Back in April we announced that we would discontinue Slifeshare within a couple of months. Well, today is the day. If you try to hit Slifeshare from now on, you will be redirected to the Slife Labs home page.
As we mentioned in the April post, Slifeshare started as an experiment and broke new ground in the space of lifestreaming. When it launched a year and a half ago, Twitter hadn’t reached escape velocity yet and Friendfeed wasn’t even on the map. So much has changed since then.
For those of you who tried and enjoyed Slifeshare, a big thank you. When we started Slife Labs, we decided to call it “Labs” because we wanted to be experimental and try different things, different ideas, with the expectation that some of them would stick and others wouldn’t.
Slifeshare didn’t stick but we are applying everything we learnt from it into new products, such as Slife 2.0 and Slife Teams, and make them even better. So it’s all good.
Ok, now that the Slife 2.0 private beta program is under way, it’s time to talk a little bit about our plans for Slifeshare and Slife for Windows. Both have been in the back burner for some time now and haven’t seen an upgrade in a few months.
For Slifeshare, not so good news. We have decided that we will be discontinuing the service as it is over the next couple of months. We still strongly believe in the concept of sharing media and activities as a way to stay in touch, but we would like to spend 100% of our energy on Slife and the problem of time/activity management right now.
Slifeshare started as an experiment back in February 2007 and got quite a bit of press, mainly because of how controversial it was. A year later, there are many other services similar to Slifeshare, the most notable one being FriendFeed. It is possible that Slifeshare might resurface in the future, but for now we are putting it to rest. We would rather do that than keep it running without the attention it deserves.
Now, Slife for Windows. Since we released the first public beta at the beginning of the year, there hasn’t been any updates. We are still completely behind Slife for Windows, but we had to re-organize ourselves for the big Slife 2.0 push, which we felt was badly needed, and had to keep the Windows version on hold.
We would like to keep the Mac and the Windows versions functionally equivalent. So we will be refreshing Slife for Windows as soon as the dust settles with the upcoming Slife 2.0 release for the Mac.
This morning we flipped the switch and brought Slife 1.3 and a new release of Slifeshare into the world. I am very excited about this new roll-out – this is really the best Slife yet, and we are also breaking some new ground.
Most of the new features had already been announced, except for one, the new Friends View. This is how it looks like:
The Friends View is meant to be used with Slifeshare. If you have an account and invite friends or colleagues, you can see what they are doing in real-time, through Slife itself.
Think of it as IM on steroids. You can share notes and see what your friends are listening to, see which online videos they’ve watched, which app they are using and more. This feature opens up a whole new dimension in live communications and social awareness. You can see the how-to for more details.
So, give it a try and let us know what you think. If you have Slife 1.2, just go to ‘Help>Check for Updates…’ and Slife will install the latest version for you.
And here we are, June 18th. As promised, we are releasing a new version of Slife and updating Slifeshare today. We couldn’t been happier to finally be able to get this stuff out the door.
Slife for Mac OS X is being upgraded to version 1.1. There are brand new features, improvements and bug fixes in this release. The big feature, of course, is that Slife now knows how to track application usage without any plugins. Plugins are still useful because they provide additional info. But when they are not available, Slife can still get some good work done.
As mentioned before, Slife is still free but you will need to purchase a license if you want Slife to track more than 3 applications at a time. A license costs US$34 and you can buy it at our site. One thing that is cool that we are doing this time is a Mac giveaway. To celebrate Slife 1.1, we are giving away a 13-inch White MacBook to one lucky Slife user who buys a license by July 12th 2007! $34 bucks might get you a Slife license and a new Mac. What a steal! Get a license and enter the drawing.
How about Slifeshare? In addition to several minor changes and tweaks in the interface, Slifeshare now supports additional activity types (videos, applications and notes) and implements a new privacy policy for web items. Instead of displaying the raw stream of web pages a user visits, Slifeshare now gives users full control over which web pages to post to their pages. Check the new Slifeshare tour for more details.
We are very excited about these releases and hope you are too. Feel free to send us your comments and feedback. Starting today, you can also reach us by instant messaging. We are ‘slifechat’ on iChat/AIM.
June 18th, that’s the day we are releasing Slife 1.1 into the world!
We were hoping to release it this week, but it was going to be too much of a struggle, so we decided against it. Next Monday gives us some breathing room in the form of extra QA time over the weekend to make sure that everything is in sync.
One of these days I should post about all the steps we go through when we release a new version of Slife. We follow a list to make sure that we hit all the nails at the right time, without skipping any important steps. It’s quite interesting.
Anyways, enjoy the last few days of Slife 1.0. The 1.1 is right around the corner. Oh yes, Slifeshare is also getting an upgrade, and a big one. It’s going to be fun.
We just released a bunch of great new features for Slifeshare today. We’ve been working on these for some time, so it’s great to finally be able to let you know about them. Here’s what’s new:
If you have a Slifeshare page, you can add or remove many of the features above under “Preferences”. If you don’t have a Slifeshare page yet, give it a try!
Recently we’ve been thinking of ways we can improve our community resources for Slife and Slifeshare. The truth is, there are tons of cool things we could do to get people involved, beyond having a forum and a wiki, and it would be fun to try out some community participation ideas.
In terms of our support infrastructure today, I would say the forum has been working out great. It’s clear the forum is a great resource. The wiki has been around for a while, people seem to enjoy it, but I wonder if having the wiki and the forum might actually be confusing sometimes (i.e I don’t know how to do X. Should I go read some how-tos in the wiki or post a question in the forum?). Right now the wiki is actually offline due to the server move, but we are planning to bring it back online. And of course we also have this blog.
We were brainstorming other things that we could do the other day and three ideas stood out, a live chat session, a Digg-style feature voting system and a mapping tool where everyone could mark where they are from. Here are some more details:
Anyways, these are just some ideas. Outside of community, we are also planning to create a section on the Slife Labs site with scenarios for using Slife and Slifeshare. The scenarios would illustrate how to use the tools for various tasks such as keeping track of time, staying in touch with other people, etc.
It’s been almost 2 months since the Slife 1.0 release. Time flies! You might have noticed the lack of posts over the last few weeks. That’s because we took a small break after the big 1.0 release push. But we are back at work putting the finishing touches on a couple of things that we plan to release soon.
Around the beginning of May, we should be pretty much ready to release the 1.1 version of Slife. In addition to bug fixes, it will have an “Export” feature and, most importantly, offer support for lots more apps. At last count, Slife 1.1 is slated to offer support for more than 40 apps.
When we release Slife 1.1, we will also release a minor upgrade to the Slifeshare web site, with improvements and additional tools to make the site easier and more fun to use.
So stay close, we have some new fun things coming down the pipe!
Over the next couple of days we will be moving Slifeshare to a new, more robust server infrastructure. So if you run into issues when trying to login, visit pages, etc, it’s because of the switch.
We already have the service running on the new server, so it really shouldn’t be too bad. We are pretty sure that Slifeshare will be on much more solid ground from now on and we don’t expect to have hosting problems like we did a couple of weeks ago. Should be much better from now on. We will post a quick update here when the transition is complete.
UPDATE: It’s done! Please let us know if you run into any problems.
Hey, welcome to the blog! This is the new place to find out what’s happening at Slife Labs. SL is a new company that we put together to help us improve Slife, work together with the community and also develop new fun and exciting products such as Slifeshare.
You are probably wondering what happened to Onlife? Well, Slife IS the new name for Onlife. We decided to change the name because there was a small issue related to the usage of “Onlife” and we thought that “Slife” actually reflects pretty well the things we are doing and the direction we want to go with the company. Together with the name change, we are also taking Slife out of beta today. As mentioned throughout the whole beta cycle, the goal has always been to make Slife more stable and I think it’s really solid right now. So the focus has not been on adding more and more features for the 1.0 release. In fact, there are less features available in this release than in previous ones. Give it a try, as per usual, Slife is free. And don’t forget to send us your feedback.
What about Slifeshare? Slifeshare is a whole new web product we are rolling out, that brings a new layer of community to Slife. We are really excited about it and think people will have fun with it. The idea is that you can have a space, a web page, where you can share with your friends of whoever else you want, stuff that you do online and in your computer. And this is something that can happen in real-time or not. For instance, you can enable your friends to see which web sites you are browsing right now, or which albums you are listening to. You can also let people see only your top sites, feeds and albums this month, year, day, etc. All you need to do is create an account at Slifeshare and configure your Slife client to connect to your Slifeshare account. That’s it. If you want to see what a Slifeshare looks like, you can check mine.
At Slifeshare, you can get an account for free, but we are also offering a Premium account with some additional features for $24 a year. We think it’s a good deal – $2 a month. It’s a win-win situation, you get more features and also contribute to our development efforts. This model where basic services are free and you pay for premium ones is called “freemium“. We think it can work pretty well and are going to give it a shot. As you will see, we don’t sell any ads on Slifeshare or Slife right now. If we ever do, we will probably go with a “public radio” approach – “this …. supported by ….” instead of Google AdWords. I suspect Google AdWords won’t work on Slifeshare pages at all and will amount to nothing but visual mess.
Expect a few glitches with Slifeshare in the beginning, since it’s a new web service and we haven’t experienced a very heavy load on it yet. Slife should be pretty stable, but let us know if you run into any problems as well. Over the next several weeks, we will be improving things behind the scenes and releasing a few more surprises along the way to keep things interesting!