The weekly update went out Friday and Saturday, instead of just Friday. Sorry about the doubling up. This shouldn’t happen again.

The friend functionality I discussed in my previous post is now in place. Add a profile picture and import your contacts to see if they are members, then invite the ones that aren’t. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments or via the suggestion form.

We’ve had a number of requests related to adding and managing friends and will be adding some features to address this:

Importing Friends
We should soon have in place a page that will allow you to check your web-based email’s address book for existing members of the site and allow you to add these members to your friends list. It will also allow you to build a list of email addresses of non-members that you can then copy and paste into your email client to tell them about your list.

List Pictures
Some of the list names people have chosen are a little cryptic even for close friends to recognize since for privacy reasons people shouldn’t use their full names. As such we will soon allow people to also post a picture, so that their friends and group members can tell who belongs to what list name.

Stay tuned! We’re working hard to so you won’t have to.

On Saturday we sent out the weekly update email of all the new items, friends and group members in your network. There was an error in the script that sent it out that meant a considerable amount of duplication for some users. We noticed it immediately and re-sent a new email. Please ignore the first and read the second. We apologize for the two messages and the long, confusing first message. It should be pretty smooth from here on out

With some of the groups exceeding 500 items and many members wanting to sift through multiple groups and dozens of friends, we’ve had to make a number of improvements to the application.

Searching and browsing:
You can filter searches of all your groups and friends by category now. Further, if you leave the search field blank and just select a category, you can see a list of all the items in a category you have available to you across all your friends and groups.

Category Stacking:
Categories within groups can now be expanded and collapsed for easier browsing. The page load time is still a bit high for some of the bigger groups but we plan to address that by not loading the items for a collapsed category until that category is expanded. Stay tuned!