South Africa social networking site, Blueworld, has rolled out a box-load of new features over the past week as it looks to grow its already sizeable userbase. Chief among these are a new activity pages, groups areas and customised profiles and mood updates.

“This is our most ambitious step towards bringing our local offering on par with international players,” said Blueworld operations manager, Charl Norman. 

“The Activity page is a great tool to keep up to date on the site’s activity or just your friends. By default when viewing the activity page you will see the entire community’s news or filter it to view just your friends. We took it further and enabled users to filter the activity to just view blogs, videos, photos or status updates from their friends or the entire community,” said Norman.

Blueworld users can also now customise their profile and groups to create a unique identity on Blueworld. There are a handful of colour themes to choose from and users can upload their own header image.

Norman says that groups have also become very popular on international social networking sites and they decided to add these to Blueworld. “Users can create groups, customise them, upload photos and videos, write on the group blog and invite their friends to join.

“Users can set their mood and add a small live update in their mini blog of what they’re currently doing, feeling or dreaming of. Their mini updates will be visible to the community on the activity page. Users can then discover and contact other users that share the same mood, for example, excited, tired or sad,” he said.

Blueworld has also expanded its photography coverage with Blueworld photographers attending popular social gatherings and uploading pictures of these to the site by midday the next day.

“We wanted to cover more events and reach a wider audience so we have aligned our photography strategy to include covering 20 twenty cricket matches, 21st birthday parties, concerts and activity on university campuses” said Blueworld business manager Bradley Voges.

Blueworld has more than 137 000 registered members.