laterstars blog

Privacy Settings and Upcoming Public Viewable Pages

Laterstars is still within an invite-only beta period, and only activated members can view any pages besides the initial signup form. Once you’re in, however, you can view other peoples’ links. This turns out to be pretty awesome because you can go through and copy all the interesting links you find that  you would have never seen otherwise to your account. Personally, I’ve found some of the best links lately while going through other peoples’ pages, and this process will be even easier once subscriptions are live.

New - Privacy Settings

Starting now, however, you can make your account private via your settings page. At this point, if you make your account private no one else will be able to view the links but yourself. In the future there may be the ability to allow certain people to view your links, similar to Twitter, and maybe even per-link privacy settings, but for now if you just want to collect your links for your own viewing this is the way to go.

To start, everyone’s privacy setting has been aligned to their Twitter setting, so if you have a protected Twitter account, your laterstars account is now set to private as well. This is just a one time alignment though - you can have a private laterstars account and a public Twitter account and vice-versa if you want.

While you’re browsing the users pages now, you’ll see private accounts marked with a lock icon:

You can click on these users all you want, you’ll just be greeted with a page saying you can’t view it.

Coming Soon - Viewable By The General Public

While this is nice for excluding other laterstars users if you don’t want them to see what you’re into, it will be of more importance in a week or so when we open up the viewing of link pages to the general public. This means that while link collection will still be limited to activated members for the foreseeable future, anyone will be able to view all the kick-ass links we’ve all collected over the last few months. You’ll be able to send people to your laterstars page so they can see what stuff you’re into and share all the cool things you’ve found. Hopefully it will let people discover things they never would have come across, and even spark some new Twitter friendships and followings.

But, if you really don’t want anyone in the world to check out your links, just make sure you set your account to be private. Again, it will already be set to private if your Twitter account is protected. Also, keep in mind that anyone in the world is already able to view your favorites on Twitter right now if you have a public account, but just know you have the ability keep your laterstars to yourself if you want. I hope most people choose to make their links public and share them as much as possible since there’s so much great stuff out there, but if you require privacy that is perfectly understandable, and now possible.

As always, please let me know what you think! Leave comments or @takeo me with any thoughts.