23, the dating service
Well, not in the “I’m gonna fill in about 500 forms and then hope that the computer in the other end has a match for me” kind of way. We give you more freedom than that. It more a matter of sharing your photos and conveying a sense of who you are to the world.
But is that something new? No, 23 has let you do that for more than a year by now (and thank you for the flowers, you guys, you shouldn’t have!). We have just added a new feature, About, which let’s you describe yourself in your own words and with your own photos. On to that we add some information about your friends and your community on 23.
To get started finding that special someone, or just let other 23 users know who you are, go to your 23 account and click the About tab. You’re welcome.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
@dubside.
we’d love to avoid too many preferences, but will definately add some.
the design idea was to create something a bit meaningful out of the data that all ready existed in your account.
how would it work for you the best way? What should your profile look like?
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Sounds good. Often wanted to know a bit more about the people who’s pictures I enjoy.
Perhaps the title in Danish shouldnt be ‘omkring’ but rather just ‘om’?
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
This is a good thing, but I’d really like the option to edit or at least hide the 23-generated user information (”I’m so-and-so”, the contact list and the rest of it).
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Dubside, I do see where you’re coming from, but I’ll let Thomas continue this discussion. For now however, I’ll clarify the reasoning behind the information and phrasing on the about page:
- I agree with you on the first person v. third person. Thomas might not. (See, this is where we demonstrate our openness by airing our differences in public. Expect a flamewar soon. My argument is not fully formed, but I’m farily certain that we only use the first person in action oriented contexts. I might be wrong…)
- Is the any piece of the “basic” information that you feel is violating your privacy. We’ve chosen a set of info that’s of interesent to your visitors — but our intension is not to publish any secrets.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
(Off topic: I hate Typo. It’s very annoying that it doesn’t recognise my line break, neither in comments nor when I write blog posts. We’re switching to Wordpress soon.)
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
It doesn’t need to be super customizable. I basically picture a checkbox by each portion of the profile: “public/private”.
Part of the problem, apart from not being able to opt out of sharing additional information, is that the section with the basic account information (signup date, # of photos, # of comments, etc.) is written in first person (”I’m dubside. I’m located…”). It feels as if the profile is speaking for me, which I don’t necessarily want. If I didn’t write it, it should be phrased in the third person. (”Dubside is located in the United States…”)
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
@dubside.
The thirdperson angle could be the way - but might be difficult to combine with whatever info i write myself on the profile?
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Different fonts, different backgrounds for each section? I don’t think it would be too hard to distinguish between the two.
It’s not about “privacy,” really, just about having the flexibility to present yourself as you want to. I don’t mind the information that’s being given out, but the first-person text, right now, doesn’t feel like something I would actually say. It’s disorienting.
Thanks for your attention.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
I’ve changed the beginning to be in third person. For now, we’ll be keeping the rest of the page intact to gather some feedback and see how people actually use it. In a month or two, we’ll have another good look at it and see if we can do some good optimisations.
And thanks for the feedback…
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
That looks better–thanks for the change. Is it possible to enable html in the user description? I’d like to add a link or two. It would be great if 23 users could make their profile as detailed as this: http://www.flickr.com/people/yakobusan.
Couple small suggestions: for US users, it should read “in the United States” instead of “in United States.” And the sentences beginning with user names should probably be capitalized, even if the SN is lowercase.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
…and now it’s back to first person?
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
ah, my bad. I was trying to stick code in manually. Adding links via the toolbar works fine. Thanks.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
- There should be nothing standing in the way of you using html? If you’re using IE or Firefox you’ll even have a fancy WYSIIWYG interface.
- The 1st v 3rd person changes have been made centrally, but the older version of the text is still cached on some of the servers. Over the next few days, the 3rd person text will be phased in — but I didn’t want to do a full restart to have it implemented immediately.
- The problems you mention with casing and wording is why you should never try to autogenerate sentences with dynamic data, esspcially not on multilingual sites.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Nice1