If you were trying to log into Parse.ly between 11pm-1am this Sunday, you may have noticed that it was intermittently down for maintenance.  Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working hard to roll out some new features, polish some rough edges, and improve our infrastructure after our launch last month.  Our first beta users have been amazing in providing us with detailed and specific feedback on what works and doesn’t work well within Parse.ly.  We’ve diligently addressed many of the issues raised by these users and rolled out a new version of Parse.ly this weekend.

So, what’s new in Parse.ly?

• Faster archiving and deleting: many users have complained that archiving and deleting items in Parse.ly was extremely slow.  This was a shortcoming of the beta release we pushed out in August, and we have now rectified this issue.  Archiving and deleting should be very speedy, and bulk archives/deletes are just as fast as single ones now.
• Keyboard shortcuts: we bill Parse.ly as the most productive way to read the news, but our initial beta users noticed that one productivity feature we are sorely lacking is keyboard shortcuts.  We have implemented an experimental cut of keyboard shortcuts in the latest release.  Simply click inside the article grid (under “Current Items”) and press the question mark key (?).  This will bring up a message box with a list of our keyboard shortcuts.  They are very similar to GMail’s; for example, e archives an item, and shift+i marks an item as read.
• Username casing problems: we had a silly bug where your username was case-sensitive, even though we use e-mail addresses for usernames.  This has been addressed and so now you can use any case you like for your username.
• Better De-duplication: we did include a deduplicator in our initial beta release, and we thought it was working pretty well: nearly 50% of the articles processed by our crawler were being deduped.  However, many users reported duplicates in their accounts, and when we investigated, we saw that there were many scenarios that fooled our deduper and resulted in an unpleasant reading experience.  In particular, resyndicated articles (e.g., those republished after a press release) often had similar titles/summaries but were not exactly the same.  So we have included a more aggressive deduper that makes use of fuzzy string matching and seems to work better in the testing we have done so far.
• Better sources: we are continuing to improve the breadth and depth of Parse.ly’s sources.  We have restructured our crawler so that it gets access to sources that weren’t available before, and also better delivers content based upon your interests.
• More frequent crawls: many users were reporting that crawls wouldn’t happen often enough for them, so they wouldn’t see articles published e.g. in their twitter feed right away in Parse.ly.  We have re-engineered our crawl infrastructure to be much more performant, which will mean fresher content inside Parse.ly for you.
• You can kill the Parse.ly share bar: when you click a link inside Parse.ly, we top-frame it to allow you to share it easily with your friends.  However, users rightfully complained that they wanted the ability to easily remove this bar from any page.  You spoke, we listened!
• Password recovery: some users forgot their passwords and we simply forgot to implement a password recovery feature in our initial release.  It’s there now.
• User profile editing: users can now change their password from inside the UI.  This was an obvious feature just plain missing from the initial release.

We also made some improvements to our Interest Setup Wizard, but this will mostly affect users who first sign up for the system.  (You did remember to invite your friends to join Parse.ly, right? )  These include:

• Better performance when adding new interests: before, there was a bit of a lag when you entered in interests.  This should be fixed now.
• E-mail is sent to user upon initial setup: some of our users were rightfully confused when they entered in their interests and … nothing happened.  We aren’t activating accounts right away, but at the very least, we should send you an e-mail to let you know that your interest entry actually worked!  This is fixed now.

We are also working on some big changes within the Parse.ly engineering team to take our product to the next level.  We have partnered with our excellent hosting company, The New York NOC (NYNoc), to scale out our infrastructure and process more content than ever before.  We are also planning our future iterations where we hope to innovate and deliver more features to save you time and let you discover the content that best matches your interests.

A Personal Note from Andrew

As the lead developer for Parse.ly, I just want to say “Thanks!” to all our awesome users.  The thing that has impressed me most about Parse.ly’s users so far is how detailed, intelligent and thoughtful their feedback has been.  We want our company to be driven by your feedback, so please, do not hesitate to provide more of it on our Cog Tree Get Satisfaction Page, on Twitter, or directly via e-mail.

This last few weeks reminds me of something Jim Young, the founder of HotOrNot.com, said to us at DreamIt this summer: “when the site became successful, we were left having to figure out how to change the engine while the car was still running.”  It’s going to be a lot of work evolving Parse.ly even while providing the service to our existing users, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Thanks again to all our users for their feedback so far, and I hope you enjoy the new version of Parse.ly!  (Also, don’t forget to report any bugs or tell us what is working well for you.)  And if you haven’t signed up for Parse.ly yet, what are you waiting for?  Do it now at http://parse.ly

Wow, it is hard to believe that this summer is almost over.  It seems like Cog Tree just moved to Philadelphia for the summer last week!  But a lot has happened and we’re really proud of what we created.  Let me try and breakdown the summer to give you an idea of how quickly we moved:

May 23rd – Moved to Philadelphia to participate in DreamIt Ventures’ second program for the summer.

June 1st – We knew that information overload was a serious problem, and that innovative technologies could be applied to help manage content online.  Though we had an idea of WHO it was affecting the most, we weren’t quite sure about HOW this was specifically affecting companies and people.  So, with the problem simmering in our heads, we went straight to the market to figure out what pain points existed and what solutions were available.  On the technology end, we had to bring a team together and start building out the prototype.

July 1st – Had an initial wireframe that was constructed directly from market feedback and major infrastructure work complete.

July 1st to August 1st – We went back to the market to ask questions about how our free tool could solve problems beyond any other free tool available.  And also asked about what demand there was for specific features that would be built on top of Parse.ly.  From this user feedback, we built Parse.ly.

August 13th – DemoDay 2009.

DreamIt Ventures was an outstanding program that allowed us to really dig deep into a problem that has persisted for the past few years.  We know that we have a solution that will save our users time and money.

Sign up today and we’ll provision you with an account as soon as possible.