Since launching our premium subscription service on December 1st, 2007 we have gotten a good response in both feedback and subscriptions purchased. Due to the feedback we got before the launch, we had high hopes for this subscription service. While the program was a success, certain goals had to be reached in order to expand tribe.net aggressively. We have decided to concentrate on making tribe.net more stable and eliminate single points of failure for the next six months. Since we cannot hire a programmer until six months from now, all changes and some bug fixes will be handled in-house by existing staff. We have already started adding functions to the existing application for our premium users, but the major changes will have to come in six months. In the meantime, we are investigating adding premium functions to the site such as the following:

1) Jabber servers to provide our premium users with a private, secure instant message system that will allow us to extend tribe.net’s functionality.
2) A secure API for premium users to develop client applications with.
3) An improved photo album function for premium users.
4) An improved mobile phone interface for premium users.
5) Additional Online Contact Fields such as Game Console (currently testing for Wii) and ID (represented by Wii number)
6) Concentric friend groups named by the user
7) Integration with Bittorrent file sharing for sharing files between yourself and your private groups.

The things we are doing over the next six months include the following:

1) Moving tribe.net to a cheaper ISP (weekend of December 28th)
2) Making changes to code to improve performance.
3) Conducting a third party SPOF (single points of failure) audit and eliminating those SPOFs.

The features we are rolling out before the new year are as follows:

1) Implementing a better spam/abuse reporting system
2) Implementing vCard files for all users
3) Implementing vCalendar files for all events.
4) Implementing a contact list feature for premium users, for at-a-glance view of online friends and how to get in touch with them.

We are still evaluating the response to our premium subscription program, so our timeline may or may not change over the next six months.

SCHEDULED DOWNTIME
We will have scheduled downtime after midnight on December 28th and 29th, until 6am for work on our DNS servers. Due to this work, tribe.net may be totally unavailable during this time. Do not be alarmed. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Darren Mckeeman
“Man Behind the Curtain”