After a few delightful programming all-nighters, we’re proud to introduce a brand new (and very cool) feature — DivShare Profiles. As we’ve mentioned in many previous posts, this is the first step on the road to a more social DivShare. We’re soft-launching profiles today to get you revved up for our big new feature, DivShare Groups, which will allow you to share files with anyone on the ‘net based on a common interest, project or organization.

Groups are about a week away, so let’s get started by learning about your brand new profile. First, we’ll talk privacy. By default, your profile is empty. You’ll have to add your photo, links and files to get started, because we don’t want to expose any files or info from your account without your consent. (The only exception — we set your default “profile display name” to the first name on your account, but you can change it at any time.)

You have a few privacy options — you can make your profile visible to everyone, only to your friends, or only to your friends and common group members. Then, you can manually add or remove files from your profile using the drop-down list in the dashboard — this drop-down now handles displaying files on your profile, setting file privacy and moving files between folders. When creating your profile, you can also set an automatic behavior for newly uploaded files — by default, no files are added to your profile unless you do it on the dashboard.

If you guys have more privacy ideas to keep everything safe and secure, let us know. Now let’s move on to the fun stuff, the profile itself. Here’s a screenshot of my profile:

Pretty hot, right? I’ll break down all the moving parts:

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We just added a new sharing option to your list, which appears on file download pages as well as on your dashboard — the “E-mail This File” form. You’ve always been able to share files via e-mail by typing in the addresses when you upload them, but we’ve found that some users also want to notify people of files after they’re uploaded — so this quick addition does the trick.

In other news, we’re working on some dashboard tweaks to show you more at-a-glance info, so we’ll be rolling those out soon. I’m also currently building the new user profile system, which will allow you to create a screenname (which will become your custom profile URL), upload an avatar and tell other users a little about what you’re up to online. After that, it’s on to our big new feature, DivShare Groups. And, unlike some other awesome things, it’ll all be ready soon.

Hey y’all, we’re back from Texas and ready to rock with some brand new features that really bring file management on DivShare to life. Tonight we’re proud to introduce the redesigned DivShare dashboard, giving you full power over your folders and files. Here’s a quick list of what’s new and what’s improved:

New:
• Move existing files between folders
• Move or delete all your files with one click
• Quickly browse all your folders in the sidebar
• View image thumbnails directly on the dashboard

Improved:
• Live search all your files with instant results
• Cleaner file listings with icons and drop-down boxes for sharing links and file info
• One-click privacy changes

» Check out the New Dashboard Now

It’s a huge upgrade, and should make managing all your DivShare files a lot faster and easier. The best way to explore is to check it out for yourself — if you use Gmail, iTunes or any of our other favorite interfaces, you should be able to catch on in no time. After the jump, I’ll go into some more detail about each new feature, how it works and how it fits into our overall plans for DivShare.

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Just in case you had any doubts about “how Web 2.0″ we are, we’ll be mingling with the best and brightest of the tech industry at this week’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Since we’ve spent the last three months staring at computer screens and braving blizzards in the Northeast, it’ll be a great opportunity to chill out, hit up some great panels and speeches, and drink as much Lone Star as possible under the hot Texas sun.

If you’ll be in town, give us a holler and we’ll talk shop over some Sixth Street partying. For everyone else, we’ll still be taking care of DivShare support and perhaps even rolling out some new features, so stay tuned.

And, don’t worry — if we get ourselves in any trouble, we’ll post photos.

We’ve introduced a lot of new features over the past two months, and on just about every post somebody chimes in: “You know what else would be great? Folders.” We couldn’t agree more, and today we’re rolling out our most-requested upgrade by far — the ability to organize all types of files in a folder.

The process builds on the foundation of our image galleries, but allows you to fill your folders with any file type you want. To make things even easier, we’ll automatically check to see if your folder contains only images — if it does, that folder will automatically become an image gallery. All your current galleries will seamlessly become part of the new folder system, and you won’t notice any difference on your image download pages.

That covers existing files — now here’s a look at all the new stuff you can do. On the upload form, you’ll now have the option to add your files to an existing folder or start a new one (and give it a name). Here’s a visual:

In the spirit of improving your DivShare organization, we’ve also made some changes to the upload success page. If you’re adding files to a folder, the success page will display a list of all your files. If you’re working on a gallery, you’ll get a quick look at all the images you’ve added so far. Here’s a sample of both:

Then there’s the download page. For image galleries, we’ve made some aesthetic changes, but everything remains generally the same. Watch out, though, for some major gallery browsing upgrades coming soon. On the download page for a file contained in a gallery, you’ll see a list of all the files in that folder. That way, users can easily navigate between related files, and you can easily group all your related files. Check it out:

Meanwhile, we’ve also made a huge improvement to your Dashboard. You can now view all your folders and galleries individually — just select one from the new drop-down list underneath the “Search” form, and all your other files are whisked away. Try it out!

We have a couple more features on tap for the next 24 hours — first is the option to move files between folders and add files you’ve already uploaded to new folders. We’ll also be adding folder support to the Wordpress plugin — for the time being it might not function 100% using the old gallery option.

All in all, we’ve been using folders for a couple days during development, and they’ve already increased our productivity big time. We’re glad you can now enjoy them as well — and, as always, comment away with all your suggestions, ideas and any errors you might encounter.

In other great news, someone who registers within the next 24 hours will be our 20,000th user. To celebrate, we’ll be programming non-stop to make the site even more powerful and exciting. Stay tuned!

Update: All done! Our Athena storage server should be back up to full capacity now. Thanks for your patience, and sorry again for the inconvenience.

We try to do this kind of thing as little as possible, but tonight we need to post an important maintenance notice. Here goes:

We are scheduling an hour of downtime tonight to do some maintenance on our newest storage server. Between 5:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. EST, you won’t be able to access files on the athena or athena-upload subdomains — this will affect most files uploaded within the last month, but some files uploaded during the day today will still be available.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we will do our best to bring the server back online before 9:00. You’ll still be able to access the site, your dashboard and all other pages — it’s just that some downloads won’t be working. At this point we expect that you’ll still be able to upload new files, but we’ll notify you if that changes.

In brighter news, we are putting the final touches on the new folder organization system, so watch out for that to go live this weekend. Have a great night, and we’ll be back up to full speed soon!