05 March
The new Blueworld goes live
For the last couple of months the guys behind Blueworld have worked hard to come up with a fresh new layout and managed to highly improve community functionality. Today the new Bluworld went live and here is some of the new changes outlined :
The activity page is where you land after logging in and is a summary of what happened since your last visit. Videos, images, blog posts, group invitations or new ‘friendships’ created are all featured here, making it a great way to discover new friends. An important feature is that you can also filter the news feed to show just your friends activity instead of the entire site’s community. This is where Blueworld is unique as you can discover new friends through their activity as your’e not limited to just your friend’s feeds.
Profiles and groups.
Your profile is where everybody sees what you’ve been up to lately, what videos you’ve uploaded, pictures shared and more other. A new feature that I find interesting is that you can set your mood or your status so that your friends know how you’re feeling. You can also drag the profile boxes around on your profile and customize the profile’s theme. This involves being able to change the header image to a graphic of your own and choose your profile colour.
If you would like to join a group it’s simple. Just click the groups link and here you will find everything the community have created lately. It’s an easy way to stay updated to what interests you. You can create public and private groups with each featuring a blog which the admin can use to publish news to the group. Groups are also customizable with themes and custom headers - you can view a custom group here.
I could go on and talk more about video or albums sharing but this is all pretty standard social networking stuff - you can share videos and photos with users being able to rate, discuss and bookmark the media.
Finally, one of the features that struck me the most is that you can now vote for the best content and tag certain pictures.
Voting is easy, there’s an “Love It” button you press when you like something and a “Hate It” when you don’t like it. Tagging is just as easy. Upload your pictures and add your friends names in it, or the car’s model and so on. You also get to leave messages on other user’s images, which is pretty cool.
So what makes Blueworld unique and sets them a part from the masses of other social networks on the web? Well, I think because its a open social network where users by default publish media to their profile like blogs, videos and photos as public content. On Blueworld when you publish media you can set the privacy of your content to either public which is viewable to all and will feature in the sub areas (e.g. blogs, videos, albums) or set as private so only your friends can see it. If you publish content to your profile and set the privacy as public you can discover new friends (and vice versa) through their media that have similar interests to you. Blueworld is about meeting new people, making friends.
If anyone wants my honest opinion the new Blueworld site is not only looking much better but the layout and the new features are very useful. It gets my vote as one of South Africa’s leading social networks.
[Disclaimer: Charl Norman is a shareholder and founder of Blueworld and is also the owner of Bandwidth Blog. This is an article by Alex Ion]
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March 5th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I like the website, it’s basically a Facebook remake, haha, but I’ve looked at the extra features, which are cool. It’s a Facebook meets Myspace almost, but tending towards Facebook a little more than Myspace.
I look forward to seeing how the movement of the website goes..
March 5th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Thanks for the comment Chris and great review Alex
About Facebook cloning - We’ve worked hard to try create our own identity
Obviously any social network that has come out after Facebook can be labeled as a remake seeing they invented and perfected the social networking technology we take for granted today
We’re different from Facebook in quite a few ways
1. You can customize your profile with themes and upload your own banner e.g. http://www.blueworld.co.za/foxinni is a good example
2. The network is open - when you publish blogs, videos, groups, events and photos by default the privacy is set to public which lets the media aggregate on your profile but also in the sub areas e.g.
http://blogs.blueworld.co.za or http://videos.blueworld.co.za
This allows other users to check your media and relate to you.. meeting new people.. etc
Were all about making new friends instead of just keeping track of your current mates
You can also customize your groups, upload a unique header to the gorup and drag the group boxes around - something Facebook has not done
Blueworld is a bit of everything - thunda, facebook, myspace and youtube..
Sure, we have a long way to go but we enjoy the challange
NB!! - Were not here to replace Facebook, theres no one online that can.
March 5th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Absolutely, I love the fact that you can make new friends easily and not have the whole masked hidden Facebook approach.
The uploading of banners and styling of themes gives it that lovely myspace touch, which I’m sure will be really popular to many people.
It’s a good movement, one which I will keep track of to see it’s progress and watch how it attempts to steal people away from the ever exploiting Facebook!
March 5th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
The customizing of profiles has constraints - we wanted to keep the structure like facebook does but give the community tools to make their profile unique without totally messing it up like 80% of Myspace profiles
March 6th, 2008 at 7:01 am
[…] an old fart wandering around Blueworld the last day or so. Charl asked me to take a look around after an update so I created an account (easy enough) and started poking […]
March 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am
The Blueworld office photos - check out our ‘cave’
http://blog.blueworld.co.za/index.php/2008/03/06/the-blueworld-offices/
March 6th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Well done to you and your team. A huge improvement. Good luck. Elan.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
[…] Norman runs Bandwidth Blog and […]
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