pinppl development

We’ve had a couple of requests for change-of-PIN functionality. I accepted these requests, and promised to include this functionality, and for that I apologise, as we do not feel it in the best interest of the service to incorperate this, after much thought, consideration and experimentation.

If you were to change your profile’s PIN, the profile URL also will change. This is an issue that can be overcome by us putting in a “profile moved” page, should anyone visit your old profile address.

But, what if someone else, who you have invariably handed your BlackBerry down to, would like to register a profile with their new (your old) PIN?

One of the main points of pinppl, as I am sure will be reflected once the service expands, is that you can lookup the profile of a friend, so long as you know their PIN. It is about the person that belongs to the PIN, as this is the platform through which you communicate via the BB, and for which pinppl is based.

If you’re in a position where you have a new device, and would like to change the PIN associated with your profile, just manually move that information over to the new profile (copy & paste), and leave a note on your old profile explaining that the PIN is no longer in use. (Or remove that profile entirely, if you wish. It’s all up to you.)

I believe this to be the best solution, and creates benefits such as if someone were no longer able to send you PIN messages, they could lookup your old profile, and see that you changed devices, and PIN.

We really don’t want to make the same mistakes with pinppl that so many other Web services have. To add functionality for a change of PIN, creates a spiral of new issues to be resolved, in ways which can only be confusing and bloated in terms of usability and optionset.

There seems just one pro for this functionality — that being the ability to move your profile information to a new PIN, not doing it manually. But you’re highly unlikely to need to do this very often.

Tell us what you think. This is your guys’ service, your feedback is crucial to the development of pinppl which we hope all BlackBerry users will be able to make much use of at final release.

The great thing about profile tags is that when you see one that applies to you, you can use it – and right there you’ve created another connection.

I’ve stolen many tags at pinppl, and am proud to say!

I’d like to thank Daniel Appelquist of TechCrunch UK for his coverage of pinppl. TechCrunch, in case you didn’t know, is an extremely influential blog about new Web startups, and technologies.

pinppl is one of the first sites to enter the mobile social networking space, and as I stated in the TCUK comments, I am confident it will introduce many new and unique features to “MoSoNet”.

Look forward to some cool stuff in the coming days, including multiple tag searching.

Tonight I did an interview with the Mobile Computing Authority podcast, a very interesting show about “all mobile computing topics”, where we discussed pinppl, amongst other subjects.

If you’re interested in checking it out, visit the MCA site to download the show in mp3 format, or check it out on iTunes.

Your profile’s privacy is based in a very simple rule: whether or not you have any tags associated with it.

A new feature added to the pinppl homepage is recently updated profiles. If you’re using pinppl to privately share with your close friends or colleagues, you will not tag your profile — tagging creates criteria by which people can find it.

If your profile has not been tagged, it will not appear in any of the homepage lists (including new users by photos), but will appear in the friends lists of other users if they have befriended you. (Some functionality for this will be added soon, if you’d rather hide your profile even in these lists.)

Profiles are not indexed in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. This is turned off to protect your privacy.

Of course, anyone can visit your profile, so long as they know your PIN number, but soon, functionality for this too will be added, whereby only those you have befriended will be allowed to view.

Expect many cool and exciting features during the course of pinppl’s development to final release, including a complete UI overhaul.