Whilst many are tripping (twipping) on Twitter, the team here at TribeHQ has been quietly shaping a platform for every occupational group. Today TribeHQ brings further innovation to the micro-blogging scene.
The new features shift the focus from demonstrating influence by building follower numbers, to recognizing the value of a member’s contribution to the tribe.
The TribeHQ platform provides the opportunity for any member within their profession to step up and provide thought and community leadership.
Here’s a taste of some of the changes:
- Members can vote on how useful they find other members’ contributions.
- When a member receives a certain number of votes, a tribal mask badge appears on their profile, highlighting their level of influence.
- As a tribe member demonstrates continued leadership the mask upgrades as they hit the next milestone.
- “Tribal Elders”, active contributors who build and foster their tribe, will now be showcased on the platform.
If you are wanting to lead your occupational tribe, then TribeHQ provides you with the platform, tools and freedom to make a real contribution to your profession.
As always, we welcome your feedback.
Paul Jacobs & Tim de Jardine - TribeHQ
TribeHQ continues to innovate. Today TribeHQ added a core feature that delivers context-specific Google news feeds, targeted to an occupational tribe. Tribe members may comment on a topical news item using short messages of up to 140 characters. The comment enters the tribe member’s own conversational feed and in turn enables other tribe members to engage in conversation around that news item.
We plan to progressively roll-out more features to increase stickiness and activity on the site. For example, coming soon, tribe members will be recognized by their tribe for providing community and thought leadership. “Tribal elders” and industry groups will gain certain privileges, such as being able to add news items to the news feed. The intention is for TribeHQ to focus on quality of relationships and alliances rather than the number of followers a member has.
TribeHQ received some major media coverage this week, with a dedicated feature on leading tech blog Techrunch.
We thought the feature itself was very well written and captured the essence of the TribeHQ platform and its innovations, at this early stage in our development. We enjoyed reading the range of comments; some of them gave us food for thought. We’ve also received a range of tribe suggestions, and some excellent user feedback.
The TribeHQ platform held up remarkably well to a massive surge in visitor traffic and member sign-ups. Only a few visitors experienced log-in issues during the highest peak periods. We’ve since made a few minor tweaks to the system architecture to further improve system responsiveness and reliability.
We will continue to develop TribeHQ. We believe the media and our membership base will be impressed and surprised by what will come next.
Here’s a couple of other reviews of TribeHQ (here and here).
Posted
on February 24, 2009, 9:41 pm,
by admin,
under
TribeHQ.
Without much fanfare, we quietly entered the early beta stage of TribeHQ a few weeks ago. Thanks heaps to all those people who have taken the time to test it out. More importantly, we are very grateful to receive a ton of feedback and suggestions.
We are now taking this feedback, fixing a number of known bugs, and prioritizing what is critical and what can feature in future iterations. We are also adding lots more occupational tribes, as requested.
In the next iteration, coming very soon, we will introduce the very important ability to reply to a conversational thread. Also, we will implement the ability for a tribe member to invite their allies from other social networking platforms.
This is only the start. We have thought long and hard about ways to add stickiness to the platform. We will progressively roll out features to make TribeHQ the key portal for a tribe member to keep up to date with the tribal buzz.
Now that we’ve built more stability and core features into TribeHQ, we will be cranking up our marketing in the coming weeks. We will continue to develop the platform, along the lines of our longer-term vision, but will as always welcome your ongoing feedback and suggestions.
Thanks for coming on this journey with us.
Paul Jacobs and Tim de Jardine
Co-founders, TribeHQ
People by their very nature are tribal. We congregate. Group membership is a big part of our lives – family, school, sport, work, clubs, politics, religion, the place in which we live, etc. Within each of our tribes, we form a close collection of allies. We unite with people who share our interests and beliefs. This is not a new phenomenon; according to the history books it has been like this since the dawn of civilization.
We are very excited to provide an early, somewhat limited, glimpse at TribeHQ, a project we have been involved in developing for a good chunk of 2008. We have worked with an awesome team (tribe) of local businesses to get the project very close to the final prototype stage. We look forward to taking TribeHQ from New Zealand to the world.
So what is TribeHQ?
In the product development we aimed to innovate at all costs. We are keeping a lot of this under wraps for now and are not quite ready to run the press releases just yet. We plan to partner with other businesses, so you may hear from us in due course.
Here’s a bit of a taste of what TribeHQ is in the meantime:
- A web-based conversational platform for different occupational groups
- Encourages global kinship, identity and sharing of ideas and knowledge across borders
- A completely new approach to online recruitment - nothing like it anywhere!
This is just a start! Our plans for 2009 are ambitious and this is only the beginning of a broader product offering for tribe members, industry, and employers.
Stay tuned, we will keep you updated …
Cheers, Tim de Jardine and Paul Jacobs
