Privacy Improvements and New Widgets

Today, we released the first set of several privacy improvements that we’re working on. We understand how important having control over personal information on the web is for everyone and this update will give you more choices on how and where your personal and ride data is displayed.

First, an update that makes it easier to access your account info, including your privacy settings…

Account Settings Menu

Now you can now easily tell who is logged in to Strava, which is particularly helpful for those of you who have more than one member of your household using Strava. We’ve replaced the Settings link from the header with your athlete name and a drop down menu that lets you easily access all of your settings sub menus with a single click.

New Settings Menu

Anonymized Public Pages

Not everyone wants to show off their epic rides, fastest ascents and mileage-heavy profile pages. Now you can choose between displaying your ride data publicly and “anonymizing” it. Anonymized personal information displays only a first name and last initial, and removes athlete photos, locations and other ride data that could identify that individual.

Anonymized Athlete Profile

To change your privacy setting, click on your name in the toolbar to access the new drop down menu, click on Privacy and change your setting from “Public” to “Strava Users Only.”

New Privacy Settings - Anonymize Your Public Information

Improved Privacy Zones

Strava members have been able to set privacy zones around their homes, offices and other locations for a while now, but we realized that this feature wasn’t as easy to use as it could be. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, creating a privacy zone hides any riding or other activity within the privacy zone on all maps. Other people looking at maps of your rides will not be able to see where you started or ended your ride, if it falls inside of the privacy zone. However, you cannot compete on segments that start or end within a privacy zone, so we give you some options on setting the size of the zone.

We’re working on improving the way you can set your privacy zone, as well as making it easier to see what part of the map is being hidden. For this release, we’ve added a map thumbnail to each privacy zone you’ve created that shows you the size and location of the zone.

Privacy Zone Maps

Club and Segment Widgets

The athlete and ride widgets have been so popular, that we’ve applied the concept to clubs and segments. Club members can now generate a widget of their club activity and embed it on their blog or club website. To get the widget, you have to be a member of the club. Go to your club page and click on the “Share [Your Club Name]‘s Rides” button.

Creating a Club Widget

If you have a website or blog dedicated to local cycling and want to be able track KOMs for local climbs, you can do so with the segment widget. To get the widget embed code for a local segment, go to the segment page and click the “Share this Segment Button” on the right side of the page.

Creating a Segment (or Climb) Widget

Please let us know what you think of these updates in the comments below!

Site Update – 5:30pm PDT

UPDATE – 7:30PM PDT

We’re back up and all data has been restored. If you’re an iPhone app customer and couldn’t create an account or sync your rides, we are very sorry. You should be able to do so now. We also have a new release coming soon that should remedy some issues customers are having with poor iPhone connectivity.

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A quick update on the status of Strava.com:

Strava is hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Like many other websites over the past 36 hours, we’ve experienced an outage and are waiting for Amazon to restore our service. They are not able to give us a good indication of how long this will take. We will continue to update you on our blog, Twitter and Facebook pages.

For Strava iPhone app customers: You will likely be unable to sync your rides until this issue is resolved. We recommend waiting until Strava.com is back up before trying to do so.

We know you rely on Strava and we apologize for the interruption.

Connectivity Issues with Amazon EC2

This evening, we became aware of intermittent and brief downtime with our website due to issues Amazon is having with their Elastic Compute Cloud, where strava.com is hosted. Amazon has posted a short update and is working to fix the issue. We’ve been in contact with our hosting provider to restore service as soon as possible. We apologize for the interruption – thanks for bearing with us.

From the Amazon Service Health Dashboard:
8:54 PM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity issues effecting a small number of instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

Updates from Amazon:

10:39 PM PDT We have identified the misbehaving network device that has been causing the issue and have made changes to fail away from it.

11:17 PM PDT Network connectivity has been restored and the service is operating normally.

We should be back up shortly.

Pro Cyclists, Updated Dashboard, Comments and More!

We have a big release this week with so many improvements that I couldn’t fit them all in the title – really, it’s that awesome.

Pro Cyclists

Tim Johnson

Ted King

Craig Lewis

Cycling pros Tim Johnson (Cannondale-Cyclocrossworld.com), Ted King (Liquigas-Cannondale), Craig Lewis (HTC-Highroad) are now on Strava! We’re excited to have them onboard, and have given them their own Pro Cyclist Profile pages. Go check them out and follow their exploits around the globe via Strava rides, blog posts, tweets and more. Make sure you fan them and drop a comment or two!

Improved Commenting and Kudos

Previously, adding comments to a ride was not exactly easy or intuitive, as many of you have pointed out. We’ve been listening! If you check out the new Pro Cyclist Profile pages you’ll notice an improved commenting system, as well as a way to quickly give out kudos. Now you can add kudos and comments to any activity in your dashboard feed, as well as on the Ride page (Ride>Ride Report), and your Club pages.

Updated Dashboard

There are some other improvements that we’ve made to the dashboard. Along with an improved activity feed with comments and kudos, we’ve also added a “share” link that lets you share a ride on Facebook, Twitter, via email or by embedding a Strava Widget on your website or blog. You can also see all the Pro Cyclists in Strava on your dashboard, making it easier to find and follow them. And we’ve added thumbnail Google maps to each Strava ride in your feed to give you more information about your and your friends’ rides on your dashboard.

Widgets

Strava Ride Widget

Another popular request we get is for ways to share your Strava rides directly on your personal blogs or websites. As of today, you have any easy way to do that. If you want to blog about an epic ride you did over the weekend, you can add a Ride Widget to that post with a map and summary information about that ride. It’s a simple as copying and pasting a small code snippet into your blog post. You can grab your ride widget code on your ride page, by clicking the big “Share this Ride” drop-down menu on the right and choosing “Embed a widget” from the options.

You can also show more dynamic information about your rides in Strava with the Athlete Activity and Summary Widgets. The Athlete Activity Widget displays the last 5 rides you did and updates whenever you upload new rides to Strava. The Summary Widget shows your total distance, time, elevation gain and number of achievements (KOMs/QOMs/PRs) for the current week. You can get the code for these widgets on your Profile page, by clicking the “Share your Rides” button under your profile photo.

Segment Filtering

Today we are also turning on strong segment filtering for everyone. This is a project we’ve been working on for a while – behind the scenes – to address the problems that occur when there are too many segments for a ride. I won’t go into all the details about how this works here, because it deserves its own blog post (Mark will  post one on it soon). In short, we use an algorithm to determine which segments are popular and then hide those segments that are not popular. As we continue to collect more information about which segments people like, the filtering will get more intelligent. You can still see “unpopular” or hidden segments, by clicking the “Show all segments” link at the bottom of the segments list. And of course, you’ll always be able to see your own private segments.

This is the second big step in trying to rein in rides with lots of segment noise – and the first step towards letting the Strava community decide which segments are worthy and which are not.

Golden Gate Bridge Elevation Correction

Strava uses a USGS elevation database to correct poor elevation data for cyclists in the US. Strava members who ride in the San Francisco Bay Area with a non-altimeter device have probably noticed that they get an elevation boost when they cross the Golden Gate Bridge. This is because the USGS elevation database doesn’t “see” bridges. We now have the ability to mark a segment as a bridge, in which case we’ll zero-out the elevation gain for that segment. This is the first step in leveraging our own data to patch elevation data. Look for more innovation in the future. Also, let support know if there are bridges in your area that we should define.

Strava Is Looking for a Senior Visual Designer

Strava is in the process of building out our product team and we’re looking for a Senior Visual Designer to advance the Strava interface. If you are an experienced UI designer for consumer web apps and have a passion for great design (and cycling!), then drop us a line. We have a great team of people here at Strava and are working on delivering a more engaging experience for athletes around the world.

This position is in San Francisco, California. You can read more about the job here: http://www.strava.com/careers/senior-visual-designer

A Strava Kit and lifetime Strava Velo membership to anyone who refers someone that we hire! Pass it along…