Videochat Extension - 2023 In Review

🎉 Year in Review: Celebrating a 2023 of Our Chrome (and Firefox) Extension 🎉

As we bid farewell to another incredible year, we can't help but feel a sense of pride and gratitude for the journey we've embarked on together with our beloved Chrome extension. It has been a year filled with growth, innovation, and most importantly, the continuous support and feedback from our amazing users.

Thanks to you, we managed to grow from 23,000 users to 107,000 enjoyers in just one year!

Here's a glimpse of the milestones and achievements we've accomplished throughout the year:

1️⃣  Expansion of Features: We dedicated ourselves to enhancing the functionalities of our extension to cater to the ever-evolving needs of our users. This year, our dev alone spent 728 hours working on the project, published 20 releases and changed 510,935 lines of code (why?). We introduced several exciting features, such as support for 50+ videochat sites (including Omegle & CooMeet Free), new streamer mode with OBS integration, and firefox support, making it easier than ever to actually enjoy your videochat experience.

2️⃣  User Feedback-driven Improvements: We value your opinions and suggestions, which is why we actively listened to your feedback and implemented numerous improvements based on your valuable insights. We even put more than 50 hours of actual work to give our users a platform to share their own ideas about what we could do better, but most ideas from google forms we received were in Chinese and Turkish and it would be better to never translate them (we did). And the most voted suggestion was about new feature for Omegle after its death. Your input has been instrumental in shaping the extension's roadmap, ensuring that it remains a valuable tool for your video chatting experience!

3️⃣  Enhanced Performance: We invested significant efforts in optimizing the performance of our extension, resulting in faster loading times, improved stability, and a seamless user experience. We spent 200+ hours rewriting the extension from scratch for your better experience. We understand that your time is valuable, and we strive to make every interaction with our extension as smooth as possible.

4️⃣  Collaborative Partnerships: We forged valuable partnerships with like-minded organizations and developers who share our vision of empowering users through technology. These collaborations have allowed us to expand the reach and versatility of our extension. We even largely succeeded in finding reasons to postpone the implementation of the custom user rating system for Omegle until the very sudden death of Omegle!

5️⃣  Community Engagement: We believe in building a strong community around our extension, and this year was no exception. We spent a lot of effort to redesign our Discord server to make it easier for people to ask questions about the project and share their own ideas. Our Discord welcomed 730 new members this year. The result was mostly questions like 'how to know names?' or 'how to get unbanned?', but we are grateful for the incredible support and enthusiasm shown by our community. A few people from the community reached out and offered their help in various ways, in the next year we will be accepting more contributions, mostly translations.

6️⃣  Recognition and Awards: Our hard work and dedication were acknowledged by industry experts, as we were honored with [top], [cool] and [works like charm] reviews. 415 out of 465 reviews this year on the Chrome Web Store were 5-star! We received FOUR reviews on firefox add-ons store and even TWO on edge! These accolades further motivate us to continue pushing the boundaries of what our extension can achieve.

None of these achievements would have been possible without your unwavering support and trust in our product. We are incredibly grateful for each and every one of you who has embraced our Chrome extension as an essential tool in your daily video chatting routine.

Looking ahead, we have exciting plans for the upcoming year. We will continue to listen to your feedback, innovate, and improve our extension to provide you with an even more exceptional video chatting experience.

Thank you for being a part of our journey, and here's to another incredible year ahead!

Best wishes,
[Your Name/Company Name]

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I've never done it before, but seeing how all these marketing departments summarize the year, I decided to try it too. So if you opened this post for the bright summary, look above and not below.

tl;dr: In 2024 the pace of development will be slowed down due to the sudden death of omegle. The project will still be maintained and developed, but not at the same pace as this year. Great focus will be given to internationalization and new features only for the people supporting the project.

Because if you don't praise yourself, no one will.

And I want to share some of the project's wins and losses.

For most of the people behind the extension, this year was very hard in every sense. But for the extension itself, up until November, everything was great because all the hard work finally started to pay off in terms of user growth.

We've been able to do a lot of things I never would have thought possible at the beginning of the project. Here is a list of them:

• Release v1.6.2 (2023-01-15) - Minor release with 2 small fixes.
• Release v1.6.3 (2023-01-15) - Fixed 'check torrents' function.
• Release v1.7.0 (2023-03-14) - Support for 46 video chat sites, Firefox, Edge and TypeScript.
• Release v1.7.1 (2023-03-19) - Minor improvements for Chatruletka.
• Release v1.7.2 (2023-03-20) - Bug fixes and minor improvements.
• Release v1.7.3 (2023-03-26) - New mirrors for ome.tv, basic Coomeet Free support, minor improvements.
• Release v1.7.5 (2023-04-05) - Minor release.
• Release v1.7.6 (2023-04-05) - Minor release.
• Release v1.7.7 (2023-04-14) - Our website & Discord server. Minor fixes.
• Release v1.7.8 (2023-04-15) - Redesigned welcome screens.
• Release v1.7.9 (2023-04-20) - Hint system, bug fixes, optimization.
• Release v1.8.0 (2023-05-04) - Geolocation & streamer mode improvements.
• Release v1.8.1 (2023-05-31) - Stability improvements.
• Release v1.8.2 (2023-07-20) - Urgent store listing update.
• Release v1.9.0 (2023-08-23) - Better support for Omegle (work-in-progress), new geolocation features, minor fixes.
• Release v2.0.0 (2023-09-07) - Patreon with improved geolocation for patrons. Transparent Roadmap based on user suggestions.
• Release v2.1.0 (2023-10-10) - Reworked the changelog system.
• Release v2.2.0 (2023-11-09) - Omegle is dead.
• Release v2.2.1 (2023-11-10) - New automation feature: 'auto-stop after skip'.
• Release v2.2.2 (2023-12-27) - Adapted to Coomeet Free changes.

I won't bore you with a lot of details that you won't be interested in, but I can say with certainty that at the moment the project is experiencing a bit of an identity crisis.

We invested a lot of effort to push the first places in chrome web store among similar extensions for omegle, but leif suddenly destroyed his video chat, and with it instantly evaporated a lot of developments and our plans for the future of the project. It was his call to make, of course, and he probably did not have a choice (I truly have no idea), but it still does not change the reality for this particular project.

In 2023, I alone personally spent a voluntary 637 hours on extension development / testing and 86 more hours on related socials - discord, canny, github, post publishing, website and so on. Also there were other people who helped me in different ways of course, but not in a comparable scale.

Me and my very small team of like-minded Individuals managed to increase the number of weekly users from 23,000 to 107,000 in just one year without a penny of marketing budget.

Our principle was very simple - we had a vision for the product and we wanted it to have something for you to recommend your interlocutor for.

But the problem is that now without omegle our project has lost its development vector and at the moment it has no clear development vision. Just look at the bars graph higher, Omegle died in November.

And we have no luck with monetization, because instead of anarchic omegle we have only more profit-focused ome, where for a number of reasons our hands are tied. And overall ome doesn't have a tenth of the problems our project could solve for omegle users.

Yes, we have boring but necessary tasks like analytics or adding support for multiple languages. To some extent, it will be interesting and useful to implement them in a fast pace, so that we can apply the gained experience to other projects. But the point is that there is no alternative to omegle in its freedom for the browser extension developer and will never be.

This doesn't mean that the development of the videochat extension will be abandoned. It's just that I, as a founder of the whole thing and basically the only driving force of this project, will be forced to shift my main focus to those projects that I think can bring in money and interesting challenges. I want to build something that would not depend on other people's projects.

Videochat Extension will be slowly but steadily developed, maintained, translated into all popular languages of the community.

I am just no longer capable of enthusiastically investing 100-150 hours a month in a project that just fundamentally cannot pay off. I can still devote 10-15.

I would like to thank again all rarest users who support the project with real human money on patreon - thanks to you it still exists as it is now.

I will try to add reasonable new features for you in future updates ASAP, but for obvious reasons I can't mess with the only survived Omegle-like platform. That's just not in my interests.

As for now, patreon barely covers the operating costs of the project, such a thing as work compensation can't even be dreamed of.

If you want to help and become one of those 10.000 users who make a real difference, please subscribe.

That's how 2024 begins, a bit foggy and unclear what exactly to do next. I hope you never have such foggy moments in your life.

Happy New Year!

qrlk