Weekly Release for Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Hey folks,

In addition to the usual behind the scenes work and bug fixes, we have a new feature for you:

Invite your Windows Live Hotmail email contacts and tell your friends about Meetup!
We recently added the ability to share Meetup with your Gmail and Yahoo! contacts. Now you can do the same with your Hotmail contacts.

It works the same as Yahoo! and Gmail - for security (we never store your password), we guide you off Meetup briefly so you can log into your email, and then bring you back to Meetup so you can see a list of your contacts and then share Meetup with them. (And rest assured, we never use those email addresses for anything except to send that initial email).

You can try this out by finding the "Invite Friends" link in the footer, in the Promote section of a Meetup Group, and after you RSVP for a Meetup.

Finally, we have some very exciting news! So that we can bring you new features, enhancements and bug fixes faster, we're discontinuing our weekly Tuesday morning releases. Instead, we've set ourselves up to be able to launch whenever we have something ready to go live. This means we should be able to launch daily (or multiple times per day) if necessary.

More good news - we won't have to take the site down to do these launches. Over the past month, we have been working to speed up the time it takes to launch changes, while at the same time being able to do launches with the site still running. In fact, the past few Tue morning launches have actually had no down time!

We're excited because we can get the stuff we're working on out to you faster and better tested. We hope you're excited, too!

P.S. Given we won't be taking the site down anymore, we will also not be using the yellow bar announcement, except for cases when we do need to schedule site maintenance. To best see what features we are launching, you can receive email alerts by clicking "Track this discussion" (right above this post), or you can follow our blog

That's awesome Greg!! I'm so glad the upgrades won't distrub the site anymore!! Thanks for all your hard work, Meetup team!

Great news! Thanks, Greg!!!

Greg, I can really appreciate just how tricky that is - nicely done! Kudos to your team for pulling off a fairly difficult feat. Meetup is really growing into a very professional resource and its nice to hear about some of the behind-the-scenes technical excellence that's driving it.

Ken

Would it be possible then to create a brand new thread JUST for announcing changes, then lock it so no one but meetup can post to it?? So, to update it, meetup would unlock it, post, then lock it.

That way one can monitor just that one thread for new stuff. Less emails than monitoring the entire forum.

Oh ... almost forgot ... thanks for working to eliminate the downtime. I never noticed it here in Phoenix, you guys were usually done by the time I got up. But in a few months the time difference between east coast and Arizona will be two hours instead of three and it would start to affect ME, so I would care.

This is wonderful news! Thanks so much everyone for coming up with updates that will no longer have the site down! My group loves you for it too!

Would it be possible then to create a brand new thread JUST for announcing changes, then lock it so no one but meetup can post to it?? So, to update it, meetup would unlock it, post, then lock it.

That way one can monitor just that one thread for new stuff. Less emails than monitoring the entire forum.

Good call John.
A clear, concise list of things about to be released would help tremendously. Forewarned is forearmed, so it will be nice to know what surprises are in store.


Len

I hear you on taking a watch on this thread. I don't want to lock it down though as we do want to hear feedback (good and bad) when we launch.

We are looking at finding a new way to indicate new feature announcements in the near future, while keeping the yellow bar reserved for site maintenance issues.

Great news, thank everyone at Meetup HQ for all there efforts on this matter.