Xanga - Timeline

Timeline

Xanga was introduced in October of 1999, in a format dissimilar to its current strain. The following year, Xanga became public as a result of a series of e-mail recruitment methods via GeoCities sent by Bianca Broussard, a fictional PR personality of Xanga.

In 2001, Genius, aka Biz Stone, the former Creative Director (and alleged creator of Bianca) left Xanga. He eventually went on to become part of the Blogger team at Google, and then to work at a new internet startup, Odeo.com. The following year, a contest called "Xangalympics" is marketed by Xanga to its members, with prize for the winner being Lifetime membership. The winning "Team" would get other prizes as well. Although unverified, various sources claim that winners are never announced.

Over the next few years, Xanga underwent several formatting changes. Featured Content is divided in 2002 into Premium and Classic views with Premium as the default. In 2005, Lifetime Premium is withdrawn as Xanga introduces Premium Plus. Eventually Xanga adds new profile features such as friends, "nudges", and chatboards that resemble Facebook. And in 2006 Xanga launches Xanga Video and Audio.

• August 6, 2007, Xanga launches Xanga TV. Xanga is easing into this feature, so they are opening this up for the premium users first.
• July 2, 2008, Xanga has an API using MetaWeblog
• March 24, 2009, Xanga moves its accounts to a subdomain and all existing URLs become http://username.xanga.com
• March 27, 2009, Xanga users can now publish blogs to Facebook (API)
• April 9, 2009, Xanga added no a vote to Idea voting
• May 29, 2009, Xanga experiments with the Top Blogs module to see if it can drive more traffic to Xanga sites
• November 5, 2009, Xanga brings back Personal URLs
• March 5, 2010, Xanga added a new archive module setting: list by month
• March 17, 2010, Xanga launches Site-Level Search
• April 8, 2010, Xanga's home page swaps position of "Top Blogs" and "Featured Weblogs"
• September 16, 2010, With Xanga's new "Quick Browse" feature, you can take your subs page with you.
• September 17, 2010, Xanga experimented w/ Frontpage Plugz for a week.
• October 6, 2010, Xanga was upgrading many their servers to brand new equipment.
• February 23, 2011, Xanga just launched a beta version of Xanga Mobile.
• April 15, 2011, Xanga now lets you recommend or share a comment.
• May 9, 2011, Xanga dumps the Share button. Xanga added a Facebook Like button, but it will not show up until on or after May 11.
• May 11, 2011, Now you can "Like" individual weblog entries so that they get shared through your Facebook feeds.
• June 9, 2011, Now users of Facebook or Twitter can sign in to comment on Xanga sites.
• June 16, 2011, Xanga launched a related posts module.
• June 28, 2011, Xanga launched an updated user-tagging system.
• July 12, 2011, Xanga launched an updated hash-tagging system.
• January 17, 2012, Xanga's iPhone App now live in iTunes App Store.
• January 19, 2012, Xanga is now on Android.
• February 9, 2012, Protected blog posts will show up your feed.