JapanSoc Tutorial – Making Friends Part 1

Recently on JapanSoc, user Japanite submitted a post titled Creating JapanSoc Groups in Other Social Sites in which he said:

I think we should consider uniting together to promote our sites in other social news sites. I thought about recommending everyone’s stories in sites like StumbleUpon or Digg, to get better exposure to new visitors.

I thought that was a great idea, and so did a few other JapanSoc users. The bloggers amongst us all chipped in with Digg and StumbleUpon user names, and now we’re in a better position to rally support for our favorite blog posts.

Socializing on JapanSoc

The big social bookmarking sites mentioned above offer tremendous functionality for building small communities of like-minded people, and while JapanSoc is rather limited in that respect, it’s not without its own fancy features.

This tutorial is split into two parts. This first part covers JapanSoc’s Messaging functionality, and part two will explain how you can “favorite” stories and track your friends behavior on the site.

Adding Friends

Before I get into messaging in JapanSoc, you need to know how add friends to your friends list. Let’s do that first:

Step 1: Go to your friend’s profile page

Click your friend’s username under his or her submissions, comments, or anywhere they have been active.

Step 2: Add your friend

On the profile page you’ll see a link to add that person to your friends list.

Step 3: View your friends list

Once you’ve added your friend, you should see the green “successfully added friend” message. After that you can click the “View my friends” link, which is also accessible from your own profile page.

Step 4: Find your new friend in your friends list

That will take you to your own profile page and display your list of friends. In this example, you’ll see “billywest” (from 7:10 to Tokyo) is now in my list, and I’m going to click the “message” icon next to his name to send him a message.

Step 5: Compose a message

A box opens up and you can send your first message. Bear in mind that this isn’t email. Your friend won’t receive the message in his email box. Instead…

Step 6: Receiving a message

…when your friend next logs into JapanSoc, he’ll see an alert notifying him of his message.

Step 7: Viewing the message

Clicking the “View now” link in the previous step opens up the message which you can then reply to, delete, or just close. Alternatively, you could have gone directly to your Inbox, as shown in the next step.

Step 8: Managing your messages

Your Inbox can be accessed from your profile page.

Step 9: Your JapanSoc Inbox

In your Inbox, you can view, reply to and delete messages as you please.

Summary

So, in short:

1. Add a friend
2. View list of friends
3. Send a message
4. Manage messages in your Inbox

Now you know how to pester your friends for socs and comments. Next time I’ll explain how to track your friends actions, and harness the power of social bookmarking! 😀

Continue: Part 2: Using favorites and subscribing to your friends’ activity

If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!