Tonight's roll-out includes the much-anticipated feature of Custom Status Messages, a feature that has been heavily-discussed in the Zoji Suggestion Box . Thanks to Kev's good work, you now have the ability to conveniently jot down a short note describing what's on your mind, your current mood, pretty much whatever you want (how much you love Zoji? :) Your short note can be seen by all your online friends.
You'll also notice an overall redesign of the Now Online box -- with the additional UI elements of custom status messages, it made sense to condense certain links into icons, and move other elements around. Hopefully you'll get used to the new arrangement quickly.
Now that you're able to vent your mood swings online, I fully expect all of you to be noticeably more pleasant in your daily person-to-person interactions :P
-Dan
You'll also notice an overall redesign of the Now Online box -- with the additional UI elements of custom status messages, it made sense to condense certain links into icons, and move other elements around. Hopefully you'll get used to the new arrangement quickly.
Now that you're able to vent your mood swings online, I fully expect all of you to be noticeably more pleasant in your daily person-to-person interactions :P
-Dan
Visibility: Anyone
If you go to Profile -> Your Friends, you'll notice we rolled out an updated view of your friends list that's quite different from what it used to be.
The original idea for this came from one of our own Zoji users a few months ago (thanks Nikita!) His complaint with other social networking sites was that there was no compact way to display all the pertinent information about your friends on one screen, and also no easy way to export the information. And he's right, for some reason, having an efficient address-book view of your friends is just not in fashion, from everything we've seen. Well, it made sense to us, so we did it, and hopefully it makes sense to you as well.
But what about friends that you barely know? In some cases you don't want them to know your phone number, for example. That brings us to our next feature.
Friendship Classification
You can now classify your friends into 3 categories: acquaintance, friend, and close friend. This is specified at friending time, but can also be changed on Your Friends page. Acquaintances will only be able to see your e-mail address, friends and close friends can see your phone number and address (if you entered them in Edit Profile). Don't worry, your classifications are personal and your friends will not be alerted to them. For those of you with a lot of friends that are acquaintances, stay tuned for more features related to this. We intend to make it easier to invite friends and close friends to events, so you're not forced to sift through a bunch of acquaintances.
As always, any and all feedback is appreciated to steer these new features in the right direction.
-Dan
The original idea for this came from one of our own Zoji users a few months ago (thanks Nikita!) His complaint with other social networking sites was that there was no compact way to display all the pertinent information about your friends on one screen, and also no easy way to export the information. And he's right, for some reason, having an efficient address-book view of your friends is just not in fashion, from everything we've seen. Well, it made sense to us, so we did it, and hopefully it makes sense to you as well.
But what about friends that you barely know? In some cases you don't want them to know your phone number, for example. That brings us to our next feature.
Friendship Classification
You can now classify your friends into 3 categories: acquaintance, friend, and close friend. This is specified at friending time, but can also be changed on Your Friends page. Acquaintances will only be able to see your e-mail address, friends and close friends can see your phone number and address (if you entered them in Edit Profile). Don't worry, your classifications are personal and your friends will not be alerted to them. For those of you with a lot of friends that are acquaintances, stay tuned for more features related to this. We intend to make it easier to invite friends and close friends to events, so you're not forced to sift through a bunch of acquaintances.
As always, any and all feedback is appreciated to steer these new features in the right direction.
-Dan
Visibility: Anyone
Just a little blurb about the new homepage design...It occurred to us that the previous layout was kind of random. Two columns of equal width, with boxes placed in either column seemingly without any real rhyme or reason other than to keep the columns roughly the same height. :-)
Well we decided to give some rhyme and reason to it, and put the "important", dynamic stuff (your events, and your "What's New" notifications) all in the main, larger column, and all of the less important, supplemental type stuff in a sidebar. Hopefully you'll find the new layout more intuitive.
Well we decided to give some rhyme and reason to it, and put the "important", dynamic stuff (your events, and your "What's New" notifications) all in the main, larger column, and all of the less important, supplemental type stuff in a sidebar. Hopefully you'll find the new layout more intuitive.
Visibility: Anyone
On my homepage now I have some links for "Join Up" and "No Thanks" 3x in the back behind/between the boxes.Tonight we just rolled out a redesigned navigation system. Replacing our old tabs, subnavigation menu, and "My Stuff" menu are a single set of menus that should hopefully give you easy access to all the most important parts of Zoji. We think this new nav setup is more convenient, intuitive, and simple than our old system, where the distinction between the tabs and My Stuff menu was not clear, and many people didn't even realize the My Stuff menu was in fact clickable.
The new nav system pretty much merges the tabs and My Stuff menus into a single set of logically-organized menus: Events for accessing your calendar and event list; Profile for viewing/editing your profile, and getting to all of your stuff--your friends, groups, pictures, etc.; Inbox for viewing your Zoji messages; "New...", a handy menu for creating a new...well, anything; and More to get to global Zoji content--featured blog posts, reviews, etc.
Hopefully you find it easy to figure out.
Other stuff we've rolled out in the last week:
The new nav system pretty much merges the tabs and My Stuff menus into a single set of logically-organized menus: Events for accessing your calendar and event list; Profile for viewing/editing your profile, and getting to all of your stuff--your friends, groups, pictures, etc.; Inbox for viewing your Zoji messages; "New...", a handy menu for creating a new...well, anything; and More to get to global Zoji content--featured blog posts, reviews, etc.
Hopefully you find it easy to figure out.
Other stuff we've rolled out in the last week:
- Dan overhauled the Edit Profile page to make it easier to find your way around. Rather than one mammoth page, it's now broken down into sections.
- You probably noticed the new Helpdesk section in the Now Online box. Dan figured new users would appreciate having a friendly face they can ask questions. Well ask away, Dan loves helping new users. ;-)
Visibility: Anyone
In case you hadn't noticed, on Friday night we made some significant changes to the navigation and layout on the home page -- hopefully for the better. First of all, this is a work in progress, and we consider this just the first of many steps and tweaks towards a better UI, so if things aren't working for you, please shout, we will work out the kinks.
The motivation behind all this is largely in reponse to newbie complaints of "too many links" and "navigation is too confusing". And after some thought, we realized that yes, they are right, for a newbie there is quite a lot of stuff to digest on the home page. We don't want Zoji to seem overwhelming. So we hid some stuff, moved other stuff, and deleted some stuff. Having trouble finding a link? See if you can find it with the new layout, and if now, leave a comment here.
Thanks,
-Dan
The motivation behind all this is largely in reponse to newbie complaints of "too many links" and "navigation is too confusing". And after some thought, we realized that yes, they are right, for a newbie there is quite a lot of stuff to digest on the home page. We don't want Zoji to seem overwhelming. So we hid some stuff, moved other stuff, and deleted some stuff. Having trouble finding a link? See if you can find it with the new layout, and if now, leave a comment here.
Thanks,
-Dan
Visibility: Anyone
1. The status messages come back after I choose Hide. Usually after one refresh.2. Can you make it so the messages only show up if I put a mouse over the person? They're very distracting.
Dick: There's an icon to collapse all status bubbles if you feel like it's too much noise. Perhaps there should be a way to dismiss an individual status bubble entirely, so that you'd only be notified of new ones, effectively. We'll think about that one.
Ohter interesting fallouts from this:
1) Let's see if status messages effectively ferret-out those who regularly hide online ... the need for attention winning out over privacy. I've already spotted one guilty party :)
2) As another member pointed out, this seems like a significant boost to his work productivity. uh YEEEAH.
nikita, you stink!
PS could the bubble go to the right of your pic instead of under it, so the pics aren't all "stretched out" as aileen mentioned? the other little icons should be placed horizontally underneath the pics, since they'd take up less room than the bubble.
Btw, in the Zoji Suggestions area in Reviews (formerly known as Tipz), you guys forgot to cross off "Custom Status Messages" and move it to the finished area :-D
Oh, and Dick...I saw that too (the messages coming back after hiding them)...weird, not sure what's causing that.
Hide the status messages. Begin writing a comment on this blog. During the next refresh, the status messages are coming back.
The status messages pop up when page refresh happens, regardless of previous status (you visible/hidden, bubbles expanded/collapsed). If the page auto-refreshes, it could explain why the messages pop back while you're just sitting there drinking beer:P
If you really really wanna hide yourself as well as the status messages, make yourself invisible BEFORE collapsing the bubbles, but not the other way around:)
Would there be any feature like subscribing one's status update for his/her fans?:D Maybe it'll be nice for the user to control who (acquaintance/friend/close friend) has permission to view his/her status
If you're curious about hiding/showing status messages works, when you hide the status messages, we dynamically hide the status messages using Javascript, and we write a cookie to your browser that says that status messages are hidden. On the next refresh of the Now Online box, we check to see if that cookie exists--if it does, then the Now Online HTML we send to your browser includes code to keep the messages hidden.
That's how it's supposed to work, and how it worked on my dev machine when I tested it. I'm not sure yet why it seems to be sporadic on the live site.