Phuser Summer Newsletter

Hello Phusers!

We’ve been hard at work here at Phuser HQ and have some exciting new things for you to try. You may remember that Phuses are a great way to discuss, plan and share with your friends and colleagues. This could be a sports team, group holiday, project or discussing something you are passionate about.

   Open Phuses

Start an Open Phuse and anyone in your network can join! This makes it easier to get discussions going. You can ask for advice or opinions or just talk about something you like and anyone in your network can take part. When you Start a New Phuse you can easily choose whether it is Open or Closed. Try creating a new Open Phuse now and see who joins in! Start a Phuse

What used to be normal Phuses where you invited everyone individually are now called Closed Phuses. They are still there for those Private plans and discussions. All your existing Phuses are Closed but why not make some of them Open? Just go into a Phuse you created and click Edit.

 Phuser Spokesperson

You have a new person in your network! He is called Mr Phuser and he is helping us launch Open Phuses. Mr Phuser has many interests (like cheese) and has started creating Open Phuses for them. Take a look at them and join in the discussion! He also loves receiving messages and SMS! If you don’t want Mr Phuser in your network just click on him to look at his profile and then click Remove from Network. Don’t worry, he won’t be offended.

Limited! Invite new people bumper blowout

Mr Phuser wants more friends! So much that he is giving out Phuse Power Points . For every person you invite in the next 48 hours he will give you 100 Points, if they sign up he will give you another 400 points!

Happy Phusing! Sign into Phuser now!

George Black
         &
The Phuser Team

P.S. Any feedback welcome!

phuser in the phield!

Esteemed phuser phellow George ‘the phuse master’ Black has just blogged about how phuser got him and his disparate but merry band of europhriends together for a trip to Dublin.

Apart from helping plan the trip, it seems that the real star of the show was phuser’s SMS broadcast feature. By sending an SMS to phuser starting with the word ‘Dublin‘, each member of the party could broadcast messages to all the others. Even better, the messages appeared to come from their own mobile numbers, as if they had sent them directly. Great for rounding everyone up at the nearest public house for a pint or three of Ireland’s Finest.

Everybody could use some phuser Broadcast goodness in their lives, so I’ll be blogging about it here soon, with ideas and tips to help you get started.

Under the hood – Revealing the Inner Phuser. Part 1

In this occasional series I’ll be explaining a little about how phuser works and what makes it different to most social networking sites.

Part 1 – How phuser protects your privacy

Newcomers to phuser are often confused. This is partly because our content & help review is still pending (it is coming, we promise!), but mostly it’s because phuser isn’t what they’re used to.

A simple example: When you join MySpace or Facebook, you immediately see lots of ‘friends’ and lots of activity. There’s a buzz – you get an instant reward just for signing up.  When you join phuser, you might well see NOTHING! Where is everybody? Where’s the action?

The first thing to remember is that phuser is all about your real friends, and your real activities. So there is a little work to be done to get started (and we are working hard to reduce this barrier), but the pay-off is that much more rewarding.

So let’s have a quick look at some of the design goals intended to protect your privacy on phuser: 

Find it fast with phuser

It’s Friday and that means upgrade time at phuser.  One short week since our last installment but still we’ve managed to dig up a couple of tasty morsels for you to savour…

There are two new features that should appeal to the phuser neophiles amongst you.  We can’t decide which is our favourite so we’ll call it a tie and let you make up your mind. So, in alphabetical order, in joint first place:

Friend finder

This piece of phuser goodness is a boon to anyone using phuser Quick SMS and Email features.  Now, from your phuser homepage you can instantly call up friends from My Network.  A list of matching friends appears as you type, and you can instantly go to their profile, start a phuse with them or message them directly.  SMSing your friends with phuser just got even easier!  (Tip: Make your SMS appear to come from your own number – Register your mobile).

Find a phuse

We know that a number of you with busy phuses have been asking for a Search feature.  Well at last we have one, and we’re pretty pleased with it.  Enter your search on My phuses and you’ll see a tastefully presented list of results:

 

The first line is the phuse of course, then the Activity (Poll, Question etc), and the remaining lines show exactly where the match was found. Simple.

 

The runner-up in our list of new features is an improvement to the phuse Members page, inspired by Chris who is organising a Stag do with phuser.  This page now lets you invite any phuse members who aren’t already in your network, which of course means you can get more from phuse Broadcasting (see last week’s update): 

 

Happy phusing!