Release on Dec 25, 2007: Be able to edit Life Roll

Add ability to edit Life Roll (previously called MyGrowUp Roll):

1. User can select more photos in their period to be in Life Roll.
2. Private period will not be in Life Roll.
3. Share Life Roll to anyone with email address

Release on Dec 16, 2007 - MyGrowUp Roll and Import Picasa photo

We added an exciting feature - MyGrowUp Roll

MyGrowUp Roll is a flash slide show that will display your selected pictures (if no select, will use Period Picture) in the timeline sequence. This release only roll your period picture, no selection yet. (next release will allow user to select which picture to be in the roll)

Summary of the release:

1. MyGrowUp Roll - Currently only roll your pictures set as Period Picture. The roll will be displayed in profile page as well as FBML window.
2. Now user can add photo to their MyGrowUp profile from Picasa
3. Make Slideshow in period to be displayed in separate window
4. Small fix: store login timestamp into db when login from Facebook

Release on Dec 9, 2007

Add view count and misc Layout improvements:

1) Add view count and visitor numbers, also show pictures of the visitor if click on # of visitor URL. This also can further to be used to award users who get most visitors

2) Enabled photo/video/other/journal tabs even though the items inside it is 0. This is in order not to confuse user where to add journal/video when the tab is disabled

3) In horizontal timeline, do not grey unselected period icons.

Release on Dec 1, 2007: Improve Facebook integration

1. Set default period picture (use the first photo in the period) if user did not set.
We consider this as a important feature to allow user and friends to see a more vivid MyGrowUp FBML profile.

2. Add "Add this application" button in FBML profile to entice a visiting friends to sign up.

3. Change MyGrowUp FBML profile whenever change period or item

4. Make it possible to display period picture in FBML profile if the picture is a Facebook photo

5. Display private icon for period in FBML profile, also disable click on private period.

Release on Nov 29, 2007: Improve Facebook integration

Important improvement for Facebook integration:

1. Display MyGrowUp app timeline profile page to Facebook friends (FBML).

This change is important, it can enable friends to see your grow-up periods immediately so entice friends to click on your MyGrowUp profile

2. Clean up layout to fit item list page into Facebook canvas
(make three columns of items if left nav bar is not hid)

3. Use Facebook new publish mini-feed api (publishTemplate..)

4. change Admin page to show number of user sign up easily

Historical Moment for MyGrowUp.com

*** Nov 18, 2007 *** will be a historical date for MyGrowUp.com.
MyGrowUp.com get 70 subscribers from Facebook in a short 2 hours time frame during evening with a $80 advertise budget during these two hours.
From today, we are confident that MyGrowUp.com will grow fast even with very limited Marketing budget. We welcome investors, but we are not very eager to do so at present. We want to grow MyGrowUp.com to a certain size until we actively search for fundings.
Here is our new Advertise layout:
--------------------------------
MyGrowUp
Application


Timeline photo, video in
your profile. Your friends
love to navigate your digital
life from childhood to today.
A true forever memory!


Congradulations!

New Release on Nov 16, 2007: Tightly Facebook Integration

Today released a almost 100% integrated Facebook MyGrowUp application.


Here is About MyGrowUp Application wording in Facebook
------------------------------------------------------
A better way to organize your Facebook photos/videos.

From your childhood to now, different periods of your life have been recorded on thousands of digital photos and videos. You will want to enjoy memory of certain periods such as your first grade in school or your honeymoon trip, but easily sorting out these photos/videos has always been a challenge, but not anymore.

We are sure you will love using MyGrowUp's timeline based digital media organizer to streamline photos/videos on your Facebook profile.

Following is message I send to some current MyGrowUp application users in Facebook:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for your using MyGrowUp to organize photos/videos in you grow-up life.

Now MyGrowUp application is 100% integrated into Facebook platform. All you need to do is to click on MyGrowUp application and login to MyGrowUp once and only once.

With the new MyGrowUp application, you can enjoy following new features:
1. Organize your Facebook photos in MyGrowUp timeline based periods (click "Add Item" button to add photos from Facebook)
2. Notify your Facebook friends through mini-feed of changes you made in your MyGrowUp profile.
3. Your Facebook friends can view your MyGrowUp non-private periods.

Please give us more precious feedback.

Thanks
MyGrowUp team


Here is new wording in Facebook application search result
--------------------------------------------------------
Timeline your digital life
By MyGrowUp.com
Organize your Facebook photos, videos in the timeline based albums. You friends love to navigate your photos and videos from your childhood to today. MyGrowUp application gives you place to enjoy forever memory


Here is wording for Ads on Facebook
------------------------------------
MyGrowUp Application
Timeline photo, video in your profile. Your friends love to navigate your digital life from childhood to today. A true forever memory!

New Release on Oct 28, 2007

This release is to start a award compaign, accumulate points for each friend a user added. Detail please see http://www.mygrowup.com/growup/topPointsUsers.htm?cover=1

Also changed hompage to emphasis Britiney and Michael's profiles as demo profiles

New Release on Oct 08, 2007

Add a new important feature: Send period album URL to email. Only email receiver can view the period. The URL sent out can be invalidate by period owner by re-generating a new URL.

New Release on Oct 6, 2007

A major release to improve user interface:

1. A much cleaner item list page:

• Hide links previously on each item to a action arrow button.
• Move photo/video/journal tabs to left side, remove redundant photo/video/journal menus on left site
• Left side menus can be arranged by drag-drop

2. A professional looking slide-show, which will show big photos and can change background color
3. A more user-friendly way to add new timeline period - add new period in-place instead of in a new page
4. Organize item in All Category only

New Release on Sept 3, 2007

1. Use www2 as web servers (faster to deploy)
2. Get Original Date of a digital photo, and show a conflict sign if the date does not match with period. (Scanned file do not have original date, so no conflict sign shown)
3. Automatically load next page when click last detail view photo of current page. (need more improvement using synch call)
4. If photo size is less than 600x450, do not display big photo icon

New Release on Sept 1st, 2007

This is a important release related to photos:

1. A much improved photo batch upload with much user-friendly interface such as photo preview, photo rotate, real-time progress, resume broken transmit and much more.

2. A larger photo are saved for better view

Release on Aug 26, 2007

Nothing but improve home page looking and feel

In next release, we are going to improve user experience on batch photo upload and give user a 1M photo

Major changes in this release are on home page to increase search engine awreness:
(see http://www.mygrowup.com)
1. Move all js down to the bottom page
2. Add more relevance keywords description in title meta tag
3. Add more keywords related wording at bottom of home page
4. Re-write head line wording to:
Not just another photo, video sharing site, MyGrowUp provides an unique timeline-based digital life album which is secure for you and your children.
(Previously it is: In this world's best scrapbook you can anchor the fleeting memories of life into a lasting MyGrowUp.com profile.. (not exactly..))

New release on Aug 05, 07 - Paging, inline edit, new Homepage

This new release included following changes:
1. Advanced paging functionality on large item list page. We used AJAX to allow user to manually incrementally load all items for a period tag or global tag.
2. Inline edit an item instead of go to a new page. Good for user experience
3. New homepage aims at the first time visitors. We are trying to make homepage simple and "to the point". A new catching title and new simplified animation were included. Following is the snapshot of the new homepage:

MyGrowUp.com banner

New release on July 23, 2007

New Release include following features:

1. Group - Group profile can be built by group members.
- Share profile through group is quick and easy

2. Organize items. Now you can order your items by drag-drop

Security Levels and Rules in MyGrowUp.com

How to view a public profile in MyGrowUp.com

I will use Michael Jackson profile as example:

1. Search for [Mich Jac] (or [ja m], michael etc), click on Michael Jackson link in the search result page


2. Now you will see Michael's profile is organized in time-line and featured tags shown in the following picture.
(Featured tags are shortcut to see items within the topics you may most interested. the owner of the profile can specify which tags to be featured tags)






3. You can either click on (A) time line period of Michael's profile, or click on (B) featured tag. You may even click on (C) Tag tab directly to select tags


If the period or tag you clicked contains both photo and video, photo tab will be displayed by default. If there is no photo, then video tab will be displayed.


From this simple illustration, you will see that MyGrowUp.com is the best web service site to manage personal lifetime media.

Next time, I will discuss how MyGrowUp.com provides most convenient security tools to secure personal media and easy for selected friends to share.

New Release - Enhanced security functionality

Now user can define own Friend Types and assign friends to different Friend Type. At Period level, user can specify which friend types can access this period.

MyGrowUp security settings have three hierarchy:
- The first level - profile security,
- The second level - period security
- The third level – items security
An item can be viewed only after you pass all three level security checks

First level security check: Profile

A profile can be set to either Private, Friend, or Public
- Private – No one can see this profile
- Friend – Only friends of this profile can enter the profile
- Public – Anyone can enter the profile

Second level security check: Periods
After passing the First Level Security check, the second level security check will decide if a period can be accessed or not. A period is set to either Private, Restricted Friend, Friend, or Public
- Private – No one can see this period
- Restricted Friend – Some Friend Sets can be assigned to a period. Only the
friends in these friend sets can access this period
- Friend – Only friends of this profile can access this period
- Public – Anyone who passed level 1 security can access this period

Third level security check: Items
Finally, after passing first and second level security check, a item can be viewed or not will depend on security setting of the item. An item security can be set to either Private or Public
- Private – No one can see this period
- Public – Anyone who passed level 1 and level 2 security can access this period

New profile: Britney Spears

We put Britney Spears profile in MyGrowUp.com: http://www1.mygrowup.com/growup/user/bspears

This is a public editable profile, we encourage you to edit the profile to make the profile the best profile of Britney Spears on Internet

MyGrowUp.com Version 06/2007 Screenshot

Richest Coverage of Michael Jackson by MyGrowUp.com

We put full coverage of Michael Jackson's grow up history in MyGrowUp.com: http://www1.mygrowup.com/growup/publicPeriodList.htm?userId=15114

We are continues to enrich Michael Jackson profile by organize his Bad Tour, Dangerous Tour, History Tour, Victory Tour etc into easy to navigate by time line and tag.

How to organize your photos, videos and any files in MyGrowUp.com

In this era of digital information representing various parts of everyone’s life, MyGrowUp.com solves one big problem for everyone – how to streamline the cluttered digital information of your entire life.

Starting from your babyhood to now, you (or your parents) can submit photos, videos, journals, school essays, and nearly everything to MyGrowUp.com.

1. In "Period" page, create your album in time line.
   
   
   In every year, you can also create multiple albums.
   
   
   
2. In "Period Detail" page, you can view items in different layouts.
   
   • Icons list.
   • Detail view.
   • Slide show.
     
     
     
     
3. When you add or edit photo, video and any other item in MyGrowUp.com, you can attach different tags on one item. Then in "Tag" page, you can view items by selected tags.
   
   
   
   

How to add friends to view your MyGrowUp profile?

MyGrowUp is private and secure: only the people you wish to view your profile will be able to do so. Once you sign up to MyGrowUp you can invite your friends and relatives to see your photos, videos, journals and any type of files in MyGrowUp.

1. Make sure that the share type of your user account is "Friend". You can change it in "Edit Profile" page. (In "Periods" page, click "Edit Profile" link to open it).
   
2. Ask your friends sign up in MyGrowUp.com with "Friend" share type.
   
3. Go to "Family/Friends" page, Click "Add Friend/Relative" link, select friend type.
4. Wait for your friend accept you as a friend.
5. Once your friend accept you as a friend, you and your friend can see each other from "Family/Friends" page.

Use above steps, you can add relatives to see your profile.

If your account share type is "Relative" and your friend's account share type is "Friend", you can see his profile but he will not be able to see your profile.

How to build a large social networking web site: (MyGrowUp.com)

I have been designed and implemented two large scale web sites. MyGrowUp.com is the latest one. Here I would like to share the secrets of how to build a large web site which uses 100% open source solutions and can scale up to hundreds millions of user subscriptions. Here are 10 things I am going to talk about:

1. Can I build a large web site with all free open source programs? what is "The Gang of Four" open source architecture?
2. How to scale your database so you can easily add more database servers to serve increasing subscribers.
3. What is the best open source cache solution to maximize database server performance
4. How to store tera bytes of multimedia files by adding cheap file servers dynamically.
5. How to load balance your web applications so you can easily add more web servers to serve billions of requests
6. What are other open sources that are necessary for a large website such as Video convert and streaming, server healthy monitor etc
7. What is the best solutions for hosting your web site (If your funding is limited, never go to big hosting company such as RackSpace, also never host by yourself)
8. How to make your web site known to mass without spending big marketing money
9. How to use Javascripts to design some fancy web 2.0 interface (such as those used in MyGrowUp.com)
10. How to integrate your service into Facebook F8 platform

Addition: How to implement a small web site for your business

Internet provides the best foundation to anyone who got a good idea and can put it into success without having funding from venture capital. I benefit from it and I would like others to share it.

Here I will talk about question 1 in the list. I will get motivation to continues on question 2 to 10 next time if there are many diggs on this article. Besides, I do not have complete answer on some item such as Facebook integration because I am still working on it.

1. Can I build a large web site with all free open source programs? what is "The Gang of Four" open source architecture?

Yes, 100% yes. You can build a large and reliable web site without paying a penny on software. The phrase "The Gang of Four" is another term for the popular LAMP (or LAMJ, so I called): Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php/Pearl (or Java). People may ask - are they reliable? I do not want to spend long writing to answer this question. Here I just give some well known web site I know which used these programs:
1. Linux: Even big enterprise such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs used Linux as production servers
2. Apache Tomcat: Walmart is one of the largest online shopping site, its massive web servers are based on Apache Tomcat
3. MySQL: A lot of Goolge, Yahoo services are using MySQL, others include MyGrowUp, Digg, Facebook and more.
4. Php, Java: too many to list here.


Please digg.

Upgrade JSTL from 1.0 to 1.1

In MyGrowUp.com, we upgraded JSTL from version 1.0 to 1.1.

1. Use Tomcat >5.0
2. Download jstl.jar and standard.jar to WEB-INF/lib
3. Change include tag from
<%@ taglib prefix=”c” uri=”http://java.sun.com/jstl/core” %>
<%@ taglib prefix=”fmt” uri=”http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt” %>
to
<%@ taglib prefix=”c” uri=”http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core” %>
<%@ taglib prefix=”fmt” uri=”http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt” %>
4. In web.xml, use tag

What is MyGrowUp.com

MyGrowUp.com helps people to securely organize their life-long digitalmemory (pictures, videos, journals, music...ETC) in 2-dimensions: bytimeline in vertical and tags (catagory) in horizontal. Thus greatlysimplifying the way people manage their growing-up memories.

In the long term, this web site targets every one; however, initially itwill be most appealing to parents, whom are interested in creatingprofiles for their children. However, as generations pass, parents willpass this down to their children and eventually MyGrowUp will cross theage barrier.

Just because MyGrowUp is geared towards an older niche, it doesn’t meanthat it wont attract younger users. Think about it this way, time neverstops; everyone eventually will grow old and eventually settle down. Once they get there, MyGrowUp will be there for them. That is why MyGrowUp hasso much potential as a social network. It is geared towards a later andlonger stage in life, adulthood, where users will not only use it forthemselves but also for their children. The seemingly self replenishinghost of users will allow MyGrowUp to grow as a social network, andhopefully a morbidly obese one...

Jawad Shuaib, the founder of Shuzak.com wrote in his article “6 StartupLessons For The Year 2007” [1] "There may never be a site as big as MySpace again." As the president of MyGrowUp I have one question: “How many middle age men or grandparents do you see on MySpace?” Theconvenience and of MyGrowUp and the demand for such a tool will propel itto compete even with social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.[1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_startup_lessons_2007.php