has got to be our priority number 1. We started working on our redesign but not just on a cosmetic redesign even though that will be the most visible change once the new design is rolled out. We also started thinking about how we can make the service more “musical” and ofcourse more useful for our users. One of the key points we have identified was that we need to let users take and use their music in whatever form they want once they have uploaded the track here. It could be letting people download (if they want) .. embedding the music on their blog or one of the several other things they can do with their music. Last few months we have been working at the new interface and several of these and more exciting features .. such as the ones suggested by our users here. This year will see a lot of new things coming to Muziboo and we are sure Muziboo will become an exciting place for all the budding musicians.
This has pretty much been the journey so far .. I am sure there are exciting times ahead for us and for Muzbians (Vasudha used this term for the first time I think) …. so keep uploading and keep exploring great music
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