FriendBinder style update

We have updated the style of the site, gone are the various beige and brown colours as are the controls on the friend's menu. We have changed the internal links to blue (from red) and external links are still green (which open in a new window/tab). It's tested and should work in Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE (even IE6) so if you come across any issues please let us in the comments.

We have recently simplified the sign ups to the site so that should be more straight forward and quicker.

You can login in or request an invite at http://friendbinder.com

How Interest Levels work in FriendBinder

Today I'm not going to write about a new feature, but rather a feature we have had from the very beginning. The reason I am going to do this is because two people have been talking about this kind of thing today. Michael Arrington talks about the need for a "Fake Follow" as he calls it. Thomas Hawk talks about a 5 improvements he would like to see in friendfeed of this list number 2 pretty much describes our Interest Levels feature.

So how does our interest levels feature work?
The basic concept is that you give someone a interest level from one to five. People in your interest level 5 might be close friends, girlfriend, husband etc. or just people you want to keep a close track of. Interest level 3 might be acquaintances and less close friends that you sort of follow the noise from. Interest level 1 is probably going to be everyone else that hasn't fit into the above categories. There is of course no reason you have to use your interest levels like this, you could use them anyway you want.

Setting Interest Levels for friends
From the stream you can use the context menu or you can use the friend's edit tab:


If you want to organize all your friend's interest levels you can do this by clicking on the friends button at the top:

Interest Levels aren't the only friend organizing feature we have, you can also use tags as mentioned in a previous post.

We want your feedback, so please post comments or if you want to discuss other aspects of FriendBinder then please use the google group.

Changes to Twitter support

As you may be aware, Twitter have now introduced per-IP limits on their API (Louis Gray has the details), this affects us in a number of ways.

Previously you were able to add Twitter as a network without giving your password to us (and this was the only option for a little while), however, this is now no longer possible due to this change in the Twitter API. Twitter will now will require authentication before you can use it. Currently the only method of authentication for Twitter is a password (Twitter say they are working on supporting oAuth in future).

We now fetch all Twitter information using your username/password and this counts against your per-user limit of 100/requests per hour (currently) and this limit is shared with other sites that also take your Twitter username and password.

We are looking at ways we can enable users to follow a handful of users if you don't have a Twitter account.

Tags and Notes

Have you ever been reading your stream and you are thinking, who is this person? I don't remember adding them. Or you want to just see people who work for a particular organisation or certain group of friends.

Well, we have a solution to this, with the new tags and notes features. You can add tags to each of your friends and write notes so you can remember how you met them or came across them (or use it for whatever you want!)

You can do this from with in the stream by clicking on pencil icon, next to their picture:


You can filter the stream by one or more tags. You can also tag someone from their 'edit' page (for example when you first add them) and you can filter the friend's list by tags.

We have also introduced tabs into some more areas of the site including the stream as you see in the screen shot.

Tell us what you think about these features at http://groups.google.com/group/friendbinder

Posting status to Facebook + AJAX notifications

We got a couple of new features today:

The first is updating your status message on Facebook, this is the same place the Twitter one is. You can post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. You'll need an extra permission from Facebook to get this working - to add this go to "settings" on Facebook network page.


The other feature is AJAX notification of when new stream data is available. This appears as yellow box on the top right of the stream.

The most useful part of this is that it updates the title on the tab, so you can leave FriendBinder open on tab and you will see without going to the tab when you need to check it.

Please tell us what you would like to see in FriendBinder either in the comments on this blog or our Google group http://groups.google.com/group/friendbinder

Posting to Twitter

Welcome to the friendbinder blog, We are going to use this blog to keep you informed about the development of the site and also via the twitter account @friendbinder, so please add this to your blog reader or to your friendbinder. If you want to know what we are all about I suggest reading Louis Gray's post about us which covers a lot of the main points.

We've added couple of features in today.
The first is posting to twitter, which is available under a new button called "you".

Also you will see reply links on current twitter messages which link to it. To enable twitter posting you will have to give us your Twitter password (yes, really, Twitter don't support anything else) you can do this by going into the Twitter network page and clicking "settings". The you button also is quick way to get to your own stream and some other tabs will likely appear here soon.

Also now you can now view the stream for all your friends not just by interest level or by network as a few people have been asking for. The stream now tells you when the last big update was which is currently not more than every hour whilst you are logged in, we are working on backend improvements to make that more frequent.

Thats all for now, more new features coming soon, hopefully quicker than these ones were.