Over the next hour our two we’ll be rolling out a lot of updates to 23 — mostly including major changes to the way photogroups work. Hopefully, this will only result in two minutes of downtime and a few broken links. We’ll keep you posted…

Update: Everything seems alright after the update. We’ll keep an eye on the 23 Monster for another while though. Be sure to let us know if you find something to be out of the ordinary.

We’re online with our new server setup (mainly a whole new database architecture).
You should see a much improved speed for all types of actions. We’ll be putting on additional servers the coming days to improve speed even further and hope (with our fingers crossed) to leave the times of bad speed behind for good.

We’re upgrading our hardware over today and tomorrow. This may cause some instability in service, but it will result in a significant increase in performance of 23… Thank you for your patience.
March 22nd, 11:21: Guan is putting the finishing touches on the hardware move as I’m writing this. We’ll use this opportunity to juggle with some data, but we should be back online quite soon. We won’t, however, be up to full speed before the end of the day.

March 9th, 18:27 in Copenhagen:
We’ve been experiencing some outages today, and this simply won’t stand. So we’ve taken 23 down for short while to grease it’s wheels.

We’ll plan to be back online in an hour our so.

19:27:
We’ve just hit the hour mark but we’re not quite there yet. Please bear with for a little while longer.

20:17:
We’re back online. The beast is awake. The increase in performance is not significantly significant, but it’ll have to do until our new multi-million dollar database server premieres. It’s being configured this weekend, so a very plausible ETA is Monday March 19th. Cross your fingers and hope.

Copenhagen has been a (if not the?) center of attention for the past few days, and the Danish users of 23 have been on the streets documenting the street riots:

(Useless trivia: Our new offices are actually located about 300 meters from where the actions has been unfolding.)

23 is truly everywhere. There’s a new Jim Carrey movie coming out called “The Number 23” based on that exact premise. It asks the stupid question “Is 23 a blessing or a curse?”. Of course, it premieres on March 23rd.

And I’m currently listening to the first single from the upcoming Blonde Redhead album called “23″. I’m not sure of the song, aptly titled “23″, really captures the spirit of photo sharing.

We’re rolling in a new feature, which automatically rates or ranks a given photo by a number of different criteria such as number of views and number of comments. When all the kinks are worked out (and there are kinks to be sure) this will allow us have the most interesting photos pop up first on pages such as Just In.

At The 23 World Headquarters we’ve been calling this “23rank”, but buzz words and *ness words are so yesteryear. Suffice it to say that this will make 23 just a little bit better.

At the moment we’re calculating these scores. That’s a big job for the hardware to handle, so the first versions of the ranking won’t be ready for another five or six days. We had about 30 minutes of slowness (I know, but slowness isn’t a made-up word, is it?) because of this last night. However, we’re not expecting any more semi-outages though.

We got a reprimand a few days ago for not blogging enough about what’s going on at 23. And the reprimand was well deserved. So I thought I’d point the reader’s attention to a few of the new features we’re working on these days.

A new Flash Uploader
We’ve let users upload multiple photos at once through Flash for a while, but we’ve never felt we reached the full potential of the uploader. That’s why we’ve been working on a replacement for a while now.

Last week I posted a screenshot of the application, and now we’re ready to release a very early beta version of the uploader into the wild. This version works well in Firefox and (surprisingly) is doesn’t crash and burn entirely in Internet Explorer. Having said that, there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out: For example you still can’t save your tags, albums, words, and privacy. We’ll probably have to fix that before going live…

The plan has been to make uploading a bit faster by letting users start the upload before figuring out which tags to use and so on. We’ll also be added some other actions to the flow so sending photos and posting to a photogroup (just to name a few examples) will become an integrated part of the upload process.

Well, give it a go, and let us know what you think.

The 23dashboard
We’re also developing a new entrance page for logged-in users. Have a look at the screenshoot and participate in the discussion. Or you can try the dashboard for yourself.