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.
Go see for yourself
[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]
