illumy 3.0 will give you the power to manage your existing contacts — and even find new ones.
That’s right: illumy will soon include friend suggestions to help you expand your network.
We’ve built a connection engine to recommend people who might be in your circle. As soon as you make your first connection on illumy (by navigating to someone’s illumy profile and clicking the Connect button), our engine starts to spin up.
Then, once you have made a second connection, it can start to generate some commonality. The more connections you make, the smarter the engine gets. It uses something called a graph database to determine relationships — the same approach social networks use in their connection recommendations.
Of course, we won’t make connections on your behalf. You’ll have to accept invites in order to formally add someone as a connection, and you can always dismiss invites you’re not interested in.
We’ll even sort your invites to make them easier to manage. The invites received list will show connection requests you get from other people. The invites sent list shows requests you send to others. (If you send a connection request and it gets dismissed, it will still appear in your sent list.)
The connection engine is just one of the ways that illumy will be the world’s best contacts app. With illumy, smarter, more secure contact management comes standard.
Contacts always stay up to date
There are three main benefits to making connections. One, it feeds the connection engine to make better suggestions moving forward. Two, you and your connections can see each other’s full profiles. And three, you’ll be freed from keeping your contacts up to date manually.
On illumy, your profile is your “contact card” — so after making a connection with someone, you’ll always be able to see each other’s current phone number, address, favorite sports team, and lots more.
This approach will solve the biggest problem of contact management. No more whiting-out your Rolodex entries: when you’re connected on illumy, all contact updates happen automatically.
Connections (or conversations) can be deleted any time
You only connect with who you want on illumy. This goes the other way, too. At any point, you can delete a connection and restrict access to your profile.
Alternatively, if you delete a conversation, it will disappear on both sides. All of the content in the conversation (photos, videos, attachments) goes away, as well.
There are 2 ways to add a contact
While connections are the best way to link up with someone on illumy, you can also create a contact card manually — e.g., for someone who doesn’t have an illumy account.
Manually created contacts used to be called Basic Contacts. They’re still pretty basic, offering fields for name, email, and phone number only. illumy connections, on the other hand, have dozens of different fields.
To create a manual contact, just click the Create a new button and select Contact. Manually created contacts will appear under the Contact Book icon in the left navigation panel.
Your privacy under your control
One final benefit to illumy connections is that you control who gets to see your profile.
At the top right of your profile page, there will be a switch to turn your profile from public to non-public. If you’re non-public, you’ll be invisible in search. No one, other than your connections, will be able to see your profile info. You’ll stay out of the connection engine, too.
Want even more granular control? You can edit what’s visible within your profile. Each field within your profile has a permission for one of the three connection levels:
– Acquaintances — can only see Acquaintance content
– Friends — can see Friend and Acquaintance content
– Best Friends — can see Best Friend, Friend, and Acquaintance content
Our goal is to give you total control of your information — for better security and more meaningful connections.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
