The Fridge (YCS10): Private Mini-Facebooks that Put Social Networking in Context | Hacker News Reader

The Fridge (YCS10): Private Mini-Facebooks that Put Social Networking in Context

xconomy.com

43 pointsandujo10 comments

Single page view: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/09/15/the-fridge-p...

Site being reviewed: http://www.frid.ge/

Interesting concept. Have they considered making it a bit more medium-size friendly, and marketing it to schools? School software tends to be waaaay behind what's even "good".

edit: after poking around a bit, I agree with x0t. It's a bit rough around the edges. But the simplicity is definitely a bonus (though I'd love the ability for a non-verified account to at least see the settings for groups, so you can at least see what you can do).

edit2: after verifying, the options are:

  change name
  "reset code" (regenerates your link)
  notify everyone on post - on/off
  delete group

Which pretty much sums up everything you can do with a group. It's just a bucket for members. Not sure what you can do aside from adding members and using a wall, haven't added myself w/ a second email and don't care to. Invite link is: http://www.frid.ge/?ginvitation=azd528pe2u8ggk0w84gkwoccc if you care to help me experiment.

Thanks Tim, whoever you are!

Once a user is part of your group, you can.... click on them to go to their page, where there's a "disinvite user" link/button. I'm hoping that changes to handle individual groups if they're in more than one of your groups.

And that's it.

Their "group settings" link reveals only a "leave group".

So, to summarize a bit on the current state of the site: it's a private Facebook wall for you + your group(s), and that appears to be it.

Before it can become more useful, I think it needs a way of organizing communication. But, then again, I don't find much use in Facebook's news feed, so I may just not be seeing some potential which others do.

those are your group setting options. in the group itself you can post, upload photos, parse youtube/vimeo video urls, post flash embeds, and more to a very specific group of people. create multiple of these side by side to have personal conversations with different people and events...

definitely rough around the edges. a bit more polished site coming imminently...

It would be nice if eventually there will be an option for groups to be public so people can discover new things.

That would make the service Meetup like, but Meetup's privacy settings fail worse than Facebook so I think there is a space to fill.

yes! but for now we are focusing on personal and private relationships. user and interest based discovery is something we are definitely going to add in...

Love it. Keep up the good work. I've invited a small network of Python geeks in Reykjavík Iceland. Will report back how it works out.

I think I shall make "Python geeks in Reykjavík" my new canonical example of "niche".

I think it needs some polishing, but this is a pretty slick idea.

Thanks! New release was supposed to hit before the Xconomy article came out but should be up later today/tonight/late tonight...

very simple for now but lots of stuff cooking...

So it's ning + meetup but private.

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