illumy exists to bring people closer together — across distance ✈️, devices ⌨️, and communication modes 📩.
In other words, illumy is about connection.
But how you connect on illumy is changing. Moving forward, you’ll be able to add someone to your contacts without emailing/messaging them, and vice versa. 👍
Here’s what that means and how connections on the new-and-improved illumy 3.0 will look.
illumy 1.0: serial connections and messages
In illumy 1.0, we married connection and messaging together. In other words, you had to accept someone’s connection request (or they had to accept yours) to message them.
But what we learned from our early adopters is that you don’t necessarily want to make a lasting connection to everyone you message.
Imagine that you have someone mow your lawn ✂️ every couple weeks. You’ll want them in your contacts to schedule a future mow — but you don’t have an immediate need to message them.
On the other hand, imagine you email a local soccer league ⚽ to offer to help out as a youth coach. There might be a few back-and-forth messages to get you signed up, but you probably wouldn’t communicate with that address down the road.
This is where the illumy 1.0 approach was lacking. Ultimately, we decided that separating connections from messages was the way forward.
illumy 3.0: parallel connections and messages
In 3.0 we’re changing the connections-messages relationship. You’ll be able to maintain an independent message thread with anybody, over email or chat.
If, down the road, you do want to make a person a connection (Acquaintance/Friend/Best Friend), we’ll add context so it’s super-easy. 😍 illumy 3.0 will automatically populate a new contact’s email address and first and last name in their contact card.
(You can view contact cards by going to the left nav > clicking the Contact Book icon.)
You’ll still be able to invite people to connect with you, and the invite engine is being totally revamped. Now, connection invitations are a particular message type that will show up in your illumy conversation thread. 🧵
This invite engine also powers an invitation queue: for others’ invites that you haven’t responded to or rejected, and those you’ve sent that haven’t been accepted. From the queue, you’ll be able to withdraw any of your invites that get ignored.
Easier contact control in illumy 3.0, too
Once a person has been added to your illumy connections as an Acquaintance/Friend/Best Friend, you’ll be able to manage that connection more easily than ever before. 😬
First, you’ll be able to set each contact’s permissions status (Acquaintance/Friend/Best Friend) from the top of their contact card.
Second, your own illumy profile will get a big revamp. Instead of several separate tabs, your illumy profile will exist as 1️⃣ single page. From there, you can set permissions for each field to control who sees what.
Finally, you’ll be able to demarcate your most important contacts and conversations more easily. Instead of favoriting both, you’ll be able to favorite ⭐ people and pin 📌 conversations.
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The illumy vision is to be able to connect with whom you want and communicate how you want. With connections that are parallel to conversations, messaging becomes easier, faster, and fun-er. Just like everything else on illumy.
Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash.
