I met with Matt on Thursday and we talked about friends groups and blogging. We decided to list the first few lines of blog entries in the feed. Matt feels it will help people get a better idea of what the entry is about before clicking on it. Further in the blog spectrum, I’ve build in new privacy controls based on friends groups. Unlimited groups and a very slick drag and drop system. But the privacy controls apply to everything since all profiles are public.

We also came up with a sweet ass way of getting blog entries and content out there without your co-workers and family being able to see it.

We talked about servers and decided to co-locate our servers here in Michigan at a local data center. We’re building our own servers. That way we can provide ample speed and space for photos, videos, art and audio storage.

Matt is launching the registration page this week. I’m cleaning up the site interface with jquery. We’re also working on profile customization. Matt wants to go with premade theme rather than giving people control over messing up the look and feel of their profile.I tend to agree. Facebook doesn’t offer any customizing probably because of how much people fucked up their myspace pages. But we’re mulling over customization of other aspects of the site which I want to remain secret for now.

I’ve decided to hide peoples sexual orientation in their profiles. We’ve kept profiles very basic since they are all public. But we’ve built the LoveNmore toolset into SocialMore. Last thing we need if your family or co-workers finding out your’re bisexual or gay if you don’t want them to know that. But you’ll still come up in a search for people that are looking for that. LoveNmore.com will become the dating portal for SocialMore.com.

Privacy has been a big concern of mine. Facebook has been getting a lot of shit lately because of their privacy issues. So we’ve designed the system to allow privacy, not confuse people and allow people to easy share things to everyone. One of my bitches about facebook is that it calls itself a social network, but really it’s social only in communicating with people you already know. There isn’t much of a sense of community outside of that. A social network should allow you to easy meet new and interesting people. The problem with facebook is that they locked down everyone’s profiles from the start, so you had to become friends with the person before you even knew them.Now they’re trying to open it up and people are bitching because that isn’t what they signed up for. I strongly believe that if you change things on people like that, people will complain. Which is why we’re starting with an open policy when it comes to profiles.From there people can lock down their content on an item by item basis depending on what they want different groups of people to see. This whole making profiles private shit has to go. You don’t go to a party and then sit in the corner and refuse to talk to anyone. Why even go to the party to begin with?

On the flip side myspace defaulted to profiles being public from the start. The problem with myspace is that they let people turn their profiles into whitetrashville. Huge fucking background images, autoplay music and animated gifs everywhere! 

So between myspace recreating geocites sites for a new generation and facebook opening things up so they can better sell their users data to advertisers, we’re refusing to do that. Fuck that. I don’t want some company selling my personal information to other big companies. Nor do I want to click on someones profile that takes a billion years to load because of all the graphic chaos they’ve customized it with. And twitter. Twitter is pointless. I understand it’s simple, it’s just too simple. Xanga is only blogging. Good blogging but only blogging. They’ve never implemented their other features very well. As far as dating sites go, well, we’ve already had that discussion and many people refuse to use them. 

So we’ve been building SocialMore as the solution.

This is a huge project. Essentially we’re building a better facebook/myspace/deviantart/okcupid/xanga here.