Enhanced Facebook boos

Our new Facebook embedded player is now live!

When we launched in March, we did a very quick and dirty integration into Facebook. One line of text, a link to audioboo.fm and that was it. Not great.

Now we’ve moved on a bit as a company and have a very new, proper & grown up, COO (Chief Operations Officer) on board in the person of Nick Hancock. He likes to spend his time looking at numbers & statistics and the like, as well as hassling me about the state of our bank balance. Apparently this is normal and not the result of the early onset of a peculiar kind of autism spectrum disorder. So he noticed that Facebook referrals to Audioboo posts were something like a fifth of those from Twitter. Now, that may say something about the popularity of Twitter but we reckon it’s probably more to do with our shoddy presence on the Facebook platform.

So, after a developer huddle, a long period of tearing our hair out about the dubious ways that Flash handles mono audio and some grumbling grappling with the Facebook API, we can proudly annouce our new, enhanced & lovely Facebook integration is live.

The player expands to this size once you’ve clicked on the play link. You’ll see the old way of doing it below the new player – just a tiny audioboo logo and a link back to audioboo.fm. A vast improvement methinks and hats off to Jon & Steve for the work they put into this.

In the bigger picture, this is all part of our commitment to the audioboo platform – an ambitious attempt to make audioboo the de facto way people record, publish & distribute social audio. You may or may not have seen the competition. We’re a long way off our goal – only on iPhone at the mo and the owners of a very messy website. But that’s the ambition. We’ll hopefully have a few announcements in the next few months that cement that vision.

In the meantime, try out the new Audioboo Facebook. You’ll need to re-enter your login details for Facebook in your audioboo.fm settings to gain access to the new player but we hope you agree that it’s worth it.

Oh, and if anyone is really remotely interested in the boo in that image, you can listen to it here.

Development, News