Posts tagged ‘Technology’
Earth Day Party Pictures at Zoosk
We took Earth Day seriously at Zoosk HQ, with sliders and organic beer, and cookies decorated to look like planet Earth. It was loads of fun! Want to celebrate being green with us? Our office recycles and composts responsibly. Take a look at the job postings on our career’s page. There are a lot of openings so if you see your dream job we encourage you to apply. Happy Zoosking!
Breakfast at Zoosk
These photos are from a recent executive breakfast at Zoosk (execs cooked bacon and pancakes for everyone) and it was a lot of fun!
If you want Zoosk’s execs to cook you breakfast one day, take a look at the job postings on our career’s page. There are a lot of openings so if you see your dream job we encourage you to apply. Happy Zoosking!
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Let’s celebrate the milestones of 2010!
Happy February! It’s the month of love, and everyone on Zoosk senses Cupid’s presence, including us here at Zoosk’s offices. It’s been a love-filled year for us, and we couldn’t have done it without our wonderful members. While Cupid’s arrows fly your way, Zoosk takes a look back at 2010, ushering in future goals by celebrating the milestones we’ve passed. Here are some cool facts:
- In 2010… Zoosk became one of the most popular online dating services in the world! (more…)
Zoosk Messenger
ZooskTV presents this new product video about Zoosk Messenger, a chat client you can download from Zoosk straight to your computer desktop. Jeff Knight, Senior Lead Software Engineer, explains how to use Zoosk Messenger and discusses unique product features and capabilities. With Messenger, you can chat on Zoosk and Facebook – at the same time – stream your Zoosk activities feed as it happens, and connect in real time.
Fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter if you like what you see here!
Produced and directed by Juliette Tang.
Shot and edited by Gairo Cuevas.
Featuring Jeff Knight, Senior Lead Engineer at Zoosk.
Music by Robert R. Putnam – “Mouton Swing” – no rights reserved.
Introducing Zoosk Affinity
Affinity is a new feature on Zoosk.com that makes online dating easier than ever – by importing your favorite music, movies, and books as listed from your Facebook profile onto your Zoosk profile in one click. John, Greg, and Peter from the Zoosk engineering team explain how Zoosk Affinity works and how it helps bring people together! (more…)
Three cheers for the new Zoosk iPhone App!
Yee yee! The Zoosk iPhone App is here to feed your raging internet addiction!
As there are 50 million (and counting) worldwide registered users on Zoosk and 40 million worldwide iPod and iPod Touch users, a sizable swath of our Zooskers are also serious Mac people. Lucky for them, because our iPhone App promises to make social dating quicker, easier, and more efficient than, well, freaking ever.
Now you can Zoosk it up at work during that boring conference call or while you’re at the grocery store or while you’re at the gym or while you’re on a bad date with someone else (you’re just, er, responding to an important text) or in the bathroom or like basically anywhere you can find a signal. Which means, essentially, that you can flirt with online hotties wherever you go. With social networking, downloadable desktop, mobile, and iPhone applications, Zoosk is dating for the connected world.
Download the free iPhone App at the iTunes App Store online or right on your iPhone. If you’re not a Zoosk member currently, you can register and validate a new account, right on the application itself. After your first iPhone log-in, we’ll give you 30 free Zoosk coins. Use them to send a virtual gift to someone who catches your eye. Then get your thumbs ready for a flirting frenzy because that touch screen will put them to work! 
Lastly, don’t be bummed if you don’t have an iPhone — Zoosk still has you covered on the mobile front. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still access Zoosk on your standard phone with Zoosk Mobile. See how easy we make it for you to flirt shamelessly? What are you waiting for? Get out there and start flirting!
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.
Zoosk has received heart-warming letters from couples from all over the world have found love on Zoosk. We are proud to share 
