Telly, Archived telly.com

Lead Front-End Engineer · 2011–2012 · San Francisco

Led the rebuild of the front end as Telly while the same codebase kept serving TwitVid.

Telly was a social video product built out of TwitVid, a Twitter video-sharing service, and relaunched under the new name in June 2012 around collections, following, and a personalized feed.

This was December 2011 to September 2012. I was the lead front-end engineer, reporting to the CEO. Six months in we relaunched TwitVid as Telly, a new application under the same roof, in June 2012.

• JavaScript
• PHP
• Mustache
• Bootstrap

1. 

   The brand as a configuration property

   Relaunch

   A new application rather than a reskin, built in the same codebase and hot-swapped in: a view and component layer in PHP, Mustache templates rendered on both the server and the browser from the same files, and History.js pushState so pages changed without a full load. The brand name itself was a config property, and legacy titles were rewritten on the way out. It shipped in June 2012.

   Sourcestelly.com as it stood in August 2012

2. The tracking that measured the launch

   Measurement

   I wrote the browser half of the tracking: a pixel per event carrying category, action, label, page and section, so the relaunch could be read rather than guessed at.

3. 

   Signing up, and the five steps after it

   Onboarding

   Sign-in ran through Facebook, Twitter, or email. Twitter was the inherited path, since TwitVid's accounts had been Twitter accounts, but by the relaunch Facebook led the page. The flow that followed was five steps with an interest picker and a separate mobile path, and it checked the browser at step four so that only people already running Chrome were offered the extension.

   SourcesTelly Introduces Social Graph for Video Discovery

4. A bookmarklet for the rest of the web

   Distribution

   The video worth collecting was mostly on other people's sites, so I built a bookmarklet that opened a capture window over whatever page you were reading. It became the path the team's Chrome extension called into rather than something the extension replaced.

   SourcesTwitvid Rebrands As Telly To Focus On Social Video Discovery

5. Source control first, and the bug that got through

   How it ran

   Not all of the code was in version control when I arrived, and getting it into a repository was what I pushed for before the rebrand started: a rebrand changes everything at once, and without history there is no way back from a bad afternoon. The surface was wide (relaunch, signup funnel, bookmarklet, tracking, and the site in Spanish, Korean, and Russian), and somewhere in it I put a bug into onboarding that broke signup. The CEO caught it in a late-night email and rolled it back, and I fixed it that night.

Related context

• Telly, by Sallee Design

  Jeremy designed Telly; this is his case study of the same relaunch, from the design side.

• Twitvid Rebrands As Telly To Focus On Social Video Discovery

  TechCrunch • June 2012: coverage of the relaunch, the personalized feed, and the bookmarklet.

• Telly Introduces Social Graph for Video Discovery

  Adweek • 2012: "My Telly", the social-graph feature the signup work fed.