🚀 Following Released, Local Launched, & more
It’s been a while since we last checked in (you may have seen that we’ve been a little busy), so we’ve got a whole bunch of things to catch you up on, starting with the biggest change to Unsplash since profiles were launched more than 2 years ago.
Following goes public 🍾
We flipped the switch last Thursday and began rolling Following out to the larger Unsplash community, making it possible for contributors to build a stronger audience directly on Unsplash.
Since then more than 250k following relationships have already been created, more than 50M feed updates are pushed every day, and we’ve heard a lot of excitement and good feedback from the community.
Following as a technical concept sounds fairly trivial, but we can assure you that doing it in a future-friendly, reliable way, at scale is a challenge.
We leaned heavily on a 3rd party service, Stream, to handle the infrastructure and aggregation, which let us launch Following now and not in 2020. Huge shoutout to their team for all of their help with making the launch a success 🎉
We’ve heard a lot of good feedback and we’re by no means done with Following as a feature. We have a lot of plans, but next up from Joshua Comeau, Aaron Klaassen, and Kirill Zakharov: Notifications.
Made with Unsplash & Remixes
Made with Unsplash, the site where we showcase some of the best things being made with Unsplash, has remained relatively unchanged in terms of features since launching almost two years ago.
We have big plans for remixes in 2017, and while we’re still in the early stages of designing its evolution, we know that it will require a close link between the remix, the remixer, the original photos, and the original photographers.
To help begin populating that data now (and not in 6 months), Roberta Doyle (đź‘‹) worked with Martine Goyette to upgrade the remix submission system on Made with Unsplash to support Unsplash accounts and the original photo details.
If you’ve created something cool with an Unsplash photo, head on over to Made with Unsplash and give the new system a try!
EXIF upgrade
If you’ve ever worked with EXIF data, you know how inconsistent the data can be.
Bruno Aguirre added a series of functions to improve our EXIF system, teaching it to automatically learn and aggregate camera brands, convert aperture values into consistent notation, and display shutter speeds values in fractional notation.
The result, while a small detail, makes all EXIF data consistent and more readable across Unsplash:
- After working over the past few months to heavily improve and consolidate our data collection systems, Tim has begun focusing on the flip-side of data collection: tools for data analysis. Our goal is to put the data directly in the hands of every teammate, so that they can reason about new features, understand past behaviours, and run experiments in realtime. To do that, Tim’s been setting up Looker, a very flexible, but powerful, data analysis tool. Looker, for example, makes it trivial to generate graphs like this comparison of Photo Downloads to Submission Cohort, revealing a unique insight into the longevity of photos on Unsplash.
- Kirill worked closely with Alice Donovan Rouse (đź‘‹) and our sponsors to brand, build, and launch the new events platform for Unsplash, called Unsplash Local.
- Josh overhauled Unsplash’s local management of state, normalizing the data as if it were a database. This ensures that data is never duplicated across the application, reducing potential bugs and speeding up future feature development.
- And finally, hats off to Bruno 🎩 for tackling a slew of unsexy, but very necessary tasks, including our recent AWS image migration (post-Crew split), a series of bugs related to image caching and photo state, and fixing what has to be one of the longest running (and most embarrassing) background jobs in the history of trivial background jobs.
