Sexual Deviants Living In A Web 2.0 World

One of the first questions I asked myself when I first sat down to design FetLife was:

Should I make it possible for couples to be able to sign-up as a couple?

I decided against it. Why? For one simple reason, no matter how strong a relationship or D/s relationship you are in you are still an individual. You have friends, you socialize, you have your own email address, you have your own interests, concerns, questions and conversations.

If FetLife was a dating site, which it is not, then signing up as a couple would make sense, but FetLife is a social utility that let’s you stay connected with the Fetish community and your Fet friends. Signing up as a single person just makes more sense for you to get the most benefit out of the site.

So that is why you can not create an account as a couple. But the shitty part on FetLife was that you and your partner could not connect your profiles in any way. Now, I admit, that was annoying and that was what was lacking.

As of today that has changed. From both a traditional relationship and D/s relationship perspective you can now specify the status/type of relationship you are in and with whom.

If you are in a relationship, are engaged or married you can now say to whom on the site you are in a relationship with for everyone to see and be able to easily link to your partner’s profile.

From a D/s relationship perspective you can do the same thing. If you are someone’s Master, Owner, Top or Daddy you can specify whose. And from the other side, if you are owned and collared, owned, a slave of, a pet of, a bottom, under consideration, under protection, a babygirl of or a babyboy of you can easily specify that you are and to whom!

I want to send out a big thanks to MJsgirl of Melbourne Chains and MJ’s ToyBox for helping me better understand D/s relationships. Anything I got right was thanks to her. Anything I got wrong was because I did not listen to her! :-)

So you are in a relationship or D/s relationship and want to see how it all works? Log into to your account and click edit from the top navigation. It will be right their!

If you have any feedback on how I can improve my implementation please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section or msg me privately. I am sure I screwed up the of/to/by in a couple places!

Everyone bitched and I heard them loud and clear! Admittedly, everyone had a really good reason for bitching. So I got what I deserved!

As of under two hours ago you can easily add/update/remove the most common fetishes that you are into or curious about from one page.

I am sure all of you are asking yourself what is up with “most common” fetishes? I can’t get anything by you can I! I could not make a form with over 200 fetishes (and growing) on it so what I did was distill the list of fetishes to what I considered to be the most common fetishes which ends up being about 70 fetishes.

So now, from your profile, you can click on the “bulk add most common fetishes” link that is to the right of the fetishes header. And presto, you are on the bulk adding/editing/removing form.

I know, for many of you it is a little too little to late since you have already added the fetishes that you are into or curious about onto your profile page but think of it this way; all of you influenced all the new members experience on FetLife!

I have a question for all of you know, is their a fetish that really should be on the list of “most common” fetishes that I totally forgot?

→ visit FetLife.com and check out the changes

Believe it or not, a lot of satisfaction is to be had, at least for me, in the small updates as much as the big ones. Refining a product is a big part of pushing it forward that most people ignore.

So here are some of the small updates that I pushed live over the last couple of days:

• Now, if you look at a profile that is not your own and the person does not have any friends the “My Kinky Friends” header does not appear.
• “Browse” in the global navigation has been renamed to “Kinksters”. lildevil complained to me about this one a couple weeks ago and finally understood where she was coming from a couple days ago. I think kinksters makes much more sense. Now it is more obvious what you will find when you click on the link.
• Added the first version of Terms & Conditions and a copyright to the bottom of every page thanks to the prodding of MasterKinkyDaddy of www.dungeondezigns.com.
• Added some new fetishes to the tag cloud Fetish page thanks to the prodding of a couple users. From Petplay to Caning to Posture Collars to Smoking to many more… we are now over 140 different fetishes.
• Also fixed some small display problems…

Today is another day and will hopefully get a couple more fixes out…

One feature was a request that I am still not so sure about and the other was my sub-conscious’. :-)

The one I am not so sure about (i.e. not so comfortable about) is being able to write about yourself on your profile. I am not sure it is necessary… I prefer to watch what people are doing on the site instead of reading their about information which ends up getting stail really quickly. But since we are experimenting right now we will see how it goes :-p.

The feature I find myself using a lot already… only after deploying it 30 minutes ago… is the ability to switch between seeing what your friends have been up to on the site and what everyone has been up to. Before you could only see your friends! :-)

Tell me what you guys think!

Two quick updates from yesterday, if you login to your profile you can now upload as many pictures as you want to your profile and you can easily change between which of your pictures you want to use are your profile pic.

Also, I fixed a bug that decided to show it’s ugly head just recently. When I have been logging in recently it looked like nobody was doing anything on the site for a couple days and I was like no… come on… that is impossible. I finally realized that the logic in my algorithm for displaying each users mini-feed was broken was not taking the last 30 things their friends were doing on the site but the first 30 things. Which makes no sense, hence I fixed it! :-)

If I remember correctly it is just over a year ago when we first launched FriendsWithFetishes.com (FWF). The original idea behind FWF was to help kinksters find other kinksters who they had fetishes in common with.

Who am I kidding with this marketing talk. I pretty much created FWF because I was extremely horny with many fetishes I needed to act on and many more I still wanted to try. The problem was I was not sure their were any girls out their that had the same perverted ways as me. Like a female John. Let me rephrase that, I knew their were girls out their who had the same fetishes as me but they were far and few between and I was not sure how many slaps I could take before just giving up asking. So I figured, their must be a better way and I created FWF.

I have to admit that before launching FWF I knew nothing about the Fet community. I had never been to an event or meet anyone who was involved in the community. It was just me and my sick perverted fetishes :-).

As I was launching FWF I was lucky enough to meet EmJ. She pretty much took me under her wings and introduced me to the Fet community in Toronto. She took me to large parties held at clubs as well as private parties held in people’s homes. I loved all of it. It was like their was another world out their that I never knew existed.

During this time I got the opportunity to meet a lot of great people and learn about the community, relationships, interaction and how it all kind of works. All the things I learnt resulted in me having to re-think everything about FWF.

All the things I learned from EmJ and her friends resulted in FWF 2.0 and we are planning on launching it in the next 7-14 days.

Our elevator pitch for FWF is:

FriendsWithFetishes is like Facebook except for the fact it is being build and run by sexual deviants.

Ok… now what does that mean for FWF? I am a big list guy so this is my Top 10 list for changes in FWF… but their is man more then just 10.

1. FWF is becoming a closed community. The only way to join is if a member invites you. We are going to seed FWF 2.0 to all members of FWF 1.0, Fet event organizers, Fet bloggers and anyone one else we discover is trustworthy and active in the community. This results in a tighter knit community that will reflect existing local communities.

2. It is all about your Friends. We are going to put a lot of emphasis on your relationship with people. Like Facebook you will be able to specify who your friends are and because of the relationship be able to easily keep up to date with what they are doing.

3. Get A Fet Feed. Mini-feeds are addictive. See what pictures your friends have uploaded from recent events, see what fetishes they have become curious about or into and who they have recently became friends with. Keep a pulse on your fetish community in between events.

4. Improved fetish listings. Now you don’t only say if you are into or curious about a fetish but you can specify, to a certain extent, what aspect of the fetish you are into. For instance are you into giving or receiving a spanking or are you just into everything with respect to spanking.

5. EMail Notifications. If you get a message from another member of FWF you will be notified via email. Now I have no excuse for not responding to messages much quicker. Damm… this sucks!

6. Improved Interface. Yeah, your right, improved interface does sound like a bogus improvement. But it is not, soon as you try the new FWF I think you will like how it feels.

And this is just the start.

What was wrong with the old blog? Nothing was wrong with it. But at the same time nothing was really right with it. It just didn’t feel right. The blog needed a name, address, design, personality and a raison d’etre. Name (check), address (check), design (partial check), personality (time will tell) and the raison d’etre is because we are going to be shipping FriendsWithFetishes 2.0 in the next 7 days. Stay tuned.

(Our blog was initially at http://blog.friendswithfetishes.com but we are going to close that blog down and start a fresh here.)