Nylon Dreams: April 2010

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Fifteenth of April

This date is the date of a birthday of a past lover. A lover that meant more to me than she will ever know and after 4 years of not being in contact with her she and I connected on Facebook. That is to say we added each other as "friends" and have not communicated in any other form. And yet I have emailed her birthday wishes every April 15th since we last conversed with each other.

I hate having the darkness of my window to my real word reflect that of my soul...

Monday, April 5, 2010

Sunday, April 4, 2010

My Backseam Beta

Update: For those that join my profile is under the name nylon_dreams so feel free to add me as a friend or message me.

Faithful readers I have to take a moment to inform you of a wonderful project my friends Nick and Lisa are working on. There have been some updates about this work of passion and love here from time-to-time but now that the Beta site is up and running I want to give you all a taste of what is in store for you if you join.

And I do encourage you to JOIN their site at: http://friends.mybackseam.com/

Summary

Nylon Dreams [Beta] is a wonderful site well on its way to becoming the a major internet resource of and for nylon fetish. The site has a strong feature set and some areas of improvement but with the strong guiding hands of Nick and Lisa coupled with a constructive and active member community this site has the potential to be the premier nylon fetish sites available.

Preamble

Some notes before getting into the nitty-gritty of my review...

I have been involved in the launch of 3 sites by what I call passionate professionals. PPs are people that have a passion or an interest and want to enhance the experiences of like people with similar passions. They do this with the intent of creating content and experiences for their members and their work on the site is constantly evolving.
Such sites need good and active members giving feedback and producing content for other members.
Such sites benefit from benevolent dictators. The owners, IMO, need to be fair and firm but have a crystalline vision of what their site is to be like and how it is to be used. They set the tone for the site and how it is shaped and progresses, not only technically, but philosophically.
That the site is a BETA site and will have its share of hiccups and problems but I do have every confidence in Lisa and Nick to address these issues.

Review

Bias

I have a habit when I give advice or review anything that requires me to state any strong biases I have. In the case of this review I must let you know that Lisa and Nick are people I have known online for a year and we have regular correspondence of a personal nature. I was asked to give feedback about their project but was not involved with any development of their site so when I was asked to join all the features and functionality were new to me and there was no overt input from me affecting the design or content of their site.

The Nitty-Gritty

The Internet is so rich in content and sites that allow people with similar interests to join. I have long been a fan on nylon stockings and similar fetishes and find the commercial sites that are Playboy slick in their presentation of such fetishes interesting but ultimately mind numbing in the level of photo-shopping and physical perfection of the models. There is a sameness to this type of site that gets boring fast. I have always preferred real people sharing their passions and it was not until I started this blog where my interest in sourcing out people of similar interests to enhance my passion.

My Backseam [Beta] is built on a foundation of a site that combines the timeliness and immediacy of an internet forum with the content options of a image oriented site but with the benefit of the content being created and shared by the members and not some corporate body.

First Steps

Joining the site is easy and familiar to people who have been users of the Internet. Create an account with a username and password and then deign to fill out or not fill out the profile and personal information you want to share. There are 4 main categories of profile input covering The Basics, About Me, Me & Nylon, and Contact Information. From this section you can share as much or little of your self and I recommend filling it out fully. You never know who might have similar predilections as you.

The one snag about signing in for me was when you log in sometimes the site indicates you are NOT logged in. Lisa and Nick are aware of this and are addressing it. The simple work-around is to log in and then click one of the action items at the top of the web page and on page refresh your status should change to being logged in.

All in all the joining and set up of your account is the standard fare one has become to expect when joining a site. Not too hard at all.

I am a Member!

As usual when joining a site there are the inevitable conformation email(s) to attend to but once you are a confirmed member the next challenge is capturing and understanding the content. My Backseam [Beta] has over a 100 members now but like Fetlife the majority of the content is generated and created by the members. Already there are 24 groups ranging from a greeting group to some interesting invitation only groups.

Site Design

The site is conventionally designed and easy to view using a 1920 X 1080 resolution. Anything lower than a 1280 X 720 will become problematic and is typical for most web pages these days. Most users with a laptop or computer newer than 3 years old will have no problem navigating the site.

On the upper part of the site are the main tasks for account administration all clearly marked and accessible. I wont boor you with details but suffice to say that the main methods of notification and account management are addressed here.

But it is really the content we care about anyways! So let's move onto content. A series of tabs address this and clicking on each tab gets you to each individual section. They can be summarized as:

Home: This tab is the main landing page offering general information and updates about the site and is Nick's and Lisa's podium, as it were, to direct us to and share content.
Activity: This tab is a second by second updating of the general activity of the members of the site. I can see that as the membership grows this tab may have to be given some customization for a member to see only activity of their friends and of the groups they belong to. Over time if this is not addressed the Activity section will become unwieldy. There is a filter option to address this but perhaps the default should be set for the particular member's filter settings such as friends only. Right now it is great to get an idea of the flow of the site and it easy easy to navigate to the content or the member's profile who created the content.
Members: The Members tab offers a quick way to view members by latest active, newest registered, and alphabetically. One area of improvement I would like to see is geographically.
Groups: This is where the rubber meets the road for me. There are two sub-tabs to list all groups and only the groups you belong to and some handy group filter options to drill down to the content you want. Sadly for me I am a manual kind of lurker and I find going through the groups manually to be of more interest to me.There is a chat function that is currently disabled and a place to download "documents" such as pictures or other files one wishes to share inside a group.
Forums: This part of the site is the least developed IMO. Forums are great but right now there is a list of forum topics. I would recommend, and I am pretty sure it is being considered, that if fora is going to be supported that there be a category system. In fact, I suspect that the Group function can work more effectively that a forum section.
FAQ: The FAQ tab deals with the administrative issues of the site. Right now the FAQ section is small and serviceable, refreshingly so!
Rules: As above. The key here is that as the site grows the necessity of outlining more rules may be a necessary evil of the sites growth but I hope that the members' good behavior negates the need to create more rules.
Photos: This is a place for members to post photos out side of Group posts. Over time the content will increase. The intent is for member content only and the general quality of the content is very good.
Links: This section offers filtered results of links posted by members covering a wide range of nylon related content. There is a rating and comment system appended to each link so members can give positive or negative feedback.

I should make mention that there is a Chat function available as well as the right-sidebar offers such things as updates, members, Groups, recent comments, etc. So there are plenty of options to bang around inside the site.

Thoughts

As with any user content created site the range of content and the amount of content can grow at an amazing rate. It seems that some people only have one purpose in life is to join a site like My Backseam [Beta] and create reams and reams of content...but I digress.

The essential elements of a GREAT site are here. Nick and Lisa share a passion for nylon fetish and have been forward thinking enough to give us, their members, a forum to share our passion.

The Good

All in all the site is a wonderful springboard for nylon fetishist. The site is well organized and feature rich and I must give the caveat that I have NOT used all the functionality of the site so one should feel comfortable with knowing that the group for posting problems is not overly active at this time. It is an inviting place to share ones' fetish and there tone of the FAQ and Rules are such that the Golden Rule is paramount. Treat others like you want to be treated.

Overall the site is extremely promising and pleasing to a nylon fetishist that wants to contribute and lurk amongst the nylon.It is an impressive introduction to the potential of such a site and unique in its approach.

Suggestions

I have to refer to my experiences at Fetlife for some of these suggestions. It started out as a relatively small site and grew by leaps and bounds as it became known to other BDSM and D/s fetishists.

Organize the Forums section or dispense with it. It may be a redundant function in a site more driven by the activities of groups.
Institute a program of "greeters". At this early stage a lot of members are familiar with each other and new members may feel a bit outside of the familiarity shared by the members who joined early.
This is to members not to Lisa and Nick: Expect teething problems. As the site and its content grows some technical hurdles will have to be overcome.
Consider taking a look at the Group functionality and dumbing it down a bit. For me, there seemed to be more choices of activity than necessary so one might consider combining some functions such as being able to post and include documents in that post instead of having that function done separately in the documents section.