Now you can search Destinations, Blogs, and Driftrs!

Happy exploring.

Import Contacts Now Live!

So what are you waiting for? Get to it!

Now With Comments and Messaging!

We're super excited to announce a pile of new Driftr features including Trip Commenting and User Messaging!

Now, if you like someone's review, photos, or trip blog you can let them know by posting a comment. If you don't want the whole world to know how you feel, you can send a private message instead.

Introducing Driftr Beta!

We're very excited to report that we are officially moving from closed Alpha to open Beta today!

Along with opening up the site, we've added a pile of new features including:

- Your Friends Feed
- Recently Added Section
- Future Trips in Your Map Pulldown
- Destinations Country/State Dropdown
- Homepage Redesign
- Friends Redesign

...plus a ton more!

Up Next:
- Trip Comments
- Customized Profile Page
- Multiple Trip Uploads
- More 3rd Party Photo Streaming

Happy Drifting!

Recently Added and Really Simple Syndication

Recently Added and RSS Feeds are now live!

Up next:
Friends Feed
Comments
Messaging

Enjoy!
Erick

A Whole Pile of New Goodness!

Some of you may of noticed we made a few tweaks today, including:

• "You Are Here" indicator
• Friend Request Inbox
• Contact Us page
• "Keep Me Signed In" checkbox
• "Most Popular" Driftr sort
• Layout tweaks

Plus a ton more - enjoy!

Photo Slideshows in the House!

We've added slideshows to everyone's photo sets to make it easier to navigate your awesome trips.

Happy New Year!

Flickr Photo Streaming is back up

The good news is, Flickr reached photo number 2147483647 yesterday. Go Flickr!

The bad news is that number 2147483647 is the limit for signed integer data type.

How did that affect us?

Well, we use an awesome open source library called Phlickr to communicate with Flickr's API. Phlickr was treating photo IDs as signed integers and in turn stopping at 2147483647. As a result, images were missing from the display because they would be assigned the wrong photo ID.

If you're using the Phlickr client library, you need to update your library so that the photo IDs are treated as string and not integer (hint: look for sprintf.)

Top Driftr Algorithm Changed

"Top Driftr" is our way of giving recognition to users who are active on the site. We want to reward our users for adding trips, uploading photos and submitting recommendations and blog entries. The problems is, our ranking algorithm isn't perfect just yet.

The good news is, we have a new one :-)

The old algorithm favored users that have a high volume of photos associated with their trips. Unfortunately, that gave an unfair advantage to those users over others whose trips don't have a lot of photos yet rife with recommendations and blog enteries.

We decided the algorithm wasn't fair so we put our math hats on and came up with a basic formula that normalizes the data we have on each user so comparisons between users is more accurate and in turn rankings are more realistic.

We're always tweaking our algorithm to give a fair shot to all users. The more you use Driftr, the higher up your ranking will get with time.

Thanks for reading and happy Drifting!

You Are So Popular!

Travel stats and profile views are now live, complete with a handy web 2.0 minimize/maximize link.