Posts filed under 'Technology'
August was a good month for love
Hurray! It’s that time of the month again, when we reveal the winning couple of the previous months’ Success Story contest. We’ve heard many beautiful love stories that left our hearts fluttering, but the August story that particularly tugged on our heartstrings was sent to us from a Zoosker from Detroit named Jason. He initially sent in this message on August 20, after he encountered a woman named Ang on Zoosk. In fact, he sent us this success story before he actually met Ang in real life, while they were still just chatting on the phone!
2 comments September 9, 2009
Love Advice: How to overcome shyness
By Juliet O
Zooskers often write in our Community Forums asking for advice on love. The Zoosk Community is incredibly supportive of each other, and when a Zoosker seeks love advice on the forums, other Zooskers weigh in and offer their assistance. It’s a nice feeling, knowing that there is a community of people willing to help you work through your love and relationship problems.
As more and more questions arise on our forums, we’ve discovered certain similarities among the questions we’ve seen. Questions often fall into distinct camps. And questions tend to be finite. We get a lot of the same questions over and over again. That should be reassuring news! This means that — for each person out there who has love or relationship problems — there are other people in the world with the same problems. You are not alone! And we want to help too. You don’t have to take our advice, or even listen to what we have to say, but we want you — yes, you! — out there to know that we really do care.
We want to participate in the conversation. So, each week we’ll be taking a question from the Zoosk Community Forums and giving our take on the situation. Unofficial advice from official Zoosk. Here’s this week’s question, posed by Zoosker Jay. This is taken from our Broken Heart, Now What forum.
2 comments September 4, 2009
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Zoosk coins
By Juliet O
… Zoosk is introducing coins to our site! Why coins? Because we like shiny objects, and we like pirates, so it follows logically that our currency of choice on Zoosk would be gorgeous glistening gold doubloons.
Argg matey! So, with coins, (1) what are these pretty little babies, and (2) what can you spend them on? Currently, coins can be spent in 4 different ways, depending on if you’re a premium subscriber or a basic member on Zoosk. Peep this.
2 comments August 31, 2009
Smooth operator — on the phone
By Juliet O
“Hello Jane!”
“Hi?”
“This is John. From Zoosk! How are you, Jane?”
“Hi! I’m good.”
“So I’m calling you cuz I thought your boobs looked really great in your photos.”
“What?!”
“I mean, I’m calling because I thought we hit it off and–”
Click.
Err… real smooth, John. Now Jane thinks you’re a total creepazoid. Right after she hung up the phone, she went to see if your name was on the national sex offender registry. It goes without saying that this is the type of phone conversation an online dater should do his very very best to avoid. But you already knew that.
(more…)
3 comments August 27, 2009
Go ‘head and run yo mouf — on our Community Forums
By Juliet O
While most of you Zooskers probably couldn’t run a marathon with your legs, you sure know how to run them with your mouths. Your chat-alicious, loose-lipped, loud-mouthy, over-sharing, word-spitting ways have greatly endeared you to our hearts, and we applaud the fact that many of you have problems shutting the front door.
Our hyperactive community forums are one of the Zoosk features we’re most proud of, because the many voices on the forums come from YOU, the community, and the community is the life of Zoosk. It appears that the average Zoosker on our forums is chattier than an ADHD kid who just washed down all his Halloween candy with a 6-pack of Red Bull. You will get that talk on, and we find that to be a beautiful thing. On the forums, topics range from discerningly erudite (like intelligent reflections on the meaning of love) to unabashedly low-brow (like talking in detail about the female anatomy), and all these topics come together to form a mish mash, hodge podge, all-encompassing community board that accurately details all the multiplicity of things going through the collective mind of the Zoosk community, something we admire, foster, and want to actively engage. Today, we want to shine a spotlight on the community, because the community the shining light of Zoosk… and now we’re getting sentimental. Make it stop.
Add comment August 25, 2009
Zoosk Desktop helps you work it, work it real good
Monday just went from blaaaahhh to YAYYYYY, ‘cuz Zoosk Desktop is here to help you keep the spirit of the weekend going all week long. What’s Zoosk Desktop, you might ask? We reply — in our most falsely modest voice — that we dared, we hustled, and here’s what we got: the very first downloadable desktop application ever introduced for a social online dating community. Or, in simpler terms, Zoosk Desktop is a ridiculously awesome new way to be on the prowl… rawr.
2 comments August 17, 2009
Facebook Connect, Yo
Hella quick, efficient Facebook Connect integration in da HIZZOUSE! (more…)
2 comments August 11, 2009
Elastic Computing with Amazon Web Service
Given the viral nature of our products, we have learned – at times the hard way – how valuable it is to be able to add capacity on-demand when we roll out a new feature or product [I will be talking more about scaling at O'Reilly Velocity Conference if you are interested]. One of the features that we released in the early days of Zoosk was the ability for users to upload multiple images to their Date Cards if they wanted to separate their dating identity from their Facebook identity (BTW, Zoosk is the only dating application on social networks that doesn’t rely on the underlying platform for picture handling and enables users to keep their dating persona separate!).
When we were designing this feature we had a feeling it will be a huge hit given the feedback we were getting from our users. However, it was really hard for us to gauge how much capacity we need to plan for and we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on infrastructure to accommodate a feature that might not turn out as big as you think it will (startups MUST be frugal to survive!).
So we decided to use Amazon Web Services for our photo processing subsystem to give us the maximum flexibility in terms of capacity planning while keeping our costs down. We had a few requirements for our design:
- Should scale horizontally
- Should be fairly decoupled from our existing data center (not expose our DBs to public network)
- Should be cost effective
In order to satisfy our second requirement above, we had to figure out a way to keep track of the in-progress-jobs without depending on our databases. Fortunately Amazon has a Simple Queue Service (SQS) that is very well suited for this purpose. We basically use it as a job queue for our photo processing.
Our ability to scale horizontally meant that we had to be able to add processing boxes on-demand as our load varied. We decided to utilize Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for this purpose.
Our process is conceptually very simple. Each photo uploaded by our users temporarily is stored on our data center. We have worker processes that copy these raw files to S3 for backup and also create a ticket in an SQS queue for it to be processed. Once in the queue, the next available processor on EC2 will pickup the ticket, process the photo, publish the output to proper location on S3 and then create a “done” ticket in another SQS queue. In our data center, we look for these “done” tickets and mark completed photos ready-to-serve for our users.
You might ask if all this complexity was worth it. It turned out that the photo feature was a big hit with our users. With millions of photos uploaded in the past few months, we are sure glad we designed the system this way and we love our ability to adjust our capacity on-demand for this feature.
Just to put the advantages of using cloud computing in perspective, I have summarized the size of photo data we have stored on Amazon S3 and also how much content we serve off of it in the following charts. Yes, those axises show numbers in TeraByte range 
. We would have really had a tough time to expand our data center to meet this load on top of the existing usage growth that we had to deal with. Off loading this work to Amazon has certainly paid off for us.
If you are interested in more Amazon Web Services usage data, checkout the 37signals blog as they chronicle their usage of the S3 service.
5 comments June 19, 2008
