The dub5 founding team met briefly last night to discuss impending victories. In particular, Jeffu introduced us to the Group Functionality we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks. (See screenshots after the jump.) This is a big piece of the dub5 puzzle, as it will allow people to manage groups of individuals of just about any size, create subgroups, send reminders and just generally make dub5 that much more usable. It’s also a big step to helping secure our campus touchpoints (more on that a little further down the post).
There isn’t much to these screenshots, but they give you some indication as to where we’re going with this. One of the things we all dislike about the way Facebook handles groups is that when you click on “Groups” you see a list of recent activity in groups you might be interested in. This seems bass ackwards. When *I* click on “Groups” I want to see the groups I’m a part of. If I want suggestions about groups I might be interested in, I’ll sort that out later. Dub5 won’t work the way Facebook does…
When you click on the “Groups” tab at the top of the nav, this is what you see: the groups you’re a part of. Now just to be clear “group” can mean anything — it can be a group of guys and gals you meet with regularly, it can be a list of statutory holidays, it can be the lunar cycle. Anything you want in your calendar and need to be reminded of we’re looking to provide.
This next screenshot that Jeffu was able to create a group (Clark’s Enemies). I doubt it’s a very large group, given what I know about Clark, and apparently there’s only one event scheduled for the smiting of his enemies, but you get the idea…
Pretty quickly here we’re going to be getting into allowing users to set the level of privacy for a group (so some groups will be public, others private) and eventually, when the dub5 robot’s smart enough, you’ll be able to browse “suggested” groups the app thinks you should join based on what you do with your time. It’s about building community and helping you to expand your horizons based on your interests.
But first, we have to launch group functionality, and that will be coming fairly soon. More on that in a forthcoming blog post!
Campus touchpoints and the dub5 crew
We’ve started aggressively pursuing the integration of “touchpoints” on campuses across the city, where touchpoint means services or organizations we’re talking to about building dub5 to suit their needs. We’re working closely with campus groups to figure out their requirements and get them using the application. This means meeting with student leaders, writing documentation, making sure everything makes sense and then getting our dev team to work on it.
That’s why we’ve added a few new faces to the dub5 staff: we have two interns from NAIT working for us, and we have an additional developer we brought on for the long haul.
Welcome to the team, everyone!
Glad to hear you’re growing and still improving! Hope you’ll be writing more about “touchpoints” – sounds interesting.