Status update, and how to donate

Thanks to your help, Partychat has been growing like crazy! In fact, 10,000 people say something in Partychat every day now. We’re ecstatic so many of you find it as useful as we do, and so many of you are using it on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, this crazy awesome level of usage has caused us to exceed App Engine’s free resource quota. We’ve been optimizing to stretch the resources out as far as possible, but as our user base grows (yay!) our costs do too (booo!). Thankfully, users have been offering to contribute for a while, and we’ve finally gotten around to making a standard way for you to help:

Donate to Partychat by clicking here. Payments are processed through Amazon and are used solely to defray our server costs. It now runs us upwards of $15 to run Partychat for a week... almost $800 a year. If you use and value Partychat please contribute!

Side note for developers: I recently migrated the Partychat Google Code repository to git from svn. If you’re working on any changes or patches, be sure to re-sync this repository. (And if you weren’t, remember: patches welcome!). The migration process was a bit confusing, and I’ll be writing a separate blog post on that process soon.

Vijay, for the Partychat team.

More Sharing Features

We've enhanced the /share command to use Embedly for generating titles and descriptions of shared links. For example, this means that tweet text is now rendered inline, saving you a click. For YouTube links to get the video description, saving you from possible rickrolls.

Rooms now also have a share bookmarklet, you can find it in the "Helpful links" section of the web interface.

Finally, the share command can also be hooked up to Google Reader's Send to feature. Just go to the settings page and add a custom link with this template:

Stats Update!

It's been a while since we updated you about Partychat's growth, so here are some numbers for those of you playing along at home:

• Over 8,500 people said something in Partychat yesterday
• Over 17,000 people in the last week
• Over 25,000 people in the last 30 days
• There are over 2,800 Partychat channels
• Partychat sent out around 8,000,000 (yup, million) messages yesterday

For the more visually inclined, here's a graph of our growth over the last 8 months or so: