Brand New Message Center

It's that time again; we're getting ready to roll out our latest release. We're planning on putting it out to a few people this week and launching it fully next week.

There's a bunch of other small stuff in this release, I'll post some more about that later, but the main focus is a brand new message center. A few months ago, we introduced Shouts as a way to send messages and content to groups of friends, a lot like our old Bulletin Board feature. But it seemed a little complicated to have to have separate mail folders and different looks for Messages and Shouts, so we decided to take it one step further and combine the two into one powerful mail feature.

So, the new message center will allow you to do everything you could do with Messages and Shouts in one. That means you can send messages to one friend or many friends, and you can use friend Circles to save lists of friends that you like to message often. And all of this will be available in one inbox. 

There are a few new features too. One is the ability to Reply All, so if a friend of yours sends a message to all their friends, you can reply to everyone in the list. Along with Reply All, the new message center supports all the usual mail functions we had before: Reply, Forward, and Delete.

The other new feature is attachments. We added buttons in the compose message form to attach your favorite photos, music, and videos. And now, when you click the Share It! link anywhere on the site, we'll use this attachment feature to make it easy for you to share all kinds of content with your friends on hi5.

When we designed the new system, we copied all the messages from your old inbox for the last 30 days into the new message center so you can still see all of your recent inbox messages in the new message center. If you want to go back and see your older messages or sent messages, don't worry! We saved everything from your old message center, including sent messages, and you can get to it from a link in the left column of the new message center.

Hope you like the new look and features of the message center when it comes out. As always, please let us know what you think by leaving comments here, we welcome any feedback.