How to Make Friends and Influence People (hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/)

Member Name: Shadowtwinchaos

Product:	hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/
Date:	01/11/02 (109 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: See lots of familiar faces, Great interaction, Lots of fun

Disadvantages: Um, let me see, I'll think of something, It's addictive?

When I first joined Dooyoo, I really enjoyed the fact that it had such a great sense of community. I liked being able to leave comments on each opinion and have some feedback on my writing. But it was hard keeping track of each opinion and who commented when. And often, when people left comments, I would comment back – but the person would rarely go back to my opinion to read what I replied. It was not much of an exchange.

On Ciao, they offered a guest book attached to your profile, which made things easier, you could bounce around from profile to profile. And you got more of response to your comments that way. Which was great. However, not all of my friends were on Ciao. Many of them were on Dooyoo.

What to do. Many of us talked about it in a chat room that most of my Dooyoo friends went to – The Opinionated Community. We all agreed that guest books would be a great idea, but the people who ran Dooyoo weren’t getting the message. Then, one member, I Love Jack Daniels, came into the chat room one night and asked if we would be interested in having Dooyoo guest books. Well, sure, was the reply, that would be great.

And Tooyoo was born. When I first signed up for my guest book, the first day in fact, I got a slew of messages welcoming me. Both from members of Dooyoo that I knew and new people I had yet to meet. And cautiously I posted a message or two to my friends. Then I got almost instant replies. It was great; I had exchanges back and forth. I watched my guest book fill up with messages. I saw the little page counter on the bottom of my book get bigger and bigger. I loved that it showed how many messages I had.

Along the top was even better. It was a list of who was visiting their guest book online right then. So I could tell who was there and I could pop over and ask them how their day was going or discuss a new opinion topic I wanted to write on. I could see who was around. Then, I discovered color.
Yes, I could change the colors of my guest book on a whim. I could be dark and broody or light and fluffy. I could mix and match, amaze and astound people with my sense of color coordination. This was great.

I also found that I could look up members in the member list in a couple of ways. I could do it by typing in their name and jumping right to their book. Or if I forgot their user name, I could look it up by letter. I was zipping around leaving all kinds of messages. But what was really great was that I got replies to all of my messages. What made it even easier was, if a person left a message in my guest book that I wanted to reply to, I didn’t have to type in their name or look them up. I could just click on their name on the message they left and it zipped me right to their guest book for my reply.

But then I found that I wanted to leave a message to someone that I didn’t want anyone else to see. But that was no problem either – there was a private message box. When I clicked that, no one would see the message but me and the person I wrote it to. I also had the option of coming into the room as the invisible person, so no one would see me.

As time went by, the messages piled up. And I got to go back and re-read any comments I wanted too. But after awhile, I decided it was time to clean house. No problem, I had two options. I could go under my options and delete all the messages at once and really clean house. Or I had the option of deleting one message at a time and saving the ones that I still wanted to keep. Now I had a great color theme, I had all the messages I could want and a neat, clean guest book.

Looking around to see what else I could find, I noticed a little area at the top of the right hand corner. It was the newest member. They were shown right at the top. It allowed me to jump right over to the newest member and greet them. The opportunity to make someone new feel just as welcome as I felt
my first day.

After awhile, I decided to look at the mysterious area called “The General Message Area” which was the main area where you could post messages that everyone would see. A bit scared, I noticed that some of my friends were posting there. Hmm, but what would I say. Then I saw that they were having a discussion on something interesting. All of my nervousness went away and I jumped right in, posting my messages with the rest of them. And it was fun. It was almost like chat.

The one thing I can say that might be a downside to having this guest book – it’s addictive. I found that I was checking my guest book several times a day. I was spending so much of my time jumping from guest book to guest book, leaving witty and amusing comments. I found that it took up almost as much time as answering my e-mail. But I also found it very rewarding to check it and see more messages from my friends, not only at Dooyoo, but from Ciao too. For as the guest books became well known, many of my friends at Ciao jumped in and got guest books too. For you see, it is not only for Dooyooers.

The list of people who joined up for guest books grew and grew. And the number of names that I recognized grew with it. I found people that I was use to reading and many more that I had never heard from before. So, not only did I have a way to get messages to people I had known before, but now I had a new way to meet people from my two favourite writing sites. Not only that, they were getting to know me as well. I found that my number of reads on both sites went up due to having met people from my guest book.

My guest book allows me the opportunity to keep my friends up to date on what’s happening in my life. It gives me a chance to share interesting web sites, share jokes, poetry, get answers to questions, keep in touch and much more. I have to say, all in all, I would now be lost without my guest book.

I would
just like to close this opinion by thanking Dave (ILoveJackDaniels) for setting this up and doing such an excellent job of keeping it running. And by adding that if you haven’t gotten a guest book yet – WHY NOT? At least stop by and give it a look. You might find that you can’t live without it. I did.

Here’s the web page address:

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

Stop in and see us. Look up the user Shadowtwin and leave me a message. I’ll be glad to hear from you and to reply. I think you will find that you will have a lot of fun, meet some great people, see people you already know and maybe even learn a thing or two about people you already know from the sites. Have fun and Peace.

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