In the words of a Grosseman "David,it's overTooYoo" (hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/)

Member Name: jimblob

Product:	hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/
Date:	31/05/02 (124 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun Fun Fun

Disadvantages: .

If you had asked me a couple of months ago what a guest book was, I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything more than you sometimes get asked to sign one in a guest house.
I had heard various people mention that ciao had one but I still thought on it as something that you wrote, "Had an enjoyable stay, bed comfortable, weather poor, dog smelly", that sort of thing.

My only other thought when I heard people asking dooyoo to include one on their site, was that they already had a sort of guest book with the comments option on each opinion. It just goes to show you what an un-informed idiot I really am (but then you all know that anyway!).

Not long ago, a new name came to my attention on dooyoo, IloveJackDaniels! ILJD, or Dave as he is known, is a clever guy (or someone who puts up a good pretence at being clever ;-P ), he first of all put a wee programme up for us all to use, a "Random page generator" for dooyoo peeps to summon up a random opinion to read and rate, this is a cool idea because you may just hit upon a gem of a writer, it also gives a chance for some of the lesser known writers to be read by a broader field of users.

After the initial success of the random generator, (success being attributed to the positive comments aimed at it), Dave came up with a guest book called ,cleverly, "TooYoo".
When I heard of tooyoo my nose got the better of me and off I went to register.
After I registered I wondered what I was supposed to do then, I noticed that I could change the colour of my page from white, to anything within the spectrum that I desired, not only that I could change the colour of the text, the links, the background in the bars, I could play about with it to my hearts content until I got it just the right sickly shade of green with totally unreadable text.
After playing about with my page I noticed lots of welcoming messages, to which I duly replied to. Lots of nice people, s
ome of which I knew, other I didn't, left me nice messages and commented on various things from the weather to the awful colour of my page,(I change it almost daily now).
There is a link to a "general area", this is a page where everyone can have a message frenzy, it is open to every member to post away and have fun, I don't know if that's what your meant to do with it but that is the way it seems to work best.
Many a boring lunch time has been whiled away writing daft poems, limericks, comments and such on the general page, with as many as ten or twelve getting in on the silliness at the same time.

As the membership grew on tooyoo, Dave started adding to the site, he added lots of little animated emoticons, y'know, smiley faces, angry faces, Jake and Elwood faces and my particular favourite, the sticky out tongue face :-P
Another good feature he introduced was the privacy feature, when logging on you have the option to stay hidden from other users, I use this if I am just popping in to either see if I have a message or if I am just leaving a wee message for some other user before going off to do something else. Using this feature enables you come and go without lots of people seeing you and asking you things or leaving you welcome messages (which I feel is only polite to reciprocate in kind).

Perhaps the best, and maybe the worst feature is the one that enables you to leave a private message for someone, viewable only to the writer of the message and it's recipient.
The private message one is good for maybe getting in touch with a friend to ask something you would rather was kept between the two of you, it is bad for people who use it purely to whore their dooyoo/ciao opinions.

At the time of writing this there are 255 registered users of TooYoo.
There are links that show you the newest members and the latest newbie is shown on the top right hand of the screen at all times until someone el
se registers, this is a nice wee touch because it invariably means that newbies get lots of welcoming messages and so begin to feel like part of the community from the start.

There is also a link to the Opinionated chat room, many of tooyoo's users are now dedicated opinionated chatters, the chat room starts to pick up at around 8 or 9 PM(ish), it can get very busy (or so it seems) but everyone entering gets a friendly welcome.

I get the impression however, that dooyoo are not the happiest bunnies in the hutch over Dave's guest book. They have been working on a new "Back end" called "Aurora" for dooyoo and a guest book was (is?) part of this. I think Dave has rained on their parade a wee bit but that was not something he could have known about as dooyoo have been playing their cards close to their chest over the launch (and content) of Aurora, having only recently started explaining about it on the community pages.

Anyway, I like it and so far 254 other users seem to like it so I say a big round of applause to Dave for making something fun to do on the net.

http://www.hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo

Thanks for reading.

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