Group Therapy

The Tsu social network is about 10 months old now. That's a fairly long time in internet years and it should be reaching maturity now. The expectations for what a service should offer are set by the big guns like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Although each site should have some unique features to mark it out people expect certain features.

The latest new feature on Tsu is groups. Although you can follow people who share your interests it is useful to have a place for like-minded folk to discuss their interests without all having to follow each other.

There are a limited selection of groups available so far as they have to be approved by the team. This is partly because groups generate earnings as in other areas of the site and this could be abused. It should also prevent lots of similar groups being created. The creator and administrators of the group get a percentage, but some also goes to a nominated charity. In the current beta phase (first 30 days) nobody gets anything.

I have joined some groups, but quickly left some as they were just full of irrelevant posts that were filling up my stream and the admins were not dealing with them quickly enough. I think there have been changes since then so that you only see posts by friends unless you actually go to the group page.

More groups are being approved each week and I will look into those. I've created a couple of possible groups to see how that goes and have also been asked to be an admin on others.

In my opinion groups work best when they are for a fairly specific topic. Otherwise there will be an overwhelming number of posts and it will be impossible to find the good stuff unless there are good filtering tools. Perhaps posts with the most likes and comments should be highlighted. There also needs to be search within a group. I hope to see the feature evolve.

Any thoughts? Discuss here or on Tsu.