I'd like to see a lot more in the way of personalization on Tribe. It can start with allowing our profiles to go on forever: an order of magnitude more fields to fill out. And 5 or 10 "roll your own" fields, where people can specify the label as well as the content. "Favorite color:" "My dog's name:" "First crush:" Whatever. My casual research (surfing around) indicates that people will fill out whatever they like, whenever they feel like it. Let's give everyone more choices.

What goes along with this is control over that information: identifying who can see what in your profile. One way to do this is to have it determined by social distance: allow people to set a maximum degree of distance that a particular bit of information will be displayed to.

At a finer degree of granularity, 1st-degree friends could be grouped (a feature I think we should have in any case) and then various profile versions could be worked out for "professional friends" or "best friends" or "poker buddies" or something. Not sure how that one would pan out with respect to the rest of the experience.

There's a whole other thread here about customizing personal and tribe profile pages, but I'll save that for another day.


People like to:

a) Talk about themselves
b) Feel famous/attract the right kind of attention
c) Change their surroundings to suit their tastes
d) Show their friends what they've done

If we let people express themselves, they'll bring other people on to do the same thing.