Launched in December 2012, Friendzdiary.com is a real time social diary platform allowing users to share documents, softwares and files. Users can upload, sent or share news, CV’s, mails, photos, videos in realtime.
Users can also chat and play games, like or dislike updates from their friends.
According to Gbolade Emmanuel, the founder,” The site works on an adaptive theme which was designed using the elgg platform and can work on any device so users have an option of using varied devices to access the site.”
Founded in Lagos, FriendzDiary is now available in ten languages [English, Hungarian, Danish, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Hebrew] and users can change their language preference by clicking the country flags on diary’s top right corner.
They can then can create profiles with photos, change profile background, lists of biography, contact information, and other personal information and create and join interest groups and “like or dislike pages and contents” some of which are maintained by individuals and organizations as a means of advertising.
Gbolade said he founded the site with ShaibuEkele, Kevin Okoli, David Amobi and James Obodo Hopewell, his university roommates at the University of Lagos students who have also funded the project. The website’s was initially designed to serve as a social diary for connecting people alone but later added extra features to accommodate social bookmarking and real-time news updates.
Run by Saunnie Systems LLC, Friendzdiary is derived from “friends” and “diary” meaning a diary of friends who connect to each other, share experiences and happening around their environment.
According to the Gbolade anyone above the age of 10 can have a friendzdiary, the diary is meant not only to connect but to also send out real-time updates to other social networks.
Gbolade Emmanuel is not new to social networks. He designed Vieplay (which was since shut down) and Zio-net (Now Friendzdiary search+), the predecessors to Friendzdiary. Gbolade says they have been partly funded by Kevin Okoli an entrepreneur (owner of ping connect) who funded the acquisition of a multi-search script from an online dealer and some of the team members have laid aside their own money to fund the sites expenditure too.
FriendzDiary is a real-time social diary network designed on the elgg platform. It gives users the opportunity to connect with Friendz and loved ones, sharing your daily activities through a daily log of pictures, events and experiences.Within friendzDiary are information’s known as logs, users can see photos, videos and conversations directly in Logdate which updates on real time.
FriendzDiary gives a variety of opportunity to its users to share information’s and happenings in their community and other social communities all day long, this helps connect people together, this is done through the Hive, Diary, Happenings and Pix. Users can set all contents and log to Private.
FriendzDiary connects business through a never ending stream of business feeds and improves sales with a provision of private message button. Businesses of divers’ type can also tap into the never ending feeds from the diary of brands and people so as to improve their strategies and learn new ways of working out their success story.
To allay concerns about privacy, Friendzdiary enables users to choose their own privacy settings on any post and content within their diary, also to choose who can see specific parts of their profile. The website is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads. Friendzdiary requires a user’s name, profile background picture and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, through their privacy settings.
Some of FriendzDiary’s features include;
Loglet
The Loglet which appears on every user’s diary allows users to send real-time updates to friends, reply them instantly and also create a thread of communication to show users their logged feeds. This aspect of a users diary is integrated also to the users activity diary desk but here it is limited to only posting but user cannot reply here or view thread but can only like or dislike a wired post. Every logged post made on the activity page immediately updates on the users wire stream so this enables user to still connect while yet on the activity age.
Log Desk
The Log desk is the navigation/dashboard of a users diary. Several features are active here such as; users panel (profile picture and profile navigation by the right); Tracker which enables users to open any content based on tags made on that specific content; featured groups; online Hives; notification bar; messages; settings; ads conner; grabs; Diary; Docs and a varied of other navigation links. Logletis also integrated into the Log Desk allowing users to like, dislike and view updated contents all around the site. The page also allows user feedback which hangs by the right of the page.
Contents stream automatically unfolds as users scroll down a page and when a user is down the page all they need to do is click the scroll up button and the page slides back upwards automatically. This reduces the stress of scrolling.
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Grabs
The Grabs feature enables user to grab page and website contents or upload Rss feeds from other websites. The grab section provides a tool bar plugin which is called grablet, it is dragged to the user’s computer browser toolbar and when any website page is open all the user needs to do is to click on that plugin and the page is bookmarked instantly to the users online media diary on Friendzdiary.
Organizer
This feature uses the elggman plugin which enables users to send free mails and 5 free SMS to users and external users. Here users can also join hives instantly without having to visit the hivepage, all the user needs to do is to drag the hive he/she wants to join to his own group column.
Diary
Users can create a Diary page and write any content he or she wants but this is different from blog because such users can create a sub page of that specific content he or she has added. This is the very heart of friendzdiary because it represents the Pages of a diary.
Technical aspects
Friendzdiary is built in PHP (elgg) which is compiled with galli cache and vroom, a source code transformer built by galli team engineers that turns PHP into static pages. The use of galli cache and vroom reduces the average CPU consumption on Friendzdiary (arvixe) servers considerably.
Like and Dislike button
The like and dislike button is a feature within each users diary, that allows users to express their appreciation and discontent of content such as status updates, comments, photos, and advertisements. It also has a social share plugin to allow users to share with their friends and prevent others from seeing their posts using privacy settings.
