As promised, we’ve awarded an iPod Touch and two Enzyme Dynamite Prize Packages to three lucky contestants.  And they are…

* Grand Prize Winner: Don D. from Blue Springs, MO
  

* Runner Up: Liz B. from Castro Valley, CA
  

* Runner Up: Shelley J. from Gaithersburg, MD
  

Congrats to the prize winners and thanks to all the participants for making the contest a success!

To enter, visit the Contest Page and click the “Enter to Win” button to share Enzyme Dynamite’s latest album StereoVision, along with your other favorites, with your friends on SwingVine and Facebook.

Want to increase your chances of winning? Get your friends involved! The more friends you get to enter the contest, the higher your odds of winning are. Maximize your chances by publishing your favorites list to Facebook and recruit your friends to enter the contest!

Prizes:

• One Grand Prize winner will receive an Apple iPod Touch 8GB with a personalized engraving

• Two runner-ups will each receive an Enzyme Dynamite Prize Package including the StereoVision album, an Enzyme Dynamite t-shirt, sweatband, and stickers

Check out the Enzyme Dynamite iPod Giveaway Contest Page to learn more.

Due to the timing, we hope that this downtime will be minimally intrusive. Here’s an excerpt from our data center.

“During this maintenance, customers will notice a complete loss of connectivity to their servers on the frontend network (public network). While the upgrade duration is scheduled for 1 hour, we only expect between 15-20 minutes of downtime as the routers reload and fully converge.”

We also wanted to use this space to acknowledge the awesome guys at Hypertable (hypertable.org) that have made the SwingVine experience possible. Not only has their storage software helped enable the image-rich SwingVine user experience, they have been incredibly responsive when we’ve needed a hand. Last night’s upgrade went smoothly thanks in no small part to their help.

Hope you’re still enjoying this month’s recently launched features (enhanced social features, facebook app) and we appreciate any feedback you have for us.

TechCrunch just did a great write-up on SwingVine’s new real-time, social features and deeper integration with Facebook through our app. An excerpt that particularly captures the spirit of this release is below.  Thanks again to Leena Rao for covering us!

“So when users sign in, social trends are added based on the number of friends who engaged with various topics, the type of engagement (like vs comment vs share etc.), and the recency of engagement. Social trends can be separated from web trends. And unsurprisingly, when topics are popular in both a social circle and on the broader web, they are ranked higher.”

Read the full article here

Today we’ve rolled out a site upgrade that will greatly expand the social features on-site and allow you to discover content collaboratively with your friends on SwingVine and on Facebook with our new facebook app.

The new features include:

New Facebook Experience: Use the “SwingVine” Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from existing Facebook friends and jump start your social results. You won’t be left behind when your friends discover the next great indie album or fashion trend.

Social Discovery: We’ve taken the existing SwingVine experience that you know and love and overlaid it with trends and commentary from friends in real-time.

Streamlined Browse Experience: When you make a new discovery on SwingVine you can “like” it, comment on it, share it and in some cases even buy it directly from the browse experience using the new, streamlined dropdown menu

Integrated Social Experience: Enjoy the same mix of social and web results whether using the Facebook app or the SwingVine website via Facebook Connect

As always, we hope you enjoy using the new features as much as we enjoy building them. Please let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks.

We also added a feature that lets you share videos and news found on SwingVine. You can share via the old options (Facebook, Myspace, email, etc.) as well as a new option: Twitter. To avoid being annoying, direct links to YouTube videos and news content are used when you share videos and news (as opposed to links through an interstitial SwingVine experience). Enjoy!

Read the full article here

Highlight:

Curious about the buzz online? Wondering which movies, TV shows, new products, and more, are lighting up the switchboards? SwingVine aggregates trends and presents them to you in an easy to scan format.

At SwingVine you can explore categories and genres in various topics like music, movies, and technology. As you browse through the categories SwingVine returns aggregated rankings from search results, blogs, and social-networking sites.

Thanks for the coverage, Lifehacker!

Read the full article here

It’s labor day and our labor of love has just gotten TechCrunched! Our favorite excerpt:

“SwingVine is designed to be a discovery search engine for people to not only see what’s buzzing on the web, but also make sense of it. It’s purpose is noble; with so much content emerging on the web, from music to movies to news and tech gadgets, there is a need for a tool to help people know what’s worth reading into.”

Thanks to Leena Rao for the coverage.

To the thousands of new users taking SwingVine for a spin: We hope you find the site useful and look forward to improving the experience with your feedback!

One pattern emerged: Users were interested in SwingVine’s promise of helping them discover new entertainment, media, and other content, but there were some major hurdles getting in the way. In response, we’ve been working hard to knock down these obstacles and just rolled out our biggest site upgrade since our private Beta.

Key changes are as follows.

New interface: We’ve redesigned our entire user experience so that first time users can immediately understand how to use SwingVine and veterans can get at what they’re looking for more effectively. From layout to color to interactivity, we’ve tweaked every pixel to make the site more engaging, effective and fun.

More content, more often: Swingbot, our fearless automaton, can now grab all types of interesting music, movies, tech topics, etc. from across the web. This automated capability complements user contributions so that you can browse the most relevant content on the web, no matter where it comes from.

News, external reviews, buy links: Links to news and reviews on other sites are now available on SwingVine to help you learn more about topics as you browse. You can even purchase some content in the music and books categories through Amazon.

Facebook Connect: With Facebook Connect, you can now share and contribute on the site without registering a completely new account.

Easier reviews & comments: Users liked the ability to opine and converse on SwingVine, so we’ve made this even easier. You can now leave a review or a comment on any topic with one click.

Vines are now “related pages”: Many first time users got very confused by the lingo, so we renamed “vines” to “related pages” and adjusted the interface as well. Some of you have already let us know that you’ll miss the old terminology, but we hope these changes will increase ease of use over the long term.

From visuals to the nitty-gritty behind the scenes, we’ve recast many aspects of SwingVine to make it a better way to stay connected to the latest & greatest content in your areas of interest. We hope that you find the improvements useful and we look forward to your ongoing feedback.