First, we've changed some of our terminology. Now all your connections are "Friends". Instead of referring to "Connecting" you'll see a new option to "Add as Friend" Instead of a "My People" page you have a new and vastly improved "My Friends" page. Connection requests are "Friend Requests". You get the picture.
For our current Gather members your friends are still organized as friend, family, and colleague but now you may change these anyway you like to fit how YOU see your world. We call these "Friend Sets".
You'll have the option to...
- Rename your Friend Sets
- Create new Friend Sets (as few or as many as you need)
- Move your friends in and out of Friend Sets
- Include friends in more than one Friend Set
Friend Sets are optional. You don't need to include your friends in Friend Sets at all if you don't want to. Friend Sets are also completely private so only you see how you have organized your friends. For example, if we're friends I can place you in a Friend set I name "Gather Pals" and you could put me in a Friend Set you name "Gather Team".
To see your Friend Sets visit the new "My Friends" page from your "My Gather" page. On the left you'll see a listing of all your current Friend Sets. The default for your "My Friends" page will be "all friends" but clicking on any individual Friend Set name will allow the page to only show the friends in that Friend Set making individual friends much easier to find if you're a very popular person.
The new "My Friends" page allows you to sort your friends in several ways including by name, recently signed in to Gather, and recent profile updates. We've also redesigned the page so you can see your friends more easily by their member icons. If you hold your mouse over a member icon you'll see that friend's tagline too if they have created one. Using the control next to the "sort by" dropdown changes the page to display your friends as a list with more information about each person.
Changing, Adding, and Removing Friend Sets
Managing your friends is so easy. On your My Friends page you'll find an "Edit Friend Sets" option located just under the page title and below your list of Friend Sets on the left. That will take you to a page where you can edit, create, rename, and delete Friend Sets.
Use the Friend Set list on the left to choose which Friend Set you want to change. We'll list these by how many people are in each Friend Set and select the most popular Friend Set automatically.
On the page you'll see two list boxes. The one on the left will contain your friends who are not part of the selected Friend Set. The one on the right contains your friends who are part of the selected Friend Set. If you've ever shared your content with a group you'll recognize that this is similar to the group selection when publishing.
Your friends will list alphabetically in the lists by name and will be shown along with their username and a tagline of they have created one. Clicking a friend in either list moves that person to the other list, in or out of the Friend Set.
You can quickly select individual friends using the "find" feature above each list. This will search the friends in the list to access them quickly. Type a few letters and the friends whose names start with those letters appear.
If you have a lot of friends there are some important things to know. The lists will initially load up to 250 friends. If you have more friends than that on Gather you can find them using the "find" option explained above or when you scroll a list to the bottom you'll see a "get more" link. Clicking this will load an additional 250 of your friends. The vast majority of Gather members have fewer than 250 friends so this shouldn't affect too many folks.
If you add a new Friend Set it starts out empty with all your friends listed on the left list ready to include in the new Friend Set.
Renaming a Friend Set keeps all the friends as they are but simply lets you make a new name. Friend Set names can not exceed 16 characters.
Deleting a Friend Set does not remove your connection to that friend. Only the Friend Set is gone. All the friends who were in that deleted Friend Set will still be in other Friend Sets you might have had them included in or are still listed as friends but not in any Friend Sets at all.
As I mentioned earlier Friend Sets are optional. You can be connected to a friend but you don't need to include the friend in any Friend Sets. If you need help with the new Friend features look to the right of the Friend Sets page for tips.
Friend Settings
Each of your friends has their own individual settings page. Look for the "friend settings" link below each of your Friends' icons on your My Friends page and on the Namespace pages of your friends.
On this new page you can add or change the Friend Sets you have for this friend. You can also change your preferences to be notified by email when the friend published new articles, images, or video, connects to a new friend, or updates their profile. This is also where you can remove someone from your friends if you no longer wish to be connected. The options to choose Friend Sets and apply notification preferences are also part of the process when you send and accept new friend requests.
You can still manage all your email notification preferences from one page but there are some significant improvements there too. As you read above you can now select email notifications for individual friends. All your friends are now listed on your email preferences page with the ability to manage which friends' activities you want email notifications about.
To join the conversation on these and the other features introduced in this upgrade please visit the Guthrie Overview article.
Learn More
The article links below provide detailed descriptions of the enhancements being introduced today. There's a lot so take some time to soak it all in.
Improved Publishing to Friends and Groups
You can use your Friend Sets to share what you want with who you want. While we were at it we also improved the group selection options and cleaned up the publishing page design a bit too. learn more
Subscriptions to people will continue to feed the articles, images, video, and comments by those individuals to your My Gather page as they always have but we've introduced several changes to the subscription options. learn more
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Comments: 17
I haven't red all of the changes yet because it looks like so much & I want to just "gather" & then read about the changes some more.
Thanks again for making things more personal!