• Ten hours.
  
• 100% Processing Capacity.
  
• Five Developers with no sleep.
  
• 24 Krispy Kreme Donuts.
  
• Unknown Amounts of Coffee.
  
• 100 Million+ reconfigurations of our data.
  
  

The team at LivingSocial has been a little busy since midnight last night, working to complete our largest maintenance and system upgrade we’ve ever undertaken. Our development team has been working overtime to ensure that our activities today went as smooth as possible. While we hate being down for any significant period of time, we think you’ll be ok with our extended absence in the near future.

Our team is still verifying the success of everything we did, so please excuse any unexpected interactions for the next couple hours. We should have everything back to normal soon.

As we come back online, we know that you’re thinking “Why were they down for 10 hours and yet there are no noticeable changes?” We promise the downtime was not in vain; today we’ve migrated our entire database, improving our performance, efficiency, and ability to provide you with useful data. This was the first step of many to delivering a completely revamped experience on LivingSocial. Stay tuned over the next several months as well roll out new features and improvements that were made possible by our maintenance work today.

As a user, you also have access to our other subject areas at LivingSocial.com. You can catalog and review your favorite books, beer, movies, games, music, and restaurants in one place. If you use the application through one of the social networking sites, such as Facebook, your collection and friends will automatically share between both Facebook and our external site.

”Why join LivingSocial.com?” you ask?

LivingSocial.com provides the richest and fastest experience for managing your collection and sharing information between your friends. A few of the biggest benefits of joining LivingSocial.com include:

Share your collection and friends across multiple social networks

If you are using multiple social networks, LivingSocial.com allows you to share your collection across all of the major social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, and Bebo.) Additionally, all of you friend connections and profile information become available on all of our sites and applications. Linking only takes a minute of your time and allows us to provide a seamless experience for you.

• Click to continue to linking your social networking accounts…

Export your collection

We’ve created a new export option to a comma-separated values file (CSV) of your entire collection. You can use this file to integrate your entire collection with a third party app, or you can just print out your collection and take it with you wherever you go.

• Click to continue to learn more about exporting your collection to CSV…

Update your Collection Remotely with our iPhone App

Coming Soon! We are very excited about our new iPhone application, which is currently in Beta. The app not only offers complete access to your existing collection, but you can search the library for a specific entity, and add a new entity, rate, review, and upload photos directly to your collection. We hope to have the iPhone application ready-to-go within the next couple weeks.

Access your Collection with Syndication Tools

We’ve heard your requests that you want to display your collections in a wide variety of places. From your Facebook profile page to your own web site, we want you to display your collection as you see fit! We’ve made and are continuing to work on a few key improvements to make this happen:

• RSS-feeds: RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing news and information that allows you to easily stay informed. We’ve created an RSS feed for your home page so that you can stay up to date with the latest reviews, ratings, and entities added by all of your friends.

• Click to continue to see how to use RSS on LivingSocial.com…

• Widget: Coming Soon! Also coming soon is a new, fully customizable and distributable widget that you can display across the web. The widget will allow you to show off your recent activity, your collection, and even the lists you’ve created in any combination. Plus, this flash-based widget will automatically size itself to fit on any website.

As always, if you need help, please don’t hestitate to drop us a line at feedback@livingsocial.com or swing by http://getsatisfaction.com/livingsocial.

Bebo first opened its platform a few months ago to allow 3rd party developers to build applications. While I'm not sure of the exact structure of the relationship, Bebo struck a deal with Facebook to leverage the structure and documentation of the platform in order to replicate its functionality. That being said, when Bebo's first opened up, they weren't really exposing applications into the normal paths users take on the site, and correspondingly, application growth reflected that. We had launched a few apps at this time and were disappointed in the minimal level of pick up among the users.

Fast forward two months.

In late February, Bebo pushed changes to their platform that greatly increased users potential interactions with the applications, including better home and profile placement. Immediately, we saw a nice increase in our traffic and the platform became much more interesting. Last week we launched our suite of LivingSocial applications within Bebo. Check out the apps here:

- DrinkingSocial
- ReadingSocial
- TuneSocial
- ReelSocial
- DiningSocial
- GamingSocial