Happy Birthday Audioboo!

It’s Audioboo’s first birthday this fine day of 12th March.

Phew! That went quickly. Just a year ago today, we received this email from the App Store:

“The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale.”

Our relief was palpable. We’d already been rejected twice: once for using the wrong kind of button (“Your application, AudioBoo, cannot be submitted to the App Store because it uses a standard ContactAdd button for an action which is not its intended purpose”) and again a few weeks later “because it allows uploading and sharing of objectionable content”.

We got round that by listening to every single boo that was recorded. In fact, we even rigged up iTunes in the office so it would fade the music out and play boos as soon as they came in. A few weeks of the most surreal radio experience ever entailed.

It’s been a fantastic year and one not without its challenges. Running out of server space and running out of money were major preoccupations, as was what the hell to do with the beast we had initially spawned as a side project. I’ve just looked at this very early walkthrough of the app and it’s hard to believe we launched with half the website not working!

Throughout the year we’ve struggled to respond to the demands of our users. After launch we added Twitter posting, then Tumblr, Friendfeed and Posterous. We drew funny database plans on the wall so we could implement the notion of following people, comments and ratings. We updated the iPhone app twice and took our first hesitant steps with Android. We did a huge amount of work on the backend that no one ever sees to try and keep our – no, your – data as organised and safe as possible.

It’s also fantastic that we got hold of the latest edition of PC Pro magazine this morning and audioboo is No 1 in the top 100 Apps EVER.  – Update – here’s a pdf of it.

So, to mark that, and the 12 months of sheer hard slog, we’ve a few treats to share with you.

Firstly, the beginnings of the new look website go live just after noon today. We never really got a chance to design it when we launched but today marks the first step towards a more organised site. The most important thing about it is that it is now iPad compatible – HTML5 audio playback which degrades gracefully to Flash in older browsers. We’ve also got a fab new intro video with a voiceover sent in via audioboo by the brilliant Robert Llewellyn of Carpool fame.

And, as a token of our appreciation to our most loyal users, we opening up access to the beta version of queued uploads on the iPhone. This allows you to stack boos even if you haven’t got network coverage and upload them later. Anyone who has uploaded more than 20 boos in the 12 months up to 15th March 2010 (so you have 2 more days to do a couple more if you haven’t) will find their app with the new functionality on Monday morning.

That’s it. Off to do more work but thanks to the rest of the audioboo team and to all of you out there who have helped us get this far. Here’s to the next 12 months!

Update: And a very nice birthday boo from Mr Stephen Fry ends our day nicely!

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