Making Planely.com AFF friendly

[Taezar]

Hey guys and gyrls.

As you know a few of us have been mucking around with Planely and getting some matches, planning meetups etc.
One of the things brought up as potential improvements (yes there have been a lot but it is early days yet) was the ability for us to recognise each other on flight / aeroport matches.

This a partial screen grab of Planely showing me that I have aeroport and flight matches.

This is within the match breakdown.


Nick the always chatty and accommodating CEO of Planely would like some further input from us on how we envision Planely's soon to be coming "Group" function working for us. IE: how do we want to be able to do it, and what would we like to happen as a result.

Me: I would like to be able to click a "share with group" option when in my profile. If I want to be Scooby I can mark my trips as private on TripIt - so an auto default on imported flight info to share. So other's can ID me, an AFF logo next to the IN and FB would be cool I think - or somehow linking us in the backend - but I think this is a bit far fetched atm as I can't even link with friends on FB and on Planely at the moment. Maybe an AFF logo against the matches on the main page as well so it will draw my attention to those flights.

Any other imaginings?

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[Mal]

There are times when I'm happy to connect with people and times when I want my privacy. Websites need to respect this (for example, if I link Planely with Tripit, it should respect that I mark a trip as private). And just because I enter a flight into Planely doesn't mean I want it publicly visible...

Happy to have an AFF tag next to my planely profile, but that's all. No connection back to my username here (unlike the current linkedin type connections).

It is hard to link to places like AFF. If you have a corporate tie-up, it's easy to track via Email address - but for community forums, it isn't too easy.

I have many suggestions for Planely, but still haven't contacted Nick. Perhaps I should some time. One time when entering flights, I did get a "Can I help" chat pop-up supposedly from him, but wasn't in a chatting mood....

 

[Misha]

It is him (or at least someone live) as I ignored it the first time and then second time I responded to be civil... There was someone there

Only feedback I have is that when you send a message to someone that it comes anonymously as "Misha from Planely" rather than email with surnames, etc...

Hence (I do have a point here somewhere) I agree that privacy is essential. I only added other flights as I believe that there's no option to look at all my flights. I'm allowing others to see each individual flight if they happen to be on it too...

AFF group would be good, with option to 'drag' or 'tag' the flights I want to be visible by that group.

It's a good concept, and I think it could gel well with some of us here...


Sent from my iPhone using Aust Freq Fly app

 

[TonyHancock]

There are times when I'm happy to connect with people and times when I want my privacy.

Given my genuine disinterest in people I have to say the planely things scares me to death!!

 

[serfty]

Until planely does handles I'm not interested .

I know a name can be fudged, but it is better to cut to the chase and allow a one word/string ID.

 

[awilcockson]

My biggest complaint and number one suggestions has to do with the "you've got a new match" email. So I go and log into my planely account and I can see all my account with all the matches .... but where's the icon to indicate "new" matches? Because as it stands I have to sift through every flight with a match to see if I can find the new matches(s) based on my recollection of the matches last time I logged in. And to be honest it is just too much hard work so I don't bother.

 

[Mal]

Don't forget the security concerns. Post a custom photo? Your email address is revealed. Contact someone once, they know your email address. Hence why I use a throwaway address and don't publish my surname. Planely needs a huge amount of work to bring it inline with other social networking sites.

---
Posted from a non-Apple device.

 

[Ewing]

Post a custom photo? Your email address is revealed.

Wow, you're right. That's really bad - and going through my matches they reveal places of employment and last names (details that are often unpublished on Planely).

It would have been better if it uses some sort of hashing system like Gravatar (which uses MD5).

 

[planely]

My time as a lurker is over! I wanted to stay out of the conversation so I could get a good overview of your thoughts, issues and ideas. Really really interesting stuff for and thanks for getting so deep into the concept.

I'd like to give you a bit of background on Planely and the direction we're heading before having a crack at your thoughts.

Planely was created for one simple reason - to help more people connect and have conversations with each other face-to-face. Whilst online conversations are fantastic and have helped millions of people connect that would never have been possible before, but it's the good old offline conversation that's a little under-serviced we believe. We want to help as many of those happen as possible between people that have never met before.

Air travel, as you guys know, can be a lonely experience if you're a frequent traveller. Given how many people are around when you fly it doesn't need to be that way. If you knew who each other were then you'd likely see there's someone close by with similar interests that it would be fun to have a conversation with.

If air travel was more 'social' then I believe the whole ecosystem could become a lot more positive. The relationships and tolerance between us as passengers and between airline/airport and customer has room for improvement and injecting a social dynamic into the experience could have a really interesting impact.

So the hypothesis goes that if people have new and exciting social opportunities ahead of each time they fly then they'll enjoy it more and will utilise their precious time away from the office/family/home to even greater effect. This will then have a knock-on effect to the ecosystem as a whole and we'll have an environment that is a pleasure to be in for the majority rather than the minority

I'm going to now address each area you guys have raised in separate posts so we can discuss each one in turn.

First up is Privacy as it's the most important one I believe.

We take privacy very seriously and spend a good part of our time when we're designing past and present on this topic. We know we have a long way to go to get everything right but just to show you our thinking to date I'd like to point out three key design designs we made to protect your privacy:

1. It's not possible for someone to 'follow' you or even invite people to follow you (synchronous and asynchronous connecting). I see some of you might like the second one though. That would make us more of a traditional social network and we left it out because we wanted to focus on helping you meet 'new people' rather than communicate with those you already know. For those that would like to do it, how/why would you use it?
2. It's not possible to get an overview of potential Matches on a route over a date period (i.e. give me all Matches between 24 June and 26 June from SYD to MEL). You only see Matches one trip at a time. That makes it much harder to 'stalk'.
3. Your profile pages on Planely do not have unique URLs therefore they aren't reachable by other people inside or outside the community and the search engines can't get to them.

These three combined mean that the only people that ever see you on Planely are those that, by coincidence, will be in your vicinity on your future trips. That, we believe, limits the possibility of the platform being used for negative purposes.

I do hear @Misha's concern though about sending a contact email to a Match exposes your email address. Personally I'm comfortable with this as I'm the one that has made the connection, but I totally appreciate others may not be and maybe you as sender shouldn't get that copy which displays the receiver's email address. We use external email because that's easiest for you guys. InMail (ala LinkedIn and Facebook) and can be such a pain sometimes. Would you prefer a Planely InMail however that was more like LinkedIn's?

@Mal has given us some fantastic feedback and raised a few other technical issues with us directly that we're in the process of working through so thanks very much for that.

Nick

PS We want to make sure we get this area right so hope we can continue the conversation. I loved Oz when I lived there so it's great I get to work with you guys

PPS I'll be doing a separate post shortly on the tagging for AFFers in your Profiles

 

[planely]

In terms of being able to tag your Profile and proudly show yourself as being an AFFer how about we start with this:

1. On your Profile page you can check a box to say you're an AFFer
2. This will then attach the AFF logo against your profile as others see it on their Match page

And then look to building the following in if the demand is there (you have probably noticed that we like to hold back and keep things as simple as possible):

• Ability to add a hyperlink back to your AFF profile
• Ability to untag some of your flights as AFF (why would you like to be able to do that?)

We'll probably launch this feature with three communities to begin with (AFF, Flyertalk and MilePoint).

We might even set up a league table to see which ones have the most number of members on the system!

What do you guys think?

 

[Mal]

In terms of being able to tag your Profile and proudly show yourself as being an AFFer how about we start with this:

1. On your Profile page you can check a box to say you're an AFFer
2. This will then attach the AFF logo against your profile as others see it on their Match page

Sounds good so far. The alternatives are either labour intensive, or rely on much closer integration with websites like AFF/FT/MP.

And then look to building the following in if the demand is there (you have probably noticed that we like to hold back and keep things as simple as possible):

• Ability to add a hyperlink back to your AFF profile
• Ability to untag some of your flights as AFF (why would you like to be able to do that?)

We'll probably launch this feature with three communities to begin with (AFF, Flyertalk and MilePoint).

Some people will want a hyperlink, personally I don't care either way. It's an option - not a requirement.
Untagging flights as AFF kind of sits closely with the expectation to mark some flights as private (or expect Planely to observe the "private trip" functionality of Tripit). While hard to explain, there are times when you don't want to be associated with a group (eg travelling with workmate who isn't on AFF/FT/MP or similar sites), or up to no good, or are just completing 30 hours flying in Y and really not even wanting to consider being in a social mood.

 

[samh004]

We might even set up a league table to see which ones have the most number of members on the system!

What do you guys think?

I'm sure I'd want to tag "all of the above" in such a case

Sounds good though and I look forward to how the ite develops.

 

[Taezar]

In terms of being able to tag your Profile and proudly show yourself as being an AFFer how about we start with this:

1. On your Profile page you can check a box to say you're an AFFer
2. This will then attach the AFF logo against your profile as others see it on their Match page

And then look to building the following in if the demand is there (you have probably noticed that we like to hold back and keep things as simple as possible):

• Ability to add a hyperlink back to your AFF profile
• Ability to untag some of your flights as AFF (why would you like to be able to do that?)

We'll probably launch this feature with three communities to begin with (AFF, Flyertalk and MilePoint).

We might even set up a league table to see which ones have the most number of members on the system!

What do you guys think?

Sounds like an awesome start Nick!

 

[LiamR]

Sounds like some awesome ideas Nick!

I like your idea to be able to check a box, and then you see an AFF logo next to my name. However, I had another idea, but some might say its lacking privacy.

(This is going to be a big hard to explain, so try and hang on)

Try and create some sort of group, or network, or circle (Whatever the trendy name for a group of people is)

We could have an AFF group, and inside that members can choose to see who else part of the group, and (Maybe.. privacy concerns permitting) see what their next flight is.

Once joining the AFF group you would have the AFF logo somewhere beside your name, (maybe when you hover over the AFF logo you see their AFF username?)

In terms of privacy... well, there could be a problem. But it is no different to submitting your travel plans here: Meetings and Social Events

If your still reading..... I have another suggestion:


Is it possible to, by default hide previous flights, and have a checkbox up the top that says 'Show Previous Flights'?

As you can see, my current screen is looking fairly full, would be nice to be able to separate the flights. Either by trip, or if they are a day or two apart? Maybe some intelligent sorting to work out a trip. (Well if he has a BNE-SYD and a SYD-BNE the next day, it must be a single trip.)

Would be happy to give more feedback in the future, I'm an IT guy, so I love these sort of ideas.

 

[planely]

Some people will want a hyperlink, personally I don't care either way. It's an option - not a requirement. Untagging flights as AFF kind of sits closely with the expectation to mark some flights as private (or expect Planely to observe the "private trip" functionality of Tripit). While hard to explain, there are times when you don't want to be associated with a group (eg travelling with workmate who isn't on AFF/FT/MP or similar sites), or up to no good, or are just completing 30 hours flying in Y and really not even wanting to consider being in a social mood.

I can see that. So am I right in thinking the following:

1. If a trip is marked private on TripIt we should NOT pull it through to Planely
2. Have the option on Planely to hide/delete a TripIt flight even though it's not marked as private on TripIt
3. Have the option to disassociate yourself from Online Communities that you've tagged yourself as being part of on a per flight basis

 

[planely]

I read right to the very end @LiamR and I never even got close to bored

We could have an AFF group, and inside that members can choose to see who else part of the group, and (Maybe.. privacy concerns permitting) see what their next flight is.

Once joining the AFF group you would have the AFF logo somewhere beside your name, (maybe when you hover over the AFF logo you see their AFF username?)

This is an interesting idea. We've been playing around with things like this but more thinking about how we could create a widget that you could install on your AFF site that draws flight data out of Planely and into here rather than keep bringing you back to Planely.

What do others think?

Is it possible to, by default hide previous flights, and have a checkbox up the top that says 'Show Previous Flights'?

As you can see, my current screen is looking fairly full, would be nice to be able to separate the flights. Either by trip, or if they are a day or two apart? Maybe some intelligent sorting to work out a trip. (Well if he has a BNE-SYD and a SYD-BNE the next day, it must be a single trip.)

We're working on putting together an Archive section of all trips in the past that by default is minimised and at the bottom of your flight list but I also like the intelligent grouping too.

I got this idea from someone yesterday. What do you guys think?

"Another idea would be to allow the user to create folders so they can compartmentalize their flights according to whatever criteria they deem to be appropriate. For example, if I am traveling to London, then Paris, and finally Zurich, then back to New York City for a study abroad program, I would want to categorize all of those flights under "Europe Study Abroad." The long list of flights can be confusing at times and compartmentalization would add a user-friendly feature."

 

[Mal]

I can see that. So am I right in thinking the following:

1. If a trip is marked private on TripIt we should NOT pull it through to Planely
2. Have the option on Planely to hide/delete a TripIt flight even though it's not marked as private on TripIt
3. Have the option to disassociate yourself from Online Communities that you've tagged yourself as being part of on a per flight basis

1) - Yes, Otherwise why would you mark it as private on Tripit? (Private I believe is used to stop the cross-transfer of flights to Facebook and LinkedIn as well as prevent people in your Tripit Network seeing your flights). I see it as being similar.
2) - Sounds good.
3) - Sounds good.

 

[planely]

Hi guys ... quick question for you

We're redesigning the main Flights page to be able to include things like the archiving of old flights and we're questioning each column to see whether they should be kept in.

Do you need the flight number?


PS I know I need to fly more! I promise I will soon!

 

[LiamR]

Do you need the flight number?

Yes. Absolutely!

 

[medhead]

one suggest I had would be to switch the flight entry around to allow search by flight number of a given date.

Hi guys ... quick question for you

We're redesigning the main Flights page to be able to include things like the archiving of old flights and we're questioning each column to see whether they should be kept in.

Do you need the flight number?

I think you currently have the bare minimum of information in a good way, all the basic info is there without being overloaded. You have the need to have info, already.