OK, sometimes I stretch movie lines a bit too far. But the emotions expressed by Steve Martin in his movie, “the Jerk,” seem appropriate. As of yesterday afternoon we’ve invited approximately 50 people into our beta, and we’re still breathing. In fact, I demo’d the site twice yesterday (for potential partners) – from two different Starbucks – and didn’t hit any errors as I showed it off. Praise the Lord!!
We’re far from ready to launch to public, but we’re learning fast and fixing things as quickly as we find them. Here are a couple of features that are unique to our system:
Dashboard to organize your content
AJ Macht insisted that our users should have a dashboard to organize the content they want to “consume”. So unlike other social networking platforms that only allow you to set up a public facing profile page (i.e. what you want the world to see about you), we’re also featuring a “dashboard” page where users can can organize their stuff.
I don’t have anything configured in my dashboard, but here’s a look at the menu of options…we’ve got “managers” set up for each content area that our users create.
Users will land in their dashboard on login and see all their incoming messages, and they’ll see highlighed any updated content from the areas they’ve designated. For example, if you set up your dashboard to notify you when your friends have added content, you’d see it from your dashboard and can more easly navigate to the content you want to see.
Friendlist manager
Another cool tool inside our system is the Friendlist manager. Unlike other systems that only allow you to tag things as “public” or “private” with “friendlist, users can tailor their profiles any way they like.
For example, if you want your cell phone to be visible to some people but not others, then you simply create a new “friendlist” called “closest friends” or something, and you tag your cell phone to be viewable by that list (and any other list(s) you like. This will prevent people on the “public” list from seeing your cell phone when they visit your profile page while your close friends will see that content when they visit your profile page.
“Colts Cred” is the social currency in our community
Most successful communities have some form of “social currency” or reputation management system. For us, that system will be called “Colts Cred.”
Users will earn “cred” for using the system and rankings will be enhanced by ratings given by other users. The screen above is the main leaderboard. We’ll have leaderboards for various subgroups (i.e. “top bloggers).
There’s a lot more to tell…this is only the beginning. It’s exciting to see people using the system that has taken so long to build. We hope people will like it!!