4/24/08 - We were honored to present our company and products at the Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad event in San Francisco. Each company had 5 minutes to present and then get real-time feedback from a group of VC's and audience members. The response was tremendous and we learned so much about the perception of our vision and products. chirpscreen was a big hit with the audience.

We met some nice folks from the other companies who were also invited to present. They were: Acquia, JobScore, Oortle, TradeVibes and Triggit. Congratulations.

4/26/08 - We are very happy to announce that we now have a Mac version of our popular chirpscreen desktop viewer. Just download it from our home page, plug in your channel content preferences, and presto! You can have your chirpscreen all the time while you're using your computer. The chirpscreen desktop viewer is a little window of all your favorite friends and content from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and eBay.

Thanks for your support and please spread the word to your Mac friends.

- The Chirp Squad

*photo from nathan

04/16/08 - We are very excited today to announce our latest release - chirpscreen is now available as a desktop viewer as well as a screen saver! To try out the desktop viewer, please download the latest bundle from our website - you can use either or both the desktop viewer and the screen saver, and you only have to configure your settings once.

As chirpscreen fans who love the great display of your friends' fun content on your screen, you told us you wanted chirpscreen all the time - available while you do other things on your computer.

We hope you'll give it a spin. We've been relentless in developing a great experience for seeing the things that are most important to you. Now you have more control over the photos from Flickr and Facebook; updates from Twitter and Facebook; and eBay auctions. You can stop the show anytime you want, zoom in on the info behind the photo, or comment and forward, or go to the original source. All of this fun without leaving everything else on on your screen. For our Mac friends, we're close... but today's release is Windows only.

We believe in a collaborative development process. We spend a lot of time with you: those who use our products and are likely users of our products. What we've heard is that you want your social network on your terms. This theme is guiding our product roadmap as we develop a variety of experiences and products.

More great news:

We've been selected as one of only six companies to present at Launch Pad at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next Thursday, April 24th. Eve Phillips, our CEO, will have five minutes to present our company and products and will receive real-time feedback from a panel of VCs and the audience. Go Eve!

We were also invited to spend the day at the Cool Products Expo at Stanford University. The mission of the Expo is "to generate interest in and excitement around "cool" products and companies in the field of manufacturing and design". Thanks, we're flattered.

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Thanks for supporting us. We're having fun and hope you will try out the new chirpscreen desktop viewer. Download chirpcreen Now!

- The Chirp Squad

3/25/08 - When we thought about the things we like to do and share with our friends, one of the first areas to come to mind was shopping. We go to the mall together, we forward them links from online catalogs, we tell them how their outfits look. So, we thought, is there a way we could bring this to our chirpscreens? chirpscreen already provides a great display, and it has built-in tools to share stuff with your friends.

And thus, with the help of our friends from eBay, we have released a new type of experience for your chirpscreen, Window Shopping. Just type in a product you're interested in (nike shoes, prada bags, legos, mountain bikes) and we'll stream in active eBay auctions of those products.

You can click through to the website of the auction itself, or share the auction with a friend via email or Facebook message. It's a great way to discover and share new products you're interested in.

Let us know what you think!

- The Chirp Squad

photo from DOliphant

3/17/08 - We are releasing some fun new features for you on this fine St. Patrick's Day. Your chirpscreen should be updated automatically over the next few days.

Sharing: Often times we've seen a photo float by that we wanted to share with a friend - but we were too lazy to figure out a way to do it. Starting today, however, our laziness will be rewarded and with a few clicks, we can now easily forward photos to friends via email or Facebook messaging.

Enhanced Commenting: We've heard from our users that they want to have more of a conversation around the comments they leave. Now, you'll be able to see all the comments left on a photo (including yours!) when you bring the picture into focus. Look for the comment icon to light up when there are comments on a photo.

Photo Info: We've also been asked to show the title, album and other info about photos when they are brought into focus. And so, when you now click on a photo, we display the additional info in the upper right corner. Enjoy!

Thanks again for your interest in Chirp. If you have any questions or suggestions, please drop us a line at beta@chirp.com.

- The Chirp Squad

3/6/08 - We're excited to announce that Chirp was one of the winners of the AppNite Demo Contest at Graphing Social Patterns West in San Diego earlier this week. Thanks to Dave McClure for organizing the conference and to the audience for voting for us!

Stay tuned for more great features to be released next week.

- The Chirp Squad

2/27/08 - We've got a stylish new look to chirpscreen launching today. We've amped up the icons, made them even more coloriffic, and animated them in a fun way. Your chirpscreen will update with the new version automatically.

If that's not enough, we're also releasing Twitter replies. If you see a compelling tweet from someone you're following, you just click on the item and a response field is exposed. Type your clever message, click POST and your public response will be directed to the originator.

We've also made message links clickable - so click on any URL in Twitters or Facebook status messages to open up that link in a browser window.

For those of you who can't get enough dazzling experiences, we've discovered some great topics to plug into the controls for "Community Photos by Topic" (formerly known as "Public Photos"). We recommend "New York" (the city lights seem to twinkle when they move), "cupcakes" because they're cute, and Eve's recent favorite is "Killer Whale". Go crazy!

Finally, we wanted to ask all of our faithful friends to use the INVITE icon. If you love your chirpscreen (like we know you do) please let your friends know about it. The more people who have a chirpscreen channel, the more fun it's going to be.

- Jeff and The Chirp Squad

2/15/08 - We're listening closely to your feedback and it's guiding our development. We're happy to report that over the next several days we're releasing a few of the most requested features for your chirpscreen pleasure. Current chirpscreen windows users will be automatically updated with the new features. If you haven't downloaded chirpscreen yet, now is the perfect time.

New Features:
Move Them Around! Have you been frustrated by some photo that got stuck behind another one, and you really wanted to check it out? We have. So, now we've enabled bringing content items into focus (just click on it) and moving them around - so you can create your own collage of the content on your screen. Once you click on a content item, it will come into the center of the screen. Then, check out the "interaction bar" - all the little icons on the lower right - and, in some cases, you can comment on the item right there. Once you're done with it, click the item again to send it back into the background.

Blocking: We love everybody, but maybe not their photos from last month's party moving across your computer's screen at work. To block someone's content from showing up on your screen, just click on the block icon on the content item (once you've clicked the item to bring it into focus) and you'll never see their content again. Unless, of course, you change your mind, and then you can unblock your friends via the Preferences tab after clicking the Controls button (lower right hand corner of the screen).

Commenting: Now that you're exposed to so many photos that were buried in your friends' archives, isn't it time to tell them what you think of them? You can comment right inside a Facebook photo by clicking on it (commenting on other items coming soon). Your friend will be notified that you commented on their photo from chirpscreen. Maybe then they'll want a chirpscreen channel of their own too!

And, for our short form friends, Twitter is here! Click the Controls button to log into your Twitter account and we'll grab those latest musings from the people that you follow.

Finally, next month we're attending the South by Southwest Interactive Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas. If any of you will be there, please at drop us a line and we can meet up. Our own Creative Director, Jeff Tidwell will be MC'ing the always hilarious BattleDecks where designers square off in a PowerPoint battle that's not to be missed.

If you haven't tried out chirpscreen please give it a download. If you are clever and have, you'll receive the update automatically.

- The Chirp Squad

2/13/08 - What's on your chirpscreen? It's not so different from what we see everyday on the internet: lots of stuff from your friends, your feeds, and the collection from millions of people contributing to a moving art collection. We started arranging all the content on our screens and documenting the fun displays last spring - and in fact similar interests in these areas are what brought our team together.

The problem with those arrangements was that they happened after a lot of searching, website visits, and IM sessions. There was serendipity and discovery, but you had to work for it. So with chirpscreen, we make it easy. We're gathering all that content, putting it in a blender and sending it back in an engaging display, and with more ways to interact and stylize it. We keep hearing that people are surprised by what they discover on their chirpscreens. Great! That's the idea.

With my eye on chirp experiences these days (not to mention the hundreds of hours I've watched it all roll by), it now seems logical. The saturation of media looks like this. My house looks like this. Memories and imagery from my friends, my family, my life, are all over the place. I have fun moments in my collections just noticing something that may have been there all along. I don't think I always want to interact with this stuff. Sometimes I just want to watch it go by. And sometimes I want to show off a picture to a friend, or tell someone I saw their funny message, and we want to make that easy for you too.

There's a strong artist sensibility at our Valencia Street headquarters. We're next to the experimental gallery Receiver, and there are as many pens and pads of paper around as monitor cables. There is plenty of coding going on, don't get me wrong, but the reason I'm so comfortable here is that the people I work with see the breadth of the experience to be the reward. I think it's only going to get better.

I can't wait to see chirpscreen displays all over the place.

Jeff Tidwell
Creative Director

1/24/08 - We're very excited to announce the launch of the public beta version of chirpscreen today. chirpscreen lets you discover what your friends are up to by creating a channel of content – your friend channel – from social websites, delivered through your screen saver.

In addition to the photos and status messages from Facebook that we offered in the earlier versions, we've added some additional great features - including Flickr photos, both from your friends and public photos by topics (tags) - and have improved the installation process. In addition, the product now also updates itself, so you'll get new features as quickly as we can add them. We hope you'll like it (and will tell all your friends!).

We've also been thinking about what's gotten us addicted to our chirpscreens. The emotional reactions we've each had – and watched our beta testers have – to the content we've seen on our chirpscreens is really pretty remarkable. We've found out about friends having babies, going on vacation, or just having a bad hair day – all because chirpscreen did the work for us that let us discover what they were doing (and Jeff swears he saw Elvis on his…but we're a bit skeptical). In any event, the experience makes us feel like we can be a better friend because we know what's going on in our friends' lives. But don't take our word for it - download chirpscreen and give it a try!

The Chirp Squad: Eve, DaveB, Jeff, Paul, Aaron, DaveH, Jeremy & Steph