Follows Not Friends

Heyo folks,

When we set out to figure out what a platform for daily games looked like, having it be social was really important to us. We imagined everyone playing games, chatting, comparing scores, and sharing highlights with their friends. Building out a social space is complicated, so we focused on things we could easily launch with: leaderboards, groups, chat, and friends.

Over time we’ve seen what works (leaderboards) and what doesn’t (chat) through iterations. A few years into this, we’ve seen the easiest bit (competition) really taking over and pushing out a more casual style of social play. Players have mentioned to us that they’re not into being compared against the top players every day on the global leaderboards.

For a long time now we’ve wanted to shift players to friend-focused leaderboards as the default, but have been unable to do so because most people on Puzzmo don’t have any friends on the platform. Since the start of the year we’ve been working on features to move us towards a space that accommodates more social interactions than competition and we’re launching some of those features today.

This starts with showing friends leaderboards above global leaderboards, and making those friend leaderboards easier to fill out by converting the core relationship metaphor on Puzzmo from “friends” to “follows”. Prior today, you could send a friend invite to someone and they would need to accept it. Now, you can simply ‘follow’ someone and they show will up on your leaderboards and social news.

One of the main goals is that we want to give Puzzmo a feel that people are playing around you. There are six figures of puzzles being completed per day but a lot of the people we raise up to being seen around the site/app are our power players! They are definitely doing interesting plays, but it can also be a bit intimidating to always be compared to them.

If we loosen the ‘both parties know each other’ part of the relationship, then its possible we can start exploring ways to give people a chance to find and follow others who are similar to you!

So, today we’ve converted all existing friends on Puzzmo to be mutual followers, removed all friend requests, and places where we you could ‘friend’ you can now ‘follow’ - over time, we’ll flesh this out more with follower specific parts to the site.

We’re also going to give everyone a boost in their friends by adding a set of staff members as friends, I expect we’ll be a strange bunch to follow because we’re rarely the best at the games and often have played every game exhaustively during testing - sort of like how MySpace Tom was a peculiar friend to everyone! If you don’t like us (rude) you can unfollow us!

And of course, if you don’t want people following you, you can take your profile private and require a confirmation from yourself before anyone can follow you.