The Social Network

iCheckMovies is about to turn three. To celebrate, we're introducing a major new feature. But first, let's look back.

Almost three years ago, we just went live. We tried to persuade all of our friends, families and colleagues to create an account. For a short while, we were a little group checking away in a small corner of the internet.

Then a friend of a friend joined our ranks. And their friends did, too. Friends of friends of friends joined, bringing more friends. Some people checked movies we had never heard about. Some checked hundreds of them. All of a sudden, our site was overflowing with movie lovers from every corner of the world.

We never expected this. Our little site exploded with checks, favorites, messages, friend requests and comments.

It became increasingly harder to keep track of our friends. Some people organized themselves Some connected on Twitter or Facebook. We had a strong sense of community, but it wasn't very tangible.

We introduced some new features to bring people together: groups, the friend finder. A step in the right direction. But it still meant you had to manually check users' profiles to see what they were up to.

Today, that's going to change. We've added activity streams all over the website. You and your friends can now watch each other move around this website.

You can now see who watched that cheesy flick or major classic last night. Your dislike for that terrible movie will now pop up in the activity streams of your buddies. You can read what your friend had to say about your newly added movie list. All in one place.

We've also added these streams to other parts of the site. We've replaced a major part of the movie detail page by a list of recent activity and added a new tab just for activities. We did the same thing for profile and list pages.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. We hope it will make this a more social place, where people gather from all over to celebrate their love for movies.

(And for those that prefer to keep their movie habits to themselves: you can always choose to opt out of all this social nonsense by adjusting your privacy settings)

edit:
We've made some changes to the privacy settings. You can now also change the privacy setting for the whole activity stream by adjusting your privacy settings.