JapanSoc Tutorial – Making Friends Part 2

In the first part of this tutorial, I went through the steps you need to add friends and send messages in JapanSoc. In this part, I’m going to explain how you can track your friends’ activity.

Step 1: Understanding the profile page

From your friends list in your profile page, you can access any of your friends’ own profile pages. Since I’m so active on JapanSoc, I’ve used my own profile for this tutorial.

The profile page has seven tabs, as follows:

1. Personal Info – your main page with your intro and user stats.
2. Submitted – all the posts you’ve submitted to JapanSoc.
3. Top Stories – posts you submitted that made the front page.
4. Upcoming – all your other posts.
5. Commented – these are the posts you have commented on.
6. Soc’d – these are the posts you have voted for.
7. Favorites – posts you have saved/favorited/bookmarked.

Step 2: Subscribing to a friend’s submissions

With the exception of the Personal Info page, all these pages have a unique RSS feed icon in the top left corner, as shown:

That means you can subscribe to a friend’s activity, which comes in very handy if you’ve cheekily teamed up with someone to soc each other’s posts! If this is the case, I would recommend subscribing only to your friend’s “submitted” RSS feed, as that includes all your friend’s posts.

You could also subscribe to the “Favorites” feed, explained in step 4.

Step 3: Subscribing to multiple RSS feeds

If you’re a hardcore JapanSoc’er and have more than one friend (which I hope you do!), you might consider using a free service such as RSS Mix to combine all your friends “submitted” feeds together into one single RSS feed.

Step 4: Understanding “Favorites”

On social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, your “favorites” would be considered the posts you have dugg or stumbled. JapanSoc, on the other hand, has both “Soc’d” and “Favorites” pages. So what’s the difference?

Soc’d posts are the ones you’ve considered good enough to vote for. I tend to soc an awful lot of posts (582 as I write this!), but that doesn’t mean that I think they are all brilliant articles which are worth printing, framing and hanging on the wall.

Favorites, in the JapanSoc sense, are the best of the best, the ones you actual want to save so you can find them again in the future. These are the posts you want to tell all your friends about.

Step 5: Adding Favorites

Below the post you want to add to your Favorites is a link, “Add to Favorites”.

When you click that link, you’ll be notified of success and given the option of going directly to your Favorites.

Posts that you have “favorited”, can be removed by clicking the “Remove” link. (Don’t worry Billy, I didn’t click it!).

You’ll also notice that there is an RSS icon on the Favorites page, too, so you can subscribe to your friends’ favorite posts.

A New Addition to JapanSoc

At the bottom of the JapanSoc sidebar, I’ve added a new box showing posts that users have recently added to their favorites. It’s worth keeping an eye on this box as you might find some great articles you had previously missed.

Of course, it also provides another opportunity for some self-promotion. If you add your own stories to your Favorites, they are going to appear in this box for all to see.

Summary

Now you know how to create a list of favorite posts in JapanSoc, and share your recommendations with friends using the RSS feeds in your profile pages.

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