Posted: Aug 21, 08 4:27pm

We’re doing a lot around here to make everything on the site more easily findable, and more directly relevant to your particular interests, and what you’re here for in general.

I encourage you all to go in and edit your Interests to make them comma-separated terms, like: kittens, basketball, demolition derbies, (or whatever floats your boat). If you want to describe yourself in more words, the About Me section is perfect for that.

Here’s why:

As you probably know, our site is organized around tags, or categories of content. You can find people, groups, and posts associated with these terms when you search or browse. In order to improve this experience, we’re going to be merging the terms you’ve stated as Interests on your profile with the list of tags for the rest of the site. This should make members more easily findable through pages that display common interests, and allow us to begin to serve you members with events and news directly based on your particular interests. Sounds kind of esoteric, but it will be cool.

If your profile is set to "Friends Only" you will not show up in the member results when someone searches a tag that you’ve posted as an interest in your profile. This will remain the rule. As is the case now, your username and photo, however, will show up in content results if you've used the tag someone is searching on to describe your posts.

Since one of the major benefits of TeeBeeDee is meeting new people through common interests, however, we encourage members with profiles viewable by other TBD members, or viewable to everyone, to update your interests. That will help you connect with people you’ve yet to meet. (Or perhaps you’re starting a group and you want to find everyone who’s into slow food, for instance.)

More to come on this but I wanted to give you all a head’s up here first…