Faving, Ignoring and Smacking!

In this  day and age, we are deluged with all sorts of information at all times of the day wherever we go…emails, text messages, IMs, phone calls, TV or radio ads, random sales people at your door, junk mail…it doesn’t end.  No, I don’t want a Pancake Puff pan!  No, I don’t need to buy a Magic Closet Space Maker.  And no, I don’t want sign a petition to support the Save the Snails Foundation.

Anyways, as ibeatyou has grown, the notifications feature has evolved from a simple way to alert you to a few things, to an important tool on the site to keep track of what’s going on your friends.  However, with the larger number of users on the site, it’s also become increasingly difficult to filter the “noise” and junk out from the good stuff.  We’ve received a lot of cool suggestions from everyone on how to make notifications relevant; we then put some of our ideas together,  filled up on pizza and Vitamin Water, and then coded away.  A few things introduced today:

• Fave Friends: Basically, it’s a way to create a PRIVATE list of your top 25 favorite friends on ibeatyou.  With your Fave Friends list, you will be able to filter competition invites and shared entry notifications by each friend on your fave list. First person that I’m adding to my Fave Friends?  N0Caffeine.  Her competitions are HAWT!

Your Fave Friends list can be accessed from the Your Friends and Foes page at the Edit Your Fave Friends link.  A key thing to remember is that while it is currently used to help filter some notifications, you may start seeing it used in other parts of ibeatyou.  If you have any cool ideas where you want to see it being used, send us a note!

• Ignore List:  To further help organize and reduce clutter (I don’t like junk on my desk) in your notifications, we’ve also added the Ignore List.  This basically is a list where you can use when you JUUUUST don’t have the heart to take someone off your friend list, but their competition invites bug the FRAK out of you.  In this case, you can add this friend to your ignore list.  You can still message them and get notifications of some types from them.  For now, the Ignore list will work when you want to block certain friends from spamming sending you competition invites and shared entries.

In addition to these and a few “under the hood”  tweaks and fixes, another update we’ve added is the ability to go SMACK 2 SMACK!

One can barely fathom the PURE AWESOMENESS of the name of this feature.  But generally, now, when someone leaves Smack Talk on your profile, you can click the SMACK 2 SMACK link to see your conversation thread with that person.  Now start SMACK2SMACKing!

Whew, this is the longest post I’ve written in awhile.  Getting tired already.  Maybe I’ll provide a little break with a…

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LOLCAT!!!!

Anyways, wanted to also let everyone know that we hear your feedback.  We’ve been busy tackling a bunch of things but keep an eye out in the next few weeks for some even cooler changes.  One of them, even sounds cooler than SMACK2SMACKing!  Another enhancement we’ll be rolling out shortly includes improving our notification email digests; yeah, we think they need to get fixed up too.  In the meantime, keep that feedback coming!  We live on that stuff…

Thanks!

- Steve and the ibeatyou Squad (cdubya, mike, waynester, rsoni)

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