Today didn't start very well. I got a call early in the morning from Vitor letting me know handivi.com was broken. I remember mumbling something and him asking me what the hell was I trying to say. I guess when my brain is booting it is unable to translate thoughts into words.

This new release is very important for us because now all your photos are safely stored on Amazon S3 (mind you, we do backup regularly but there was a very small chance of loosing a photo and we don't like to take even small chances on bad things) but to make that happen we had to make some changes. As Murphy would say: if anything wrong can happen it will and it did. Fortunately, it was just a matter of applying a patch to Perlbal and as soon as it was fixed all services became available.

At about the same time, someone sent me a rocking youtube video link, the sun became brighter and warmer and you guys started to give positive feedback on this new release. I couldn't help but feel energized by this combination of events and it set me on a great mood for the rest of the day.

So that's the funny story about this release, what goodies do we have in the bag for you? Lots of them:

• Ruben worked hard at further optimizing the mobile application and it's snappier. Not only that, but our content adaptation engine now optimizes photos so that they transfer faster to your mobile and this results in faster browsing of your friend updates;

• still on the mobile camp you're now able to browse albums and friend updates without having to return to the lists, what we call fullscreen browsing. Just press the left and right buttons on your mobile;

• if you're at the computer, you should notice that your friend updates and the public timeline are refreshed automatically too so you can just sit back and check what's happening anywhere in the world in real time;

• speaking of website: we really, really, love the feedback and deeply appreciate the time you guys are taking to help us iron out the kinks. With that in mind, we've established a presence at Get Satisfaction, a leading website for user feedback. Not only you'll be able to share your ideas and problems with us, but also with the rest of the community;

• for those who are curious and haven't registered yet, you can get a glimpse of how handivi looks like on our tour guide.

• finally, there are some other tweaks like improved profiles and many changes under the hood that overall should improve your experience with the service.

More things are coming for the next release, if you would like to see something built into handivi get in touch!