Fridae

If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a ... well, fairly interesting at least ... surprise. That is, if you think of our Fridae Labs area as ... the woods.

Let's ignore my slightly-flawed metaphor for the moment. :)

New Stuff! Fridae Fresh

We know it can be hard to find the newest content on Fridae, so we've added a new section to the site recently, called Fridae Fresh. This is where you'll find all the freshest content users have posted to their profiles, showing the latest photos, the latest profile updates and the latest blog entries.

The pages are updated a few times an hour with the latest content.

Fridae Fresh is considered beta for now.

Fridae Tribes Update

So far the response to Tribes has been great! You've created lots of new Tribes and we've seen some surprising groups forming. (1JAPAN - we had no idea you guys would grow to become one of our biggest Tribes!)

Today we also added some new goodies to Tribes.

A new menu option - Subscriptions - is now available in each Tribe. This allows you to subscribe to various emails and notifications for the Tribe. At the moment you can opt to receive the daily email of all the Tribe's activity (who joined, new messages, new photos and photo albums), but in the future there'll be other options.

Tribes now display the identities of their Tribe Masters and Administrators in their pages, so you know who to contact if you have any problems.

Member profiles now display the Tribes that the member belongs to (only showing public, listed Tribes). This is a function we were putting off deploying, but with such a great response to Tribes, we felt it was important to start displaying them in your profiles.

Lastly, we've added some featured Tribes to the right hand side navigation of the Tribes pages. From time to time we'll update the featured Tribes list. There's no formula here, its just Tribes we find interesting. (Everyone should go join Gaymers now!)

Finally, on a personal note: thanks to everyone who listened in to Technogaze last week. :)

It's been a while since a tech update found its way onto the blog. Rest assured we've been working hard on some new goodies! Today we've introduced a new feature called Fridae Labs.

Fridae Labs is where we experiment with some new features. We've been having fun playing with them in the office, and thought it would be nice to offer our users a way to play with these features too :)

Lab Experiments can be considered "beta" - they're very experimental, and there are likely to be bugs. We'd appreciate your feedback (and patience, while we fix bugs).

To access Labs and check out our current Experiments, click on Settings > Fridae Labs in your user console. The Labs page will tell you what's currently available and show you how to access it.

Our first Lab Experiment is "Tribes", a major new groupware feature for Fridae.

Tribes

A Tribe allows Fridae members to arrange themselves into a group around a common cause or interest.

You can use a Tribe to find other members who are into the same things as you, and if you can't find one you can create your own.

Each Tribe gets its own discussion board and photo galleries for members to interact with each other, and it can also have private Agenda items visible only to its members.

A Tribe can be public (anyone can join), or private (an invitation is required to join). You can hide the Tribe's contents or the Tribe itself from anyone who's not a member.

The Tribe page also has a distinctive new layout style which can be customised by the Tribe Master.

Fridae will maintain a public "Tribe Index" which will list all Tribes that have opted in to be shown to the public.

Anyone can create a Tribe, for any reason! Here's a few off the top of my head:

• Australians in Singapore (that's me)
• Transformers Fans (again, me)
• Hamish and Andy Fans (yeah, its me again)
• People who go to the same gym as you
• Fridae Members who attend the same college or university

and so on - the sky's the limit!

Joining or creating a Tribe is a great way to get involved with and get to know other Fridae members who might not necessarily be looking for Personals - give it a go today!