Phonezoo Blog

Overall, the product updates we pushed out yesterday were received well by some users and not as much by others.  We received a good number of feedback in our support emails and also monitored user comments in public feeds.  Majority of the constructive feedback boiled down to two specific areas.

Considerable number of people were taken aback by the new messaging default where only Friends can message you.  We understand this has caused angst among some users but community overall will benefit from this change as it improves privacy and security for everyone.  Users who want to receive messages from anyone can still do so, by simply changing the messaging option under My Zoo > Privacy Settings.

Also, users who have lots of Friends and Favorites started seeing too many status updates and other public activities of their Friends and Favorites showing up in their feeds.  This seems to have overloaded their feeds and got in the way of their messaging.  This was an oversight on our part and we should have provided an option to control this.  To address this issue we are planning two changes:

1. We will be updating the product tonight and provide additional options in Privacy Settings to control what you see in My Feeds.  You can choose to see what your friends and favorites are doing or can turn it off – by default it is turned on.
2. Within next 1-2 weeks, we will break off messaging from feeds.  This will allow you to process incoming messages separately and more efficiently instead of having to search through all the feeds.  We are currently designing this and will have an update for you shortly.

We hope this addresses the short comings in our recent product updates.  We value your feedback strongly, so please keep it coming.  Thanks for using Phonezoo.

In case you are wondering why some of the site functionality changed or you stopped receiving feeds, read on.

A good number of people were getting confused about the definitions of Friends & Followers and were getting lost trying to figure out how to sign up for or stop feeds.  Overall, the previous feed management design was little bit too complex for everyone except power users (you know who you are!).

Tonight, we took multiple steps to address this confusion.  If you are a Phonezoo user who had Friends or Followers and were actively consuming the Feeds section, you should read this carefully as this impacts you. 

We changed the naming for Best Friends, Friends, Followers to reflect what they truly mean.  Friends has been renamed to Favorites to reflect the one way relationship it implies – you can add someone as a favorite and you don’t need their approval. Followers has been renamed to Fans to reflect that when someone adds you as a Favorite, they are becoming your fans.  And Best Friends has been renamed to Friends and it requires two way acceptance as before.  All these functionality is conveniently available under the My Zoo tab along with all of your other content.

Feeds is becoming a fast growing section in the site and many users go their first to see what their friends are doing within Phonezoo.  To reflect this, the Feeds tab now defaults to My Feeds where you can track what your Friends and Favorites are doing.  Public Feeds, where you can see what the rest of Phonezoo community is doing, is available as a separate secondary tab.

Perhaps, the most important change of all is in the enhanced Privacy Settings page.  We have consolidated feed management functionality in to your privacy settings so you can control everything in one place.  Options to decide what feeds you receive in email and text are simplified so your decision making becomes much easier.

As part of this consolidation of your messaging and feeds options in Privacy Settings, we had to change some of the defaults.  This means, if you signed up for some of the feeds to be sent to you via email or text message, they would stop until you go sign up again.  Also, by default only your Friends can send you a message unless you change it to allow anyone in the community to message you.  We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you but we believe these changes significantly eliminate most of the abuse possibilities inherent in a open messaging environment.

We are excited about these changes as they bring more clarity and provide more control to our users in community.  We are working on additional messaging capabilities and new applications/contents and we will roll them out over the next few weeks/months.

 As always, we look forward to your feedback. We thank you for using Phonezoo.