We’ve had some requests from users who are sharing big videos that they don’t want to have them automatically converted to Flash Video, so we’ve added a new option to your My Account page to turn off this feature for new uploads. If you want to convert a vid after the fact, just head to the download page for any vid you’ve uploaded and click the “Convert” link.

We’ve also made some improvements to the video conversion system, so you should see a big speed increase from here on out. Enjoy!

We’ve launched a ton of new features that help you find your friends and colleagues on DivShare, quickly send them files, and then track files you have received or saved. Here’s a roundup of the last three posts:

Inbox, Archive & Favorites
All files you receive will be saved in the new inbox on your dashboard, and you can archive them for safe keeping. You can also add a file to your favorites by clicking the new link on every download page.

Address Book & Autocomplete
When you add friends to DivShare, the new autocomplete address book will help you find them when you start typing in the “Send To” field on the upload form. Saves you typing and memorization.

The People Search
Now that you can build an address book and easily send files between friends, it’s time to starting building your DivShare friends list. The people search gives you a fast and easy way to find anyone on DS, or invite people who haven’t created their accounts yet.

We’ve got a ton of new stuff on the horizon and are expanding fast — the other day, we broke 50,000 registered users! Comment away, and watch the blog for more new stuff in the next few days. Enjoy!

In our third new feature post of the day, we’re getting introduced to a really cool new social feature — People Search. Now that you’ve got inboxes and address books, you need a really easy way to find everyone you know on DivShare so that you can easily collaborate, join groups and send files.

Enter the People Search. You can type in all or part of anyone’s name or e-mail address and easily check out their profile or add them to your friends. Once you’re friends, both of you can take advantage of the autocomplete address book, and it’s easier to invite each other to groups and share files. Here’s an example search, for “divpub”. Since Dave and I both have @divpub.com addresses, we’ll both show up.

For privacy, no one’s e-mail will ever be displayed unless you have searched for that exact e-mail address. The only info that shows up by default is your first name and a link to your profile (which, if you haven’t added anything, is probably blank), so random people wouldn’t be able to find me by just typing in “rob” if they didn’t know who they were looking for. And, as always, you have tons of privacy options to deny friend requests and make your profile and groups secret if you want to.

To make yourself easier to find on DS, we recommend adding a photo and a description profile display name — for example, I recently added my last name to my display name. That way, a search for “Howard” makes it easy to find me. You can update all your settings on the My Profile page.

One more quick thing, and then you can hit the comments. If your friends aren’t on DivShare yet, the “Invite” form in the sidebar of the people search page gives you a quick, easy way to tell you how cool you are. Just type in their addresses and they’ll get an e-mail introducing them to DS and providing a link to get their own free account. Spread the word!

To make it even easier to send files to your friends’ new inboxes, we’ve added a very Gmail-esque function to the upload form — autocomplete on the “Send To” field. If you have DivShare friends, they will automatically show up whenever you start typing the first letters of their name or e-mail address. It saves you some typing and, more importantly, you don’t have to remember a million e-mail addresses or copy them in from an outside source. Check it out:

In that screen, I’ve typed the letter “r” and everyone on my friends list whose name or e-mail starts with that letter appears. I can then click on any of the three, and their e-mail address will be inserted into the Send To field. Easy as pie!

Now that we have these cool new sending features, you’ll also want to start building up your list of friends and colleagues for easy DivSharing. I’ll introduce you to the new People Search in the next post. Until then, let us know what you think in the comments.

We’ve got a bunch of great new features to announce that we have been rolling out over the past 24 hours. First up: three new ways to organize your files on the dashboard. Check out your dash sidebar for the new links to your “Inbox,” “Archives” and “Favorites” — these three new folders allow you to keep track not only of files you’ve uploaded, but stuff that you like around the site and files that other people have sent your way. Here’s a screen:

Inbox: When your friends add you to the “Send an E-mail To:” field on the upload form, the system will now add the file to your DivShare inbox as well as sending you an e-mail notification. It’s a great way to keep track of a bunch of files you’ve received as part of a long project — I know Dave and I are already loving it for use during our own DS development. In addition, any e-mail notifications you send from the dash or download page will be added to the recipient’s inbox.

If you want to clean up your inbox, just move files that you still need to the Archive.

Favorites: On every download page, you’ll find a brand new “Add to Favorites” link in the sidebar. Just click that and it will save the file to your account, so you can access it whenever you want via the dashboard.

Searching: You can also do a live search from the dashboard on your inbox, archives and favorites sections, just like with uploaded files. Just type your terms into the regular search box, and it will search whichever section you’re currently viewing.

Address Book: We also set up a fancy new autocomplete feature for the “Send To:” field on the upload form. So if you just start typing the name or e-mail of one of your DivShare friends, their info will pop up and you’ll be able to add them to your recipient list with a single click. We’ll go into more depth on this in the next post, and talk more about how to find your friends on DivShare in a bit.

As always, comment away on the new features!

Not that we keep track of our Alexa or anything, but we hit an awesome milestone today — we are now one of the top 1,000 most popular sites on the web (No. 904, to be exact). Check out the goods right here.

This is cool, but the even cooler part is that we are about to launch a ton of cool new features, including an Inbox, Archive and Favorites section of your dashboard that allows you to easily track files that others have sent to you, or files that you’ve found on DS and want to keep for later. We’re also doing a bunch of big hardware upgrades today to make life even faster and easier for downloaders. Got more suggestions and feature requests? Hit us up in the comments. Stay tuned!