With the deepest regret that can be offered via blog posting, I am saddened yet dutifully obligated to report that FlickIM will only be in iPhone/iPod Touch form until we have the available resources to fully support it.  We have been hard at work for the last year concentrating on our “main event” website called Redux, and things are now moving so quickly that we have simply run out of man hours to keep FlickIM Desktop performing at its best.  The unfortunate result was a mangled FlickIM that malfunctioned all too frequently and, worst of all, was aggravating you guys.

Eventually, the sharp sting of remorse that we felt each time Desktop misfired simply became too much for us to bare (particularly the “us” in the support department), so we are putting her to rest until we are available to provide you guys with the quality chat application you deserve.  We plan to bring it back and integrate it into our main site (you can check it out now at preview.redux.com), though for now FlickIM Desktop will be taking an indefinite server siesta.

Thanks for your support, loyalty, and fantastic feedback, and hopefully we can get back to you and the rest of our wonderful users soon.  In the meantime, enjoy iFlickIM, and hope to catch a few of you on Redux too.

Best wishes,
Andy (and the rest of the FlickIM team)

Happy Holidays fellow FlickIM’ers.  Hope everybody has been enjoying the season of giving, getting, and spending quality time with family around the world (as well as hiding from them by chatting with buddies online).   We’re in a sentimental mood at flickIM, and in the spirit of the season, we’d just like to thank you for making FlickIM a smashing success.  Talk to us at support@flickim.com and let us know how FlickIM fits into your world.  Your feedback will be invaluable  - tell us how you use our product, what features you enjoy most, what you would like to see, and anything else that you can think of.  As new features are proposed, we want to ensure that we make the right decisions with you in mind to create the best chat experience possible.  Enjoy the rest of the holidays and hope to hear from you soon.

Hey flickies. This week marks the third month now of Flick.IM desktop’s release, and judging by site traffic and your comments, we seem to be doing something right. We’re delighted with the amount of positive feedback and users signing up, yet as comfortable as our laurels are, we’re not using this success as an excuse to rest on them. Rather, we’ve continued to improve upon Flick.IM and are pleased to announce our next official push of features and upgrades.
Kindly mouse over your buddy list and delight in the wealth of information now displayed, including status, online time, avatars, and yes, those precious away messages (you’re welcome). In addition, we’ve added some new Application options. Finally, to celebrate Flick.IM’s 25% anniversary, we’ve awarded her with a new, firmer, and more robust back-end (software). She’s never felt or looked better, and her speed, reliability, and confidence have made great strides as well. After all, while we can’t make your friends any more reliable, at least we can make chatting with them more reliable. We also have some big news coming around the corner that, well, is a little bigger than a set of updates. Keep it tuned, and keep the comments coming. Like a good little user-powered company, we’ll continue to oblige your every wish as obediently as we humanly can.

Hello to our many fans whom we were able to meet in person for the first time at last weekend’s Download Music Festival.  Having no idea what to expect, it turned out to be a wonderful Saturday spent outdoors in the lovely weather.  Thanks to all those who took a break from the great music to hang out with us at our booth, glamorously situated next to the beer and garlic fries stand.  We don’t often get a chance to move our operations outside the office, mostly due to the fragility of our prized engineers, though they too were able to soak in a sunny jam or two between fixing bugs.  Our picks of the show included relatively unknown yet mind-blowingly awesome 65daysofstatic, Canadian new wavers Metric, She Wants Revenge, and of course, The Cure.  There’s even something of a Robert Smith eyeliner thing going on around the office now, though it may just be due to sleep deprivation. 

We were flattered with the amount of interest and curiosity buzzing around our humble operation, especially since all we had to entice people with was a few computers and our own enthusiasm, and as usual you guys came through with some terrific feedback and suggestions.  We’re now back at the homebase in Berkeley working to get those suggestions into FlickIM in time for our next official update in the coming week.  Keep it tuned and watch your ideas become the next hit feature of FlickIM.

I mean honestly, why wouldn’t it?  A few of us tried it at the Apple Store, and we’re pleased to report that it also fits perfectly in the screen when oriented vertically.  Welcome new iPod Touch FlickIM users!  iPhone users, please be kind to them.

Thanks to all who stepped up and submitted their creative brainchilds to our Show Us Some Skin competition.  Now that everything is up and available for your flicking pleasure, do check out each of the designs received from our talented user pool.  Choosing a winner was very difficult, so thank goodness  we left that up to you, our users, to decide.  Your decision?  “iPhone SMS.”  It’s creator Pete will receive the princely sum of $300 to the Apple store.  Add that to his $100 iPhone rebate and Pete could have, like, one and a half MacBook replacement batteries coming his lucky way.  Tied for second are Eric’s “Red Skin” and Stephen’s “Stockholm,” with each receiving an iPhone Bluetooth headset for their feats of glory.  Bringing in the third place prize of $25 Apple gift bucks is Louis’s icy hot “Brushed Metal” skin.  Fourth i.e. nonexistent place goes to the “Badger” skin from our own enginerd Charles, which he pleads only took him a minute to make.  Whatever, either way we’re docking that minute from your pay as misuse of company time.

As for everyone else, well done, fellas.  We only hope your heads don’t swell too much, as that can make the Bluetooth headsets much harder to operate.  Thank you everyone for your submissions. We’ll continue to offer them to all of our users on our site.  Around the corner is a big, big announcement that we’re pretty excited about, so keep tuned in for even more reasons to FlickIM your friends rather than talk to them in person.  Especially with all the lovely new skins, you know our interface is prettier than theirs anyway.

We’re most giddy to announce our first user-generated contest to help you add some personal flair to our already gorgeous user interface. We’ve already been offering skin customization tools to our users, and the results are not only tremendously popular, they allow us to sit back, relax, and watch you guys do all the left-brained fun stuff. Now we’re feeling a bit indebted and have decided to give you something back for your efforts. Specifically, a $300 Apple Store Gift Card to the smoothest, slickest design, as determined democratically by usage on our app. Runner up submissions will be awarded $25 iTunes Gift Cards, iPhone Bluetooth headsets, and of course the ability to be globally viewed on our site. Plus you’ll have people worldwide flicking your skin. That should make you a bit giddy too.   To see all of the details of this contest, click here

Hey everybody,

Today we are proud to release something we couldn’t have done without your help.  Skins!  We’ve added customizable skins to FlickIM, allowing you to create and choose how you want your FlickIM chat to look.  You can find a link to the directory of skins on the main page of FlickIM.

The three skins you can now choose from are the default FlickIM skin:

Red Skin by Eric Atha:

and iPhone SMS by Pete Zich:

If you know CSS, HTML and image editing and would like to make a skin for the directory drop us a line at support@flickim.com and we’ll send you all the materials and instructions you need to get started here.

As a side note—for any of you wondering about those javascript notifications you were receiving the other night—we accidentally turned on the debugging mode for the live server.  Don’t worry..the appropriate employee has been dealt with and made an example of; as soon as the other engineers discover the body you can be assured that it will never happen again.

Remember, we always want to know if something is broken or needs improvement!

Or alerts, rather. They’re a new feature we’ve added today.

You can turn on notifications under the ‘Notifications’ link on the homepage. When you enter your email address or phone number we can notify you if you receive an instant message when your phone is locked.

FlickIM will detect that you are away after you have locked your phone or left Safari for more than 15 seconds. If you receive an instant message we will send you an email or text message stating that you have waiting messages. Don’t worry, you won’t get spammed by texts: FlickIM will only send you one notification after the first missed message and then nothing more until you’ve checked it and gone away again.

If you find something isn’t working correctly, send us an email at support@flickim.com. A lot of you have suggested the ability to view away messages and a standard buddy list, so we’re working on that right now. We’ve also got some pretty awesome looking skins from our users which we will be adding soon. If you want to help us with skinning before we release the feature to the public, email us at flickim@.flickim.com and we’ll get you set up right away.

Hey everybody,

Today you may have experienced a “overload” error that didn’t allow you to log in. (Funny enough we didn’t receive any emails about it, only experienced it in-house). Initially we had four servers dedicated to managing connections; they were overloaded today, however, by the highest usage we have seen so far. As soon as we noticed this we immediately diverted more bandwidth to correct the problem. If anybody is still getting strange overload errors be sure to email me at flickim@flickim.com.

While we’re thankful to our users for making us the most popular chat application out there, you guys also crashed the server.

We can call it even, I guess.