A new beta version of Xfire is available for testing. It will be live until roughly Wednesday, 7/11/07, at 6pm Pacific Time (that's 18:00 for you Europeans .

Download 78a.exe now. (link removed beta over)

Exit Xfire. Copy 78a.exe to your Xfire installation directory and run it to update your Xfire. If you don't know how to do this, then you probably should not be attempting to beta test Xfire. To verify that this worked, go to the Help | About box. The beta version of Xfire will report build 26986.

The major change for this update is better Vista support. Xfire no longer runs elevated in Vista, this should help with game detection.

Please restrict discussion of the beta to this blog thread. This is to help us track your feedback. We are interested in your experiences with the new beta, specifically anything that goes horribly wrong. Thanks for your help!

--- Chad

Had a website update yesterday, it was a little later then expected, but had some good stuff in it:

• More clan activities being logged.
  
• New screen shot interface
  
• *alpha* of a WoW Character Stats page
  
• Better data in the profile page blog module
  
• a couple CSS improvements for Opera
  

We're aiming for another website update on Thursday, it will mainly be bug fixes, and might make the WoW Stats page public.

Xfire is starting a beta program before the client releases, get all the details at Chris' blog

Continuing with the website release notes blog posts...

In today's website release we have the following changes:

• Change screenshots from displaying in PNG to JPG, this should result in faster load times
  
• Changing your public email address no longer unverifies your private email address
  
• Further backend work for clan events
  
• Many BBCode fixes and improvements
  
• Invitation Email security fix
  
• Favorite servers display fixed
  
• Username should always show next to blog comments
  
• When viewing all of a user's blogs, the most recent entry gets a view credit
  
• Properly limiting nickname to 25 characters
  
• Various CSS tweaks
  
• A couple fun surprises put in place for next week's client release
  

The next website release is 4.32 on 31 May 2007

So after reading through the majority of public blog entries that people posted there are two big trends. The first is surprise that Xfire has blogs and that they didn't notice it before. These people usually just test it out. The second group seems to think it's perfectly normal to have a blog on Xfire, and they posted as if they had already had a thousand previous entries.

This second group interests me. I think if it were me, I'd test the waters a bit like the first group and probably never look at it again. For the second group it seems like the most natural thing to talk about that secret love or the fact that you hate your siblings, in a public form. It'll be interesting to see the drop off rate in both groups, and what the traffic is like on the weekends.

Anyone have any ideas on promoting blogs?

We have release notes for the client, why not the website too?

In today's website release we have the following changes:

• Added a box for Blogs on profile pages, officially announcing it
  
• Prettied up the WoW characters box on profile pages
  
• Fixed the color coding of COD:UO and COD2 servers
  
• Closed a couple of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
  
• Added a permission system for the blogs
  
• Lots of Clan Calendar improvements
  
• A couple BBCode fixes
  

Next scheduled update: 17 May 2007