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Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

friendsweekly.com

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Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#2
Hey, this seems really neat to me. I'd really like it if it takes off.

That said, many people I know are 'addicted' to social media (mostly Instagram, some Facebook). It's less about sharing what's going on in your life with loved ones, and more about 'showing off' – a carefully curated feed of text and images. Often with the purpose of seeking approval or validation.

I have left all (traditional) social media for the most part, but I don't know if many people will be willing to do that, and/or replace/supplement it with this.

Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#4

Hey, this seems really neat to me. I'd really like it if it takes off. That said, many people I know are 'addicted' to social media (mostly Instagram, some Facebook). It's less about sharing what's going on in your life with loved ones, and more about 'showing off' – a carefully curated feed of text and images. Often with the purpose of seeking approval or validation. I have left all (traditional) social media for th…

> I don't know if many people ...

Every service doesn't need to appeal to every person, or to destroy FB.

Would it be successful with 1,000 users? 10,000? 100,000?

Certainly there's some small fraction of the world that would find this useful.

Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#5
post #4

Hey, this seems really neat to me. I'd really like it if it takes off. That said, many people I know are 'addicted' to social media (mostly Instagram, some Facebook). It's less about sharing what's going on in your life with loved ones, and more about 'showing off' – a carefully curated feed of text and images. Often with the purpose of seeking approval or validation. I have left all (traditional) social media for th…

> I don't know if many people ... Every service doesn't need to appeal to every person, or to destroy FB. Would it be successful with 1,000 users? 10,000? 100,000? Certainly there's some small fraction of the world that would find this useful.

Is that small fraction in the same friend group? If not they'd be just a bunch of random strangers on the internet. The problem is that FB, Insta, etc... is where most people's friends are. I don't have any use for a social network my friends don't or won't use.

I really do like this idea. I have a few friends I send a long email to every 2 or 3 months, just to keep them up to date on my life, touch base, see how they are doing since the last time we spoke. I quite like the format. I don't need to tell people about my life daily, or in most cases even weekly or monthly.

Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#7
This looks great but I don't see anything about pricing / business model, which worries me. Are they going to start charging for subscriptions once they're established? or inserting ads everywhere to make money? or do the intend to pursue freemium features with a solid "free forever" feature set?

I only really want to invest the time and energy into getting my friends using this service if it's the latter.

Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#8
so it says it keeps your fam stuff out of the public social feeds... but uses email.. which makes a lot of stuff public, like sending postcards around the world right?

I think people are already confused enough about how email works and how non-private it is.. so I would be careful with that wording.. unless the emails are encrypted of course - then good on you for working on something cool.

RSS in the title is kind of mean - I was hoping to see a new mobile friendly version of netvibes / pageflakes that allowed friends and family to check off boxes to get notified about updates in some of the categories (rss feeds)- and make opml shareable / clone-able so people could start their own..

I tinkered with the idea of doing just that with buddypress and rss widgets for profiles. Have not researched a good way to close a profile or set of feeds, but the other pieces are there.

Re: Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about

#10
I agree with the need for 'safe' social places like to be built.

But since the entire system is based upon lists and lists of email addresses, there REALLY needs to be a Ts & Cs and Privacy Policy in place here.

I'm assuming this is a one-man-band (Jayme?) behind this which I also commend, but if you don't add those things and also some background info about who's behind it (and how safe are all those email addresses) it's going to have a hard time winning trust.

(And yes, though I can kind of see where he's coming from, 'RSS' in the title title is misleading. Rather like Spotify calling a 'talkie' audio file a 'podcast'. It simply (and really) isn't.))

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