Bonfire

To our users, supporters, and friends,

Every day we read amazing tweets from people discovering Bonfire, and it's clear they'd been waiting for the service we created. No-longer do they have to chat to their friends off-Twitter, they can instead have a personal and private backchannel to discuss with their friends 'what's happening now', right in the place they're hanging out with them.

In many ways it's been a typical startup roller coaster for Start Bonfire. We built something ambitious, solving a problem for a lot of people, launching successfully with good press and traction. We also raised money early on from a great group of investors willing to take a risk on a less traditional product like ours.

But it's come time to make the hard decision to discontinue the service. We've always been a very small team, and we've overcome a lot of very specific and unique challenges that working to augment the Twitter experience brings. We had grand plans, and an exciting roadmap, but unfortunately we've not had the resources to be able to move forward as quickly as we'd liked to have done.

We’ll be turning the servers off on 26th September, and we'll update this post with instructions for downloading your personal data.

If you’re reading this and are full of ideas or simply want to know more about Bonfire, the roadmap, technology, opportunities for the future of BonfireIM, or anything at all, please do feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]

From myself and the Bonfire team, THANK YOU to everyone who’s been involved, and for all the good will we’ve received over the duration of the project.

Update: This doesn't seem to be happening often, and there's some speculation about whether it's happening at all or is in fact a bug or anomaly, or maybe Twitter's A/B testing the new feature. Well I just spotted another example:

Again, I do follow @TheDeveloper, @bschlenk, and @leydon, but not who the tweet is in reply to, or directed at, @ollynewport.

I grabbed it on Tweetbot too, just in case. But it is appearing in the stream, not just the site:

I think this is a really interesting example of a small change Twitter could make that would have quite an impact on seeing just that little bit more of your wider circle, a few more potentially relevant tweets.

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Twitter just rolled out some subtle but significant UI changes to twitter.com, and most interestingly a change to what tweets you see in your stream.

Firstly you'll now see tweets from friends that mention people at the start of a tweet that you don't follow. In the screenshot below I do follow @j4mie, but I don't follow @ejosully. The context here appears to be that because I do follow @seb_ly that this tweet may be of interest to me. Previously tweets have been filtered based on usernames at the beginning of a tweet, i.e. if I don't follow the person you're replying to then I won't see the tweet. A subtle change, but you will now see more tweets in your stream because of this added implied context.

This is clearly a strategic move from Twitter, and we could speculate a lot about why..

Secondly the Reply, Retweet, and Favorite buttons have been moved on all tweets. Depending on whether a tweet had been clicked, opened, the links would either sit above or below the tweet content. Now they always site below.

So it looks like this has been an opportunity to roll out a few UI updates as well as this interesting change to the tweet visibility logic. What else has been updated?

It's time to step it up a gear at Bonfire HQ.

(UPDATE: We just moved into London's premier startup space, White Bear Yard, sharing the space with a ton of other Passion Capital startups)

We brought 'presence' and IM to Twitter, but there's a whole lot more to do, and it involves the rest of the web too.

We'll be working with the latest tech, that hardly anyone is using in a live environment yet. Things like Web Intents, Websockets and open webapp manifests, as well as oEmbed, localstorage, 'augmented browsing', and an authenticated social graph. These are the lines between the dots of the web, and they need drawing.

We believe in open tech, the web, and that everything we do is really about people. We work fast and iterate often, no long product cycles here.

If you want to be part of an early stage startup, guiding and shaping it with us… if you know the web can be better, more connected and consistent, now's your chance to build it. We need crazy-awesome people to do these things:

Interaction Designer / Product Genius An interface nerd with graphic skills, web and touch– hell, a device is a device. You think big and want to design the future of the web.  

JS / Frontend Master You write hardcore bespoke JS, and use frameworks when best e.g. backbone, jquery, strophe etc, and your HTML/CSS goes to 11.  

Ruby/Erlang/XMPP/AWS Warrior You're big on realtime tech, websockets, XMPP/jabber, and are comfortable in Ruby, Erlang(?) and any language that's best for the job. You design for scaling and the high concurrency challenge, get big data, and can build on AWS and nginx.  

iOS Magician Thinking this all sounds great but the future is mobile? You know there's a different context, and the opportunity is huge. You work native, design for efficient connectivity, multi-gesture experience, and universal iPad/iPhone.

The skinny…

Get paid (We're small, but we're funded and exciting. Review in 6 months)

Equity options (we want you to benefit from the value you create)

Brighton or London (we haven't decided yet, but it's nice by the sea, and you'll help us choose)

Modern office with other startups

Opportunity to learn

More autonomy

Big iMac

Training/conference budget

Fruit and coffee on demand

Be a significant part of building an early stage, globally focused, consumer oriented tech company, with a huge opportunity

Labs projects (we're not afraid of bleeding edge tech in production… play and build)

Want to run your own startup one day? Awesome! Find out what it's like from the inside, we'll help you learn fast, and get connected.

We had a feeling we were building something people wanted, but last week this really became apparent.

We announced with Techcrunch and GigaOm that we're bringing chat and presence to Twitter, and we immediately opened up signups for a brief period. Straightaway we realised that very quickly we were going to be serving even more people than we'd planned for.

Wanting to provide the best experience we can, we decided to limit the numbers while we work hard to make Bonfire even better and iron out a few remaining bugs.

It's been great reading the comments on Twitter, and my phone didn't stop vibrating with notifications as the idea got shared around the timezones.

We won't keep you waiting too long! Sign up for the beta, or follow @BonfireIM on Twitter to find out first…