MySites Grows Up

I’ve been blogging a lot about entrepreneurship lately. I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at MySites. We haven’t communicated much with the media lately, in favor of talking directly to our users and improving our service for them.

What’s up?

Since August, a bit less than a year ago, we launched what we call internally “MySites 2.0”. We decided to focus only on saving and sharing files, and skip everything on the side. Essentially, we’ve become more lean. That means a much lower team size. It also means focusing more on listening to users and thinking about how to make things easier and prettier. We learned to listen, which is why I’ve invested so much time on Google Buzz, and we’ve managed to reuse some of our great previous technology and behave like a smaller startup.

Great new people

The other important thing is that we’ve got new people who’ve joined us as advisors, mentors or investors.

Taneli Tikka, who’s known for his work on Irc-Galleria, the Finnish social networking site with monetization levels beyond any others social networks, using high brand value advertising.

Sonja Kangas, from PAF, one of the leading online gaming companies, also involved in the Nordic Game program and organizer of IGDA (the International Game Developer Association) in Finland.

Valve, who’s one of the leading design firms in a country known for its great designs, and responsible for making us look so much better.

and continued support from Peter Vesterbacka, who’s helped us in the mobile world.

They come in addition to our 4 current advisors in Germany. I’m very happy that they’re here to provide the expertise. Each of them is simply the best in their field. Knowing that they can tell me when I’m wrong and help us avoid trial and error or simply open new doors lets me sleep better at night.

Partnerships

We launched a fully open API, which allows any 3rd party to do exactly what we can.

We’ve been developing partnerships with great startups:

Xihalife, who uses us for their video hosting, players, media conversion and file hosting.

Dazzboard, who offers MySites as a way to save your files online.

Breezetags, for which we’re the first implementation, who provides us with sharing by sms.

WreckAMovie, who is going to use us to offer media and file hosting and players to all their projects.

New features

Since January, half of the work we’ve done during the last 6 months has been simply trying to keep up with the growth. We’ve had our hands pretty full simply trying to make the site usable for as many people as possible, and launched a new design, which we keep on tweaking. Our goal is not to add many new features, but to make our existing ones better.

We’ve added support for documents, using Google Docs. You can now view Word, PowerPoint, PDF files directly on MySites (example here), and share them with your friends like you would on SlideShare.

We’re 90% done with our desktop uploader, which will work on PC and Mac, and let you upload multiple files with drag and drop. It will be live in a few days, but ask me if you want to try a beta. Here is a preview from our dev version:

We’ve started work to simplify the Home page once you login, and on social gaming features, which we’ll explain more soon. You can expect our background in gaming to come much more into play in the near future.

PS: Don't just stand there, leave a comment!