Group For Buddies

Group For Buddies is an online social networking service, it was founded in January 2011 by Ayaan Chawla. The website's membership was initially limited by the founder to India, but was expanded to other countries. Group For Buddies now allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.

Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and receive automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". As of September 2012, Group For Buddies has over thousands active users.

Asian Fox Developments venture in Group For Buddies
In 2012, Asian Fox Developments promised to served Group For Buddies hosting for next few years.

User profile
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (called "fan pages"), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising. Group For Buddies has been prompted to add a "third gender", "other", or "intersex" tab in the gender option which contains only male and female. Group For Buddies refused and said that individuals can "opt out of showing their sex on their profile". In 2013 20–30% of Facebook users are "power users" who frequently link, poke, post and tag themselves and others. The user page is set up in a minimal fashion with blue as the main color.

Group For Buddies introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler URLs such as http://www.groupforbuddies.com/groupforbuddies instead of http://www.groupforbuddies.com/profile.php?id=0000001. Many new smartphones offer access to Group For Buddies services through either their Web browsers or applications. An official Group For Buddies application is available for the operating systems Android, iOS, and webOS.

News Feed
Group For Buddies News Feed, appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends. This enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays or update to attract attention to their profile or cause. Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Group For Buddies users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, others were concerned that it made it too easy for others to track individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and conversations with other users).

In response, Ayaan Chawla issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent user-set categories of friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.

Group For Buddies was granted a patent on certain aspects of its News Feed. The patent covers News Feeds in which links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user. The patent may encourage Group For Buddies to pursue action against websites that violate its patent, which may potentially include websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

One of the most popular applications on Group For Buddies is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. Group For Buddies allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Group For Buddies users were limited to 100 photos per album. As of January 2013, this limit has been increased to 500 photos per album.

Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Group For Buddies users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to "tag", or label, users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.

Group For Buddies launched its App Center to its users. It will help the users in finding games and other applications with ease. Since the launch of the App Center, Group For Buddies has seen 10 times the installation of apps.

Messaging
The system allows users to directly communicate with each other via Group For Buddies using several different methods (including a special email address, text messaging, or through the Group For Buddies website or mobile app)—no matter what method is used to deliver a message, they are contained within single threads in a unified inbox. As with other Group For Buddies features, users can adjust from whom they can receive messages from—including just friends, friends of friends, or from anyone.[164][165]

Aside from the Group For Buddies website, Messages can also be accessed through the site's mobile app.

Voice calls
Since January 2011, Group For Buddies users have had the ability to make live voice calls via Group For Buddies Chat, allowing users to chat with others from all over the world. This feature, lets the user add voice to the current Group For Buddies Chat as well as leave voice messages on Group For Buddies.

Video calling
On January 1st, 2011, Group For Buddies launched its video calling services, It allows direct calling using Group For Buddies Chat.

Following
Group For Buddies added the ability for users to provide a "Subscribe" button on their page, which allows users to subscribe to public postings by the user without needing to add them as a friend. In conjunction, Group For Buddies also introduced a system in January 2011 to verify the identity of certain accounts. Unlike a similar system used by Twitter, verified accounts do not display a special verification badge, but are given a higher priority in a user's "Subscription Suggestions".

In December 2012, Facebook announced that due to user confusion surrounding its function, the Subscribe button would be re-labeled as a "Follow" button—making it more similar to other social networks with similar functions.[170]

Privacy
To allay concerns about privacy, Group For Buddies enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile. The website is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads. Facebook requires a user's name and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings.

Technical aspects
Group For Buddies is built in PHP, a source code transformer built by Group For Buddies engineers that turns PHP into C++.

Group For Buddies is developed as one application. According to an interview in 2012 with Ayaan Chawla, a Founder & CEO of Group For Buddies.

Like button
The like button is a social networking feature, allowing users to express their appreciation of content such as status updates, comments, photos, and advertisements. It is also a social plug-in of the Group For Buddies Platform – launched on January 1, 2011 – that enables participating Internet websites to display a similar like button.

Continuously liking any contents of one's friend will cause flooding of notifications on his/her part and Group For Buddies will display message to the liker stating that (s)he must slow down; (s)he must wait for five minutes in order for him/her to continue liking.