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!

Enhanced profiles
It’s always been a bit annoying that you can’t find out a little bit more about someone after you’re listened to a good boo. Slightly easier if you follow them on Twitter since you can check their profile there but that didn’t seem to make any sense. So we’re adding the ability to add similar information to your audioboo account. Name, bio, url etc. Small stuff but should be useful.

Here’s a screenshot I quickly nabbed off the staging server. Still very scrappy.

Alternative to Gravatar
We love Gravatar but we realise some people don’t. So in this next release we’re adding the option of uploading a picture from your computer. Just don’t try and take a 15 MB one off your camera – we’ll limit upload to 1MB.

Vanity URLS
We probably should have done this sooner. Now when you want to go to someone’s account on audioboo.fm you just type /name rather than the more cumbersome /profile/name. You don’t have to change anything. /profile/name will just redirect to the new url.

Oh, and we’ve moved the comments button!

Hopefully we’ll roll this one out by the end of the week. Someone is muttering about an ugly button that just has to go before then. It’s live. Still ugly but that’s the way we work. Launch and then improve. Enjoy!

Update: We now also include the attached photo when you upload to Posterous.

Took us a while but version 1.3 of audioboo got sent off to Apple at 4.30pm on the 8th January. Based on past experience, we thought it wouldn’t be okayed for 3/4 weeks. We were then pleasantly surprised to receive an email at 11.17pm the same day saying that they had approved the update. Kudos to Apple for really updating its review process. I think the last update took 3 weeks to be approved and that was with some major behind the scenes hassling.

Anyway. Audioboo 1.3. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there which won’t be obvious to the naked eye. Most of that is preparing for a future paid version (don’t worry; there’ll always be a free one) but I’ll try and list the major changes you may become aware of.

1. Welcome Georgia
In keeping with the next version of the website, we’ve introduced the font Georgia into the app. We think it gives a little bit more personality. Hope you agree. The pink was a bit of an experiment but we kinda think it works!

2. Not just recent boos
You can now choose to listen to followed, featured and popular boos. They are also boos near you, although this is somewhat experimental at the moment. We’d hoped to have a few weeks while Apple approved this to fine tune this but looks like we’ll have to issue a minor update instead in a month or so. However, we personally find these features quite ’sticky’ and browsable and hope you do too. Boos near you is a big server update, rather than anything to do with the app, so that means we can start to do some interesting location stuff on the web when we get a bit of time. If you have any great ideas, get in contact.

3. Detailed view
If you click the arrow next to each boo, you can now view extended information whilst listening, like the full title, tags, photo & location. We love this. Adds real context to the listening experience. We’ll be adding comments, follow, reply with a boo etc.. to this over time. Bear with us as we try and work out how to add functionality with simplicity. Thank you to those that helped us with this.

4. Accessibility
Some of the first people who contacted us after launch in March 09 were partially sighted. A number of them gave us valuable insight into which bits of the website worked with screen readers and we did our best to engage with them to make the site as accessible as possible. In this release, partially sighted or blind users with the 3GS iPhone now get a fully accessible application which will speak them information on 99% of the functionality

5. Quit & then append
In the previous versions, if you quit the app with a recording unpublished, that was it. All you could do was publish it when you next launched the app and start again. In this version, you can continue to record once you’ve relaunched the app. This was part of some bigger file structure changes but might have some interesting uses for people wanting to wrap up short daily updates into one boo every week, for example.

That’s a small selection of the new stuff. Some amazing things that didn’t get into this release but maybe next time. Rest assured that this one though cements a really solid server/app relationship that we should be able to mimic with other mobile platforms later this year.

You can download the updated App via iTunes.

One small suggestion during beer has now turned into a massive, totally metadata driven experiment to do just that – but without any human intervention on the rather dull process of editing stuff together. We’ve just successfully completed the first live test by tagging random bits of content from the last 20 days and running a script that found the original files and auto compiled them – with crossfades – into a single podcast. I had to pull the finished result off the server manually and upload it using the new upload ability but the concept has been proven.

So, if you can do that with tags, you can repeat the process with people you follow, with featured boos and boos by location. In fact, you should potentially be able to create a podcast – or a radio program – using any bit of the metadata we collect.

Thanks to all those people whose audio we used: @flashboy @channel4news @britisharmy @heatherataylor @markusrill @Jason_Cobb @bdoaccountant @documentally @caulkinTheTimes @ash_matadeen @tonyblackburn @se1 @benjamin_cook @bbcoutlook @psmith @blueswirl and, of course, the boobot at the end.

Personalised audio programs just got a little bit closer…

Update
And we’ve just tried the same experiment with time limited boos from a single account. Very rough but this one also includes some testing on finding audio silence and ending the recording if it’s longer than some mad equation the team came up with!

What we’re now testing, for Pro users (currently The Royal Opera House and Open University but a few more are on the way), is the ability to embed that functionality within their own websites. So, for example, if you’re a radio station and want to easily allow people to send you audio that you can moderate before publishing on your own site and at audioboo.fm. Or a news site that wants a centralised account to which named reporters can easily publish too.

We’re currently implementing this as a pop up, which can cause all kinds of problems in certain browsers. So, I’ve embedded the functionality here in order to be able to test it in as many different browsers and operating systems as possible. You can too, if you like! Note: for this test, you’ll need to be logged into your account at audioboo.fm.

When we launched Audioboo way back in March (and that seems like a lifetime ago), we got a wee bit of flak from peeps because it only worked on the iPhone. Fair enough really. People wanted Android, they wanted Blackberry, they wanted Nokia, Windows Mobile, Sony Ericson and all the rest. They wanted audioboo for their phone. How nice is that? But difficult to really deliver on.

That would be some serious development across multiple platforms for a small, cash strapped team like ourselves. We managed to get it onto Android a few weeks ago, mainly due to a great developer and our belief that it’s going to a be a pretty dominant platform very soon. We’ve also been working on a Nokia version for some time but it’s just really difficult to get things right on the Symbian platform and we do like things just right. So the upshot is that it’s currently just not feasible for us to cover every mobile device that’s out there. Sorry.

But we do sincerely hear the pain of users who are unable to, well, be users at the moment. It’s always horrible to say no, sorry, we can’t. So we’ve been moving features around the whiteboard for a while and are finally pleased to announce the release of a very early christmas present for you all.

So welcome browser record/upload. From this Friday (it may be Thursday but we’re hedging our bets here) we’ll be opening up some new functionality for you to all start playing with. Using Firefox or Safari ( it ‘may’ work in IE now but may not – that’s first on our list of things to fix), you’ll be able to either upload an existing audio file of your own or record straight into audioboo.fm via any attached microphone. Then, just like on the iPhone, you can add a picture to go with your boo, type in a title, add tags and then enter a location by clicking or searching on a Google Map. It then does all the stuff a mobile recording will do – appears on audioboo.fm, available to download as a podcast and fires off to the social network of your choice. If you spend a lot of time sitting at your desk and don’t have an iPhone or Android device, we hope you’re going to love this.

The limit is still 5 minutes but the companies signed up to our nascent Audioboo Pro service get longer, as well as the ability to embed this functionality within their own web site. This is currently a big media company tool, already sold to the Royal Opera House, UBC Media and someone else we can’t mention yet but should be able to next week.

We’ll aim to launch a slimmed down paid version of Pro for serious bloggers, independent journalists et al early next year but bear with us on that.

Do we know how you’re going to use Browser Boo? Nope. It might be daily uploads of those audio recordings that have been sitting in a bag under the stairs up till now. It may be copyright material (which we’ll take down, by the way). It could be your existing podcasts. It could be anything. How exciting is that? Even since I started writing this, @Barc_alpha has already suggested that @Dr_Black use it to open up Bletchley Park’s audio archive to the world. What a fantastic idea. We’re sure you’ll have a ton more.

As you may tell, we’re really excited about this. For a few reasons. Firstly, it opens up the audioboo platform to a much larger audience, including those wanting to share pre-edited material, archive recordings and more. We really do want to become the single stop service for all your audio needs, whether that recording, listening or sharing.

Secondly, it moves us much closer to our vision of enabling real conversations on Audioboo. Not realtime streaming ones – the quality issues have always made us veer away from that. But the ability for people to respond to audio with audio itself will be a powerful one. We’re not there yet – some pretty complex database stuff to address first (apparently). But with the ability to record directly from the browser, we’ve moved a step closer towards this.

So have a go when it’s launched. We’d love to know what you think. Upload some audio you’ve had sitting on your hard disk for ever, share it with the world and see what happens. We’re able to accept pretty much any audio format (and if we can’t then et us know). Or get a mic (a webcam should do) and have a go at saying something to the people you know or maybe will know in the future.

UPDATE. Oops – The Next Web covered this earlier

View Larger Map

Or, for a more linear approach, you can listen via the audioboo digital mission tag

The mission was Digital Mission and it was organised with SAS effectiveness by Sam & Emily from Chinwag and the peeps from UKTI. It’s really exposed us to the US market and I think we’ll be back soon…

So enter Tweetminster at the Liberal Party Conference. They did a fascinating collection of boos with Paddy Ashdown, Jo Swinson MP, Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty and more. And we’ve just heard via Twitter that Krishnan Guru-Murthy of C4 News is going to do the same at the Labour conference.

I think with the UK election already in the phony war stage, this could get interesting!

UPDATE 30th September
The Labour Party Conference was simply brimming with boos, thanks to Tweetminster & C4 News. Some amazing stuff captured, including Ed Balls, Michael Crick, Chris Eubank, David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett and Peter Mandelson. If there is an election in April 2010, there’s a strong chance Audioboo will be a big part of it.

Queued upload does what is says. After you’ve recorded a boo, it gets put into a queue. That means you can either record a new one immediately or create multiple recordings when you’re nowhere a wifi or 3G connection. We can ping the location data over the puny Edge connection, so you can be safe in the knowledge that you can record as many boos as you want and you’ll still get all that lovely geo-location attached to your boo.

Tried it on a first generation iPhone on the way home and worked a treat. Got the location data and uploaded it without any fuss when I booted Audioboo up on my home wifi connection (ignore the buzz. That’s my Mikey not liking something).

We expect to get this into the App Store in October (when Apple will approve it, who knows). But there’s a catch to this feature. You’re going to have to pay for it. It’ll end up being an annual subscription service around about £24 a year. But we haven’t yet got the full feature set that will make want to you part for the cost of 3 bottles of reasonable wine. So, for the moment, it’ll be a one off payment – probably around £3. But don’t hold us to that.

Worth it? We think so. It’s a much needed addition to the service. Hope you think so too.