It’s been awhile since we shared news on our blog! That’s about to change, because we have some really exciting announcements coming up very soon. Please stay tuned!

For now, I’d love to introduce a few new features on Mightybell that we rolled out over the last few months.

Find a Time to Meet

One of the biggest hassles we know everyone deals with is trying to figure out the best time for a group of busy people to meet up. Avoid an endless email thread by using Find a Time to Meet in the Events tab of your Mightybell Circle. Just follow the steps, poll members, and select the date and time that works best for everyone.

Private messaging

You asked for it, it’s here. Private messaging is one of our favorite new features not just because it’s so useful. (We’ll be the first to admit that we’re kind of addicted!) Now you can quickly send a message to an individual or any group of members in any of your circles.

The Mightybell iPhone App

We introduced our Mightybell iPhone App recently, and the response has been incredible. It’s easier than ever now to connect with your circle on the go.

A fresh new look

Mightybell circles just got a fresh new look—chat is over on the right and posts and events are organized across the top.

These updates make it easier than ever to create deeper, more meaningful experiences you can share with your friends on Mightybell. We hope you love them as much as we do!

- Audra :)

(PS - We were also featured on Mashable today as the #1 tool to help plan your next meeting. Check it out!)

The words “Black Friday” inspire two reactions: the burning desire to sleep on the sidewalk while sorting “buy one, get one free” coupons or the need to hide in a bunker until the nation’s most painful shopping day is over.

We’d like to offer a new reason for the season. Instead of getting up at the crack of dawn to buy yet another gadget, give a special gift of thanks to someone in need. We’ve created a Mightybell space to get you started. Feel free to add your own favorite charities directly to the space… the more the merrier!

Wherever you are and whatever you do, we hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends.

Though most major department stores are already claiming it’s Christmas, we’re only a week away from our country’s annual food coma. And while your Thanksgiving may be a joyful celebration of Aunt Jo’s jello mold and Uncle Pete’s fried turkey, planning the who, when and what can still feel like an organizational nightmare. Minimize your stress by creating a Thanksgiving Mightybell space.

Invite guests by adding an event to your space calendar. Include the date, time, details and location.

Add questions for your guests to answer, including suggestions for the menu and tentative plans for entertainment.

Upload links to pre-dinner games, post-dinner activities and favorite family recipes.

Share photos directly from your space during and after the event.

If you haven’t created a Mightybell space yet, this is a great opportunity to try us out for a week to see what you think. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

We’ve been told that quality is defined by quantity.

That every moment should be broadcasted.

That life is about collecting people.

We politely disagree.

We believe quality is defined by intimacy.

That every moment is a chance for collaboration.

That life is about creating intimate communities.

You already have the framework: roommates, co-workers, teammates, music soulmates, fellow mothers, friday night friends, marathon hopefuls, study partners, book enthusiasts, fashion addicts.

Now, it’s time to go deeper by engaging those communities on Mightybell. Get into the details of a conversation without worrying about the opinions of a larger audience. Share posts, photos, questions and links in an active, real-time space. Invite as many people as you want, or only a few. In fact, you can create as many spaces as you need for all of the intimate communities in your life.

The best part? No status updates required.

Being part of an intimate community means staying in close contact even when life get hectic. That’s why we’ve added the “post/reply by email” feature, which allows you to engage with the members of your space without logging into your Mightybell account. Here’s how to do it:

Go to your personal settings (upper right hand corner of your space) and select the dropdown menu.

Copy the email address and add it to your contacts. If you have more than one space, repeat for each.

Get started by sending photos and files (as attachments) or text and links (in the body of the email.)

Want to respond to a comment or post by email? Hit “reply” and answer like you normally would. Your comments will be automatically added to the space.

Victory! You can officially delete that Google Groups account.

Our mission at Mightybell is to bring people together in small, intimate communities around their interests, passions and goals.

What’s an intimate community? It’s a dinner party. It’s a study group. It’s a phone bank. It’s a chapter of a larger organization. It’s a traveling team. It’s a place where there is the trust and safety to go deeper into a conversation, a topic or an issue together with people you care about.

For us, our most meaningful moments have been in intimate communities. It’s been in the third hour of a late night conversation with intriguing people and close friends.

Mightybell is an experiment to see if we can bring the power of intimate communities to millions of people around the world. It’s a big, ambitious mission. Intimate communities don’t lend themselves by definition to quick growth. They are built over time around shared interests and values, conversations and - dare we say it - commitment. They go beyond a quick like.

Yet, intimate communities are truly magical. They push you. They encourage you. They make even the biggest goals and challenges seem possible. They remind you that everything is going to be ok.

We believe that software can play a critical role in creating the conditions for intimate communities to form, grow and touch millions of people in their daily lives. In fact, we think software can enable new types of intimate communities.

Let’s see if we are right.

The Mighty bookmarklet allows you to add links to photos, articles and videos to your space without opening your account.

To get the bookmarklet, go to your name in the upper right hand corner of your space and choose “bookmarklet” from the dropdown menu:

Then, click on the link to add the bookmarklet to your toolbar. You want to drag the “Add to Mightybell” button to your browser bar:

But, wait, there’s more. The Mighty bookmarklet magically supports over 50 different types of links from across the web.

For example, want your intimate community to see an amazing Kickstarter project? Use the bookmarklet to pull in a Kickstarter project. Let’s take this project we supported last night:

I can click “Add to Mightybell” and the Mighty bookmarklet appears with the Kickstarter video, the project title and the project description. Then I just click add:

And the Kickstarter project video is in my Mightybell space with a link back to the project:

Here at Mightybell, we’re huge fans of Twitter. In fact, it’s a bit of an addiction. Today they launched some fantastic new features, including a cover photo for profile pages.

This bit of news seemed like a good opportunity to mention that when and if you need a colorful, visual online space for creative projects, Mightybell is, as some may say, “on trend.”

One of the best ways to use a cover photo in your new Mightybell space is to prompt your small group or creative project with a question.

For example, this is what we put together one evening in a moment of late night work delirium:

(And we highly recommend Homeland. Holy intense.)

To add a cover photo and customize your Mightybell space colors, open the customize modal underneath the title. Then, upload and type away:

We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

We’ve been fortunate in the past week to share our story with Fast Company and Techcrunch and it got me thinking about a company’s mission.

Our mission at Mightybell is to bring people together in small, intimate communities around their interests, passions and goals. We believe at the heart of intimate communities is the “us” that happens with shared experiences.

You don’t have to go far to meet 10 new services ready and waiting to help you broadcast what you have just done and what you like. That’s not a knock on other services. There is a clear need for public sharing.

It’s just not the problem we’re interested in tackling.

At Mightybell, we’re obsessed with how to bring the “us” of online spaces to two billion people around the world.

We think the more interesting - and difficult - challenge is to scale the intimacy of dinner parties, co-ops, workshops and volunteer phone banks into entirely new types of global networks.

Since founding the company, we’ve been driven by this one mission. This one obsession with the “us” of shared experiences. How we continue to evolve the product in the pursuit of this single-minded mission is what makes the ride thrilling.

We are grateful to have the opportunity to build Mightybell with you, your creative projects as well as your intimate communities. Especially in these early days.

We can’t wait to deliver even more delightfully useful features from here. Thank you.

Gina

I love chat. Especially group chat. It’s fast, casual and you can get a lot done while you are chatting away with friends or people who share the same interest.

I also love sharing links, photos, videos, files and events when I’m working on creative projects with friends.

At Mightybell, we’ve sought to combine both. Sort of like an online mullet, chat is on the left and posting is on the right, combined into one great interface.

Today our friends at Hello Giggles are launching a little Mightybell experiment that shows off the ability to chat, post and comment in the same space.

They have also customized the colors of their Mightybell space to match up to the main Hello Giggles site, which look absolutely fantastic.

Have a look and why not create your own Mightybell space for chatting and posting while you’re at it?

Happy Friday!

Gina