Suggestion for feature: add "friends" list to user's personal page

Howdy, I have multiple friends on Mountain Project who keep their tick list updated, post, etc. It would be great to be able to add them to a "friends list" or "people I'm following" kind of thing on my personal profile page so I could quickly link to their pages. The current use case is to just bookmark them in my browser - which works, but it would be cooler to keep this all inside the MP ecosystem. If there is interest in this maybe people can reply or thumbs up this feature request. 

Bryan

Thank Bryan, we've been considering this for 6+ years now and might do it, but not in the near term.  Thanks!

Agreed. One of the great joys of climbing is meeting all different types of people from around the world. Some use Mountain Project actively, some have accounts but don't engage much, and others have no MP presence. But having a way to follow each other and then see an updating feed of what current or former friends/climber partners/acquaintances are actively up to could be a really wonderful social feature.

On the other hand, I can see the challenges MP faces in balancing being a source of route information, a personal climbing log, and a social forum. Making things easier or adding features doesn't always make things better. 

Friend list could also be good as a filter on the recent comment / route / picture lists, similar to what's new in my favorite areas. Also on a recent ticks list, if such a thing existed.

A 'friends' feature might include trip planning extensions, like scheduling, destinations, pack lists, etc. 

PS if you use any of the features I mention, I will not come back later and cry about not being compensated for them. Their implementation would be compensation enough.

As much as I love the forums and the community that exists because of/through them, I really would not enjoy seeing mountain project become more of a social media website. I feel that adding friends/follows would push it much more so in that direction 

IMO this is a lot more useful than neutering comments and discussion.  It actually brings the community closer together.  Or is this not a community site anymore?

Emilio Sosa wrote:

As much as I love the forums and the community that exists because of/through them, I really would not enjoy seeing mountain project become more of a social media website. I feel that adding friends/follows would push it much more so in that direction 

Having friends (connections, follows, etc) on a forum goes back many years.  It's not exclusive to social media sites, assuming you're referring to Facebook.

Fwiw, forums like this are the original social media sites on the internet.  We're talking before MySpace era stuff... there were internet forums.  [insert dramatic music]

Having an easy way to stay connected with climbing contacts would be a boon for this site.  Lurkers might actually join just to make and keep those connections.  Not everyone uses or wants to use Facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.

An alternative to this could be "Follow Route" or "Follow Crag" so that you can see when a tick is added on that route or at that crag. 

Bumping this. I agree both with the “add a friends feature” and the “don’t make it social media” perspective. I think there’s a good (and probably technically pretty easy?) way to walk the line: just add a button on every profile to “follow” that works similarly to the way the “to-do” button currently works for a route, and then add a private “following list” that mirrors the current “to-do list” on your own profile. None of this even needs to be publicly visible to other users.

And to clarify: I don’t think profiles should show number of followers, or that there should be any sort of newsfeed, because I strongly agree with the sentiment that making MP too social-media-esque would be its downfall. I think it should just be a list of profiles you can easily click over to, like your to-do list currently is.