ReadPath is realigning around a secure and easy to use permission structure along with the features that make sense to attach to this. The core of the site allows you to connect with your friends and determine sets of permissions that will be given to each group of friends. You can create as many groups as you like with the default starting set of Family, Friends, and Coworkers. Friends can be in multiple groups, Grandma can be in your Extended Family group as well as the Motocross Riders group.

Once you have your friends and groups there are lots of things that you can do with them. With each of these things, you control whether you’re including a single group, multiple groups, or individuals.

• You can share status updates from the Friends page.
• You can share news items that you’ve found interesting from the ReadPath news system.
• You can upload and share photos (videos and documents/files are coming soon).
• Create a real profile with real phone numbers, email, and addresses and control who gets to see what.
• Share bookmarked items from around the web.

Shared items on ReadPath have a couple of other aspects that make them unique in social networks. With the focus on permissions and privacy, items on ReadPath are by default shared with no one. It is up to the person sharing to pick a group of people that the item will be shared with. The recipients of a shared item are set and final when the owner publishes the shared item. This list of people is also available to all of the recipients. So if your Aunt Matilda shares some political gossip with family members, you know that coworkers or others won’t be included on the comments later. You can also be much more confident about what you want to say because you get an exact unchangeable list of who is included on each shared item.

ReadPath is not included in search engines and we don’t get traffic from them. Only this blog, which has no user content and lives on a separate domain, is included in search engines.  With ReadPath, you don’t need to worry about your party photos being accidentally picked up by Google and stored for future employers to see. In fact there are strict permissions on all aspects of photo display. Even if someone were to get the url of one of your photos they would not be able to view it unless they were logged in to ReadPath and had the proper permissions. And these permissions can be revoked at any time.

Much more importantly, in comparison to other social network sites, we take no advertising. We don’t make money by selling our user’s data. This removes the pressure that other sites have to keep pushing the users to be more and more public. There is a need to be able to have private communications on the internet and ReadPath’s goal is to be the best place for people that don’t necessarily want to live in public. Default private is a core principal and that won’t change.

Instead of advertising, our business model is to charge for the aspects of the site that are expensive.  Similar to the Flickr model, there will be a free tier as well as a premium tier with enhanced uploading capabilities.

Another core principal is that the data on ReadPath belongs to the user. There will be a full API to do anything that you can do on the site available to developers. You will need to authenticate, but once you do you’ll have full access to fetch, change, or delete your data. The only caveat being that the same levels that dictate premium usage through the site will apply to the API as well.

I hope you enjoy the new ReadPath, there are still many more changes coming.

For Chrome on the mac, it appears that RSS auto discovery is not included by default. This is the feature that puts a little RSS icon in the URL bar when the page that you’re on has an RSS feed available. In order to enable this feature for Chrome on the mac you need to install this extension. This is an extension from Google and seems to work great.

Then if you find a RSS feed that you’d like to add to ReadPath, drag the link below to your bookmark bar.

Add To ReadPath

Then when you’re on a page that you want to subscribe to, press the bookmarklet and it will have ReadPath subscribe you to the feed.

The share buttons are on the news reader page as well as on all of the search, category, and topic pages.

The url that you share will automatically be converted to a shortened version using bit.ly so that it’ll fit within the 140 characters that Twitter allows.

On all shared items that you receive you’ll see a comment box at the bottom of the page where you can add your thoughts and impression. When you comment on an item your words will only be visible to the people that originally had permissions to see the item that you are commenting on. So if your brother shares an item with his Family group, your comment will only be visible to other members of the Family.

There are also a few other options available to you when someone shares a story with you.

Using the “Reply” option you can send a note that is only visible to the original sender.

It’s also possible for you to reshare the item with another group of people that you choose. However, going back to the previous example of your brother sharing with the Family group. If you now want to turn around and share the item with your Friends group using the “Share” option, your friends will not be able to see the comments in the Family discusion but will now have their own set of comments.

There is a new feature in todays release for Top Rated Filtering. This feature allows you to remove low scoring news items when reading on the News page. As you read and rate items with the ratings check marks, ReadPath adapts and scores your unread items. Now you can remove from view items that are low scoring and focus only on the high scoring items.This can greatly improve the efficiency of your news reading.

Since each person’s profile is going to be slightly different, you can fine tune your settings on the Profile page to give you the right mix of displayed and hidden posts.

In the next couple days you should see the new features based on this infrastructure rolling out. If you see any issues with Unread Item weirdness before then, let us know.

Along with the formatting update I’ve just pushed another update this morning that allows you to be very specific on who you want to receive email updates from. If you go to your profile page, the email preferences area has been changed to allow you to pick which groups of users you would like to get notifications from. So if you’d like to only receive email updates from Friends and Family, but not from Coworkers or the Public, it’s now possible to do this.

There were also some changes to the homepage that went out with this release.

There are also several exciting new features currently in the works. They should be going live in the next couple days.

“ReadPath Update Email” determines how often you receive notifications of unread personal shared items. You can set this to daily, weekly, or never.

The other option “Receive Shared Item Notification” determines if ReadPath sends an email notification immediately when someone shares something with you. This email will have the message that your friend has shared along with a link to the related story if there is one.

I just noticed that there is a typo in the text of the Email Preferences box. That should be fixed before you get to the page.