Couchsurfing, the peer-to-peer accommodation sharing network, has re-launched on a new platform to enable it to take the first steps toward new functionality for its desktop and mobile app users.
The move came after a cut-off yesterday of its antiquated system, with about 30 hours of operational downtime.
Couchsurfing, which claims to have facilitated 3 million trips in the past year, has done a full back-end technical infrastructure re-build.
The switchover by the San Francisco-based, private company comes a little more than a year after the company's CEO stepped down and was subsequently replaced by Jennifer Billock.
Faster search algorithm
What Couchsurfing's claimed 400,000 active hosts will notice most is the front-end design changes. These are -- at launch -- minimal.
The biggest quick upgrade for users is an improved search experience.
Until this week, a common complaint of users has been that the search box for finding hosts in a destination hasn't differentiated between members who are barely active and ones who are enthusiastic.
A search for hosts in Destination X might have turned up, at the top of the results, the profile of a member who had done nothing more than fill out an email address, name, and a location.
Now, the search engine takes into account "profile completeness" as one criteria for sorting which member profiles should appear at the top of results.
Members who have full biographies, photos, Facebook connected accounts, and frequent travel histories will rise to the top of results.
Plus, if you've only supplied an email address and name, you don't get permission to send a request for a place to stay. The standard for "profile completeness" has been raised.
In other details, the cleaned-up interface no longer has a message in-box that looks like it's from 1997.
There's also a better presentation of events globally. The company claims that nearly 100,000 members attend events each month, on average, worldwide.
While proud of reaching this project milestone, CEO Billock downplays the front-end user changes today.
"We have much, much more on our product map for the user experience than the small changes made today in the front-end experience.
The big step here is that this new platform has technical depth and will let us build new functionality on top of it quickly, unlike the old system.
Now we can start solving real problems for users and enhance their experience in meaningful ways."
Couchsurfing has, in 2011 and 2012, raised cumulatively $22.6 million from venture capital firms like Benchmark.
The relaunch is a personal victory for the CEO, who championed the move in February to the company's board.
True to Couchsurfing's collaborative and combative ethos, when the startup launched a beta tester community for this particular switchover, the panelists wanted to make changes to how the panel itself worked.
Unlike in the past, this time Couchsurfing executives did acknowledge and accommodate many of the requests for broader transparency. They concede that the changes made for a better process.
Billock credits the beta testers for having made the project a success, as well as the team she's led for the past year.
MORE: Couchsurfing’s new CEO is optimistic, as Erik Blachford and Joel Cutler join board