Fan / Follow: The Paths of Inspiration

Our biggest request since we rolled out favorites is:

“who’s favoriting me?!?”

Mike and I debated this solution pretty heavily. Mike’s from the Facebook generation where people have 500+ friends and everything’s open and public. I’m from the AOL “consumer” generation and have strong paranoia about maintaining privacy. As a result, we decided to make it possible for you to be able to favorite a mix anonymously without worry about social-games or viral spam …and find another solution.

So today we now have Fan / Follow, our (first) way of connecting users. If you like the stuff someone is making, you can become a fan and follow what they do. It’s essentially the same thing as followers/following on Twitter, but with the more traditional semantic.

There’s an interesting benefit to the fan/follow process. Let’s say Thom Yorke decides to sign up for Mixwit and you become a fan. Not only would you be updated whenever he makes a new mix, you’d also be able to check out his favorites, and who he’s following. Going further, you can follow a people chain to discover the people influencing the people that are influencing Thom… and who’s influencing those people beyond them (and so on and so on…)

How it Works

You can easily become a fan by clicking the “Follow me” button under his/her name. Plus,  we provide a list of the 25 newest fans and people he/she is following on each display page.

As a fan, you’ll be able to stay up-to-date with your favorite people. You’ll also receive notifications whenever he/she makes a new mix, adds a new favorite, etc. Similarly, people who choose to be your fans will automatically receive notifications when you make a new mix. You don’t have to tell them – it’s done automatically.

Of course, with our new settings you can always change what follow notifications you send and receive.

So to recap:

Favorites will be for stuff (widgets). Anonymous.

Fan/follow is for personal / public connections. Usernames are shared and displayed.

Profiles & Settings: It’s all about you…

Happy to announce that we’ve added basic profile settings and controls for our users. Previously, they were “sort-of-there” &  “wherever-it-fits”. Now it’s organized and useful:

Profiles

This may be a little confusing at first: it’s the profile and menu of the person you’re viewing. So if you’re checking out your own mixes, you’ll see you. But if you are viewing stuff by someone else, you’re going to see their name and image, and links to their stuff.

What’s new:

• User picture – a 75×75 image (same size as Twitter)
• User name - no longer restricted to your account name – it can be your own name, including spaces
• Fan info – on your own page it will display your fan count. Otherwise, it’s the primary “Follow me” link to follow (and unfollow) other users
• User menu – links to the user’s profile page (i.e. their home page), mixes, favs, fans / following, and rss

Settings

We’ve created new settings pages to give you better control over your account. For those of you who’ve been using Twitter, you’ll find they’re very similar:

• Account – allows you to change your Display name, your URL user-name, and your contact email address
• Change password – basic password changing forms
• Notifications – choose what notifications you send and receive*
• Picture – add a picture to represent yourself; we’ll crop and resize it for you

* note on notifications – this is where you can control what notifications you send and receive with fans and the people you’re following. We’ve only included a few notifications for now, so we can test usefulness and bandwidth. In the future we’re going to have a homepage news feed (like Facebook’s) that will provide regular updates.