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.
NO ONE LIKES THE NEW CHANGES! it needs to go back to the way it was.
Site has now sucked, why did u change it besides the fact of the privacy setting, thats they key part you edited becasue of the fact that the messaging system is now efected and you can’t talk to some of your friends now, go back to the old way, please, I konw you will be losing alot of people from thi siste if its hard to navigate around, and the faq’s are very confusing, please take this into consideration, thanks
these neew settings suck!! i dont want to see when someone changes their “what are you doing” every tem mintues this is a very confusing way and would just be better and easier to handle if they went back to the old wayys. thanks.
hey, idk if im the only one who noticed but i think in my opinion that the site has now become very confusing. i find it hard to talk to people this way because if i get a message i have to scroll through all the feeds people continuously change through. so i mean i knw in all goodness you tried ur hardest to make the site more compatable for new comers seeing how it’s a lil bit tricky at first, but in the case of users who have just gotten use to it or people who have been on for awhile are now confused. this is where our hatred towards the new site comes in and i do no support the new update. please, in all goddness, change the site back to the way it was:(
Why you decided to go and change things, other than the fact that you are completely bored, is beyond me! Deciding to change the names of my friends is not important to me. I have brains enough to figure out whats what and who’s who. Call them oompa loompas for all I care. The problem I have is the new setting in my feeds section. I use my feeds section to talk to my friends. Not keep up with their status. Everytime somebody changes they’re status I get a notification and can’t figure out if they’re talking to me or everybody. And in your brilliant scheme to change our privacy settings to “simplify” things you forgot to put an option in there for us to receive only messages. Way to go Smart Ones!!!
We appreciate your feedback. Not having an option to turn these off in the feeds is an oversight on our part. We are addressing it tonight with a product update. A blog post describing this just went up.
This new set-up is so stupied and its worse than before no one likes it this way! You should change it back because it wasnt confusing before.
i dont lik the new changes either to wierd for me
everyones comment including mine says that the new changes r stupid and we want the old style back