Textile Update | September 2018

business • Oct 08, 2018

The end of summer brings new updates to Textile and Textile Photos

With September come and gone, and the summer now well behind us in the Northern Hemisphere, it seems like a good time for a community update. The Textile team has been hard at work building new features and tackling new issues in Textile Photos. It has been an exciting month, with some media coverage, community recognition, a growing user-base, and a very exciting pipeline for what’s the come. We’ve also accelerated our early release program, and we’re getting through the Textile Photos waitlist even faster! So sit back, relax, join the fun, and find out what we’ve been up to below 👇.

Media and External Coverage

Textile has been popping up here and there all over the Internet. Some of the things we’re most excited about include the recent FileCoin 2018 Q1 & Q2 Update — where Textile publications were featured multiple times — and an article in the Guardian about decentralisation being the next big step for the world wide web — where Textile Photos was highlighted as one of the more developed products to be built on the DWeb. That article generated quite a bit of discussion online, and we were very pleased to see the positive reception that DWeb technologies are receiving… let’s keep the conversation going! Additionally, since revamping their weekly IPFS newsletter, Textile articles have been featured multiple times in Protocol Labs’ IPFS Newsletter, so make sure you sign up there for the latest IPFS-based projects and news.

In addition to these two big articles, Textile has been added to BetaList and Startup Tracker (we even made their top 10 hottest startups list), among other startup focused sites. Additionally, Textile has received some international coverage, with several features on IPFS.Fund community sites in China. Highlights include a Textile Photos overview video shown live at the “AI and IPFS Summit” in Shenzhen, China. Here’s a link to the original article on IPFSFirst.com (WeChat Search: IPFS-FIRST) where the video has been made available to the community. Additionally, IPFSFirst.com recently launched a new “Pioneer Dialogue” (先锋对话) interview series that aims to discuss ideas and concepts with folks from industry working with IPFS and other decentralized tools/platforms. Textile had the honor of being showcased recently. For those who don’t read/speak Chinese, Google Translate seems to work pretty good for on-the-fly translation, and we’ve included English versions on our own blog.

Textile Blog and News

In addition to outside recognition, Textile has been busy publishing articles of interest to our users and the wider IPFS community. Check out the articles from the month of September in the list below. As always, if there’s a topic you’d like to see us cover, please feel free to reach out on Slack or Twitter to make a request!

Textile Photos…

For the past few months, we’ve been running an early release program for our Textile Photos app. Many of you have signed up for our waiting list, and each week we send out new invites with referral codes to early Textile Photos ‘pioneers’. From some of our earlier users, Textile Photos has been described as… an Instagram-like alternative for storing, managing, & sharing photos on the #DWeb, and a #decentralized IPFS-enabled Instagram, and a “service […] to store photos safely and without anyone able to do targeted marketing using your personal account data”, and even a “secure/private photo sharing app over IPFS”, as well as “a way to uniquely identify your photo file and disseminate only to those you wish”. These are all apt descriptions of what we’ve built… so far! But as we continue to explore new avenues afforded by DWeb technologies, we think you’ll find Textile Photos will start to stand out on its own 😃.

As we continue to push out regular new releases, we’ve seen out waitlist grow over 50% in the month of September alone! And those invites going out faster than ever before… to the point where we’re pushing out weekly releases, and keeping the actual wait times for a referral code down as much as we can. In the ‘app improvements department’, we’ve added better thread sharing on both iOS and Android, a smoother on-boarding experience for new users, as well as new views for ‘liking’ and commenting on your photos. Plus a ton of stability improvements and fancy things making things run smoother under the hood.

What’s next?

So what’s next for Textile and Textile Photos? Well, the team is hard at work bringing in some exciting new updates and features to Textile Photos as part of our mission to explore the future of mobile on the #DWeb. This will include major updates to user profiles and data recovery (this one is huge, so stay tuned for some upcoming posts of this topic), adding back auto-backup of your camera roll (due to popular demand), plus a big UI update that will blow your pants off, and a whole lot more. So stay tuned to our blog and GitHub repos for the latest and greatest updates and new features.

And now you’re up to date. If you’re excited about Textile — or just want to learn more about our apps, ideas, and vision for the future — feel free to reach out on Slack, or share your thoughts on Twitter. If you’re a fellow decentralized web developer, let us know what cool distributed web projects you’re working on — we’d love to hear about it, and maybe discuss partnerships! In the mean time, sign up for our waitlist to get earlier access to Textile Photos, or our mailing list to get updates about new features and progress.